Benghazi Cover-Up Blowing Up

We now have the evidence that the State Department knew right away that Benghazi was a jihad terror attack. We know that Susan Rice knew. Barack Obama also knew and lied to the American people.

The Democrats are threatening to boycott the select committee on the Benghazi jihad attack on September 11, 2012. The media is cheering their subterfuge on, hoping to normalize glaring un-Americanism, so that the president can easily follow suit. Once again, the Democrats overreach. Does the Watergate-flogging party mean to stump for the suppression of the truth about the slaughter of our countrymen? Is that their campaign platform? Do they really believe they are going to win on a platform of propaganda?

The emails make it perfectly clear that it was known from the outset that Islamic terrorists planned and coordinated the attacks on our consulate in Benghazi. 

Treason is the accurate term for the actions of the Obama administration in the aftermath of Benghazi. The president knew within 24 hours that it was Islamic terror.

And yet in the post-Benghazi fallout, Obama continued to attack and blame free speech for the Benghazi slaughter. Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, starred in a paid advertisement condemning the video insulting Islam. These paid advertisements (funded with American taxpayer dollars) ran in Pakistan. This presidential attack on our freedom and our Constitution was the Obama administration’s primary response to the deadly Islamist attack on September 11, 2012.

He knew. He knew from the very first.

In reviewing the cache of new documents just released as a result of Judicial Watch’s successful FOIA lawsuit, it is clear that there is more incriminating evidence of a cover-up than just the now-infamous “smoking gun” email from Ben Rhodes. Rhodes’ email is slam-dunk evidence of the White House’s lead role in the cover-up. The blaming of the YouTube video and the talking point lies that Susan Rice was to advance on the five Sunday shows were driven by the White House.

In reviewing the 41 new documents, one sees that huge sections of these unclassified documents are blacked out. If they are unclassified, why are all the Benghazi paragraphs redacted? Fox News is reporting there are discrepancies between the emails released to Congress and the same emails released to the watchdog group, Judicial Watch.

Still, some material extremely damaging to the administration is clear. In a memo from former Deputy Spokesman at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations Payton Knopf to Susan Rice and others, Knopf provides “Guidance on Events in Libya 9/12/12. (Today’s initial guidance from NSS and State).” In it, he gives a timeline (“the tick tock”) of events on that day and quotes the State Department’s Victoria Nuland as saying that “it was clearly a complex attack.”

In the same memo, Knopf discusses Obama’s “tick tock” during Benghazi. The president was made aware of the attack on the afternoon of September 11, 2012 “as he started his weekly meeting with the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” Ironically, only a day before the Benghazi jihad attacks, Marc Thiessen broke the story in the Washington Post that Obama had scaled back in-person daily intelligence briefings and had actually attended fewer than half of the daily intelligence briefings that had been held since he entered the White House.

But what’s salient here is that according to Benghazi transcripts of defense testimony, just minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi was attacked, senior defense officials, both civilian and military, were told that it was a “terrorist attack.” So why did the Obama White House promote a false narrative, and why didn’t defense officials speak out about this false claim?

After being notified that it was a terrorist attack on the afternoon of September 11, 2012, Obama was “updated several times throughout the evening and the next morning.” When asked when he had heard of Ambassador Steven’s murder, Nuland said, “The president was notified last night that Ambassador Stevens was unaccounted for and then notified again this morning of about his tragic death.”

At 11:53 PM on September 11, senior adviser Eric Pelofsky told Rice that a Libyan government official had called him to “extend his condolences” over Ambassador Stevens’ death. Pelofsky said that they had not recovered the Ambassador’s body, but referred to “a photo on twitter of someone carrying a body of someone who resembles Chris over their shoulder.” Pelofsky had previously written that it looked as if the death of Stevens was a kidnapping gone bad. “Yes – I’m very worried. In particular, that he is either dead or this was a concerted effort to kidnap him,” wrote Pelofsky at 9:06 PM Eastern the night of the attack. This, too, contradicts the State Department version of events.

Photo: Ambassador Stevens being carried from the consulate (note his left hand touching his face).

I find it impossible to believe that the president of the United States was not notified immediately that night, while Pelofsky was writing about Stevens’s death, that our Ambassador had been taken from our embassy possibly still alive and then murdered. But Nuland clearly says he was notified the next morning.

If he was asleep at that time, they wouldn’t wake him for such momentous news? Why wasn’t he calling the shots? He’s the Commander-in-Chief – or had he by that time already given the stand down order? The American people need answers to such questions, and let the chips fall where they may – or bodies, in this case. Why are they covering up the point at which Obama was informed about Stevens’s death?

And there is still more. In an email on September 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Alex McPhillips, Press Officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, advised Rice that Ansar Al-Sharia was attacking the consulate. The first reports came into the White House between 4:00 and 5:00 PM that day.

In the same email from Knopf concerning “Guidance on Events in Libya 9/12/12,” he asked Nuland what State knew about the group taking credit, Ansar al-Sharia. Nuland would only say, “It’s very early and I’m not going to be able to offer an assessment of this group.” The point is – it was known that Ansar al-Sharia was taking credit for the attack in a widely distributed State Department email on September 12, 2012. Everybody knew that the al-Qaeda-linked group was behind the attack.

Yet the White House statement of September 12, 2012 did not call it a terror attack. Obama called it “an outrageous attack.” It sounds like a Broadway review. It was an outrageous lie.

And in Hillary Clinton’s press release that same evening, Clinton referred to the Muhammad video in her remarks and stated unequivocally that the “United States deplores any intentional efforts to denigrate the religious belief of others.”

The frenzy was not to save our beloved countrymen. The frenzy was to save Obama’s election – this while our boys were in the firefight of their lives.

There is also proof that Rice was lying when she said that security on the ground was strong and significant. In an email at 4:49 PM on September 11th – 49 minutes after the attack began, according to the State Department’s own timeline – State’s Dan Fogarty advised several officials, including Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, Victoria Nuland, and others that the February 17 Brigade were responding to the attack on the mission [consulate] “engaging the attackers, taking fire, and working its way to the compound to get to the villa…”

The February 17 Revolution Brigade is a jihadist militia that is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was repeatedly accused of engaging in atrocities during and after the Libyan Civil War. Yes, with the world’s largest, most technologically advanced, and best-armed military, the Obama administration and State Department outsourced their response to a jihadist group.

Back in September 2012, according to the Daily Beast, “the intelligence community had an intercept between a Libyan politician whose sympathies are with al Qaeda and the Libyan militia known as the February 17 Brigade – which had been charged with providing local security to the consulate. In the intercept, the Libyan politician apparently asks an officer in the brigade to have his men stand down for a pending attack – another piece of evidence implying the violence was planned in advance.” In other words, it wasn’t a spontaneous reaction to a video about Muhammad.

What I also want to know is why hasn’t the FBI released Christopher Stevens’s autopsy report? How did he die, precisely?

And where was Obama on the night of September 11, 2012?

I await more of Judicial Watch’s documents in the hope that they might shed more light on what happened on that fateful day. But what we know already is enough to begin impeachment proceedings.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.