Okay, guys, God help me, I’m going to get political for a minute here.
By now, hopefully most of you know that on September 11, 2012, there was an attack on our embassy in Libya that killed our Libyan Ambassador, Chris Stevens, along with three other Americans. If you want the full story, you can find it here.
After the attack, the Obama administration blamed an 11-minute trailer for a crude anti-Islamic movie called The Innocence of Muslims. UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on all five Sunday talk shows, and insisted the attack was a “spontaneous” event sparked by this video.
Now we know that on September 12th, the Obama administration had enough information to label the events in Libya a terrorist attack (as did the President of Libya) in order to release intelligence assets in the area. Yet they continued to blame the amateur video, which hardly anyone has seen, for the attacks. Obama himself, speaking at the UN, would not use the word “terror” or “terrorism” once, even though his administration labeled it a terror attack on September 12th (again…I just want to drive the point home).
Now, I’m not going to judge here. Intelligence can be murky, and we may have labeled it a terrorist attack on the 12th, while still believing it was a spontaneous reaction to the video, in order to get assets on the ground that we needed to, so we could start hunting down the savages who killed our Ambassador and three other Americans on US soil (an embassy in a foreign country is considered to be that country’s territory or “soil”).
What I want to focus in on is a point that the perpetually quick-witted Greg Gutfeld has been making (you can follow him on Twitter, he’s @greggutfeld). And the point is this: Where did we get the information that this was caused by the video? Where did that come from? The Obama administration came to this conclusion very quickly. But we don’t know why they came to this conclusion. What I’m saying is, where did we get the information — in a matter of hours — that is was all due to this stupid, offensive video? That’s the “smoking gun” here, if there is any smoking gun at all. Who, where, how, why did we immediately blame it on the video? The cynical among us believe that the administration stayed as far away as it could from the word “terror” because having an attack on 9/11 that kills four Americans is quite a blow to a campaign that is touting the killing of Osama bin Laden as one of its signature achievements (which it was, and I’m not trying to take anything away from Obama on that; he made the call; he gets the credit — although he should share most of it with SEAL Team Six and the intelligence network put in place by the Bush administration after 9/11/2001).
The mainsteam media is hardly reporting on this at all, which is why I feel compelled to blog about it. And the salient question, first raised, as far as I can tell, by Mr. Gutfeld, is, quite simply — who confirmed it was about a video? We now know it wasn’t, and that’s understandable; mistakes happen. And again, we may have simply labeled it a terrorist attack on 9/12 so we could release necessary assets, even though we didn’t have enough information to tell the American people it was a terrorist attack. But, and I am going to hammer this home repeatedly, where did we get the information that made the administration so certain that it was the video that caused the attack? Where did it come from? Somewhere, somehow, some person or persons said, “We know this attack was specifically provoked by this video right here, and here’s why and how we know it…”
We need to find out who those person or persons were. Because they were incredibly, egregriously wrong, and they need to be held accountable for it. This is not some small story. This is a US Ambassador, whose journal shows he was concerned with his safety in the weeks and months leading up to 9/11/2012; that he was specifically concerned that he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list, murdered on US soil, along with three other Americans. The preceding link is to a story about the cable news network CNN finding the Ambassador’s journal four days after the attack, and the attacks CNN has come under for publicly releasing some of its contents. And, for a moment, let me defend CNN: The journal was news, it was absolutely correct to report on it, and those at other networks saying it wasn’t and that their network wouldn’t have made any of it public are lying through their teeth.
We need to stay on this. We need to find the source behind the definitive claim that this attack was caused by a YouTube video. Because that source was clearly and obviously wrong, and somebody, or some group of people, need to be held accountable, and fired at the very least.
Again, all credit to Greg Gutfeld, who has been a dog with a bone on this issue, and rightfully so.