Thursday, October 18, 2012

How Little Are We Being Told About What Ambassador Chris Stevens Was Doing In Benghazi?

Barry Rubin wrote a post the other day shedding unexpected light on The Murders in Libya, The Presidential Debate, and The Pattern of Obama Foreign Policy.

Rubin goes further than just addressing the standard questions that have been raised about both the terrorist attack itself and the inconsistencies and contradictions in the the behavior of the Obama administration since that day.

There may be another yet untold story about the Ambassador Chris Stevens and his actual mission in Benghazi:

It is quite true that the State Department and ultimately Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was responsible for the ambassador being in Benghazi and for ensuring his protection. The president would not be consulted on such a “minor” event. But the story hinges on why the ambassador was in Benghazi that day.

If he was, as accounts by sources in the U.S. intelligence community suggested, negotiating with a terrorist, anti-American group to obtain the return of U.S. weapons provided during the civil war that would have been a much higher-priority matter. The fact that he was not accompanied by a delegation of foreign aid experts to evaluate these alleged projects shows that the reason for the ambassador's presence in Benghazi is being covered up. This situation transcends State Department jurisdiction and brings in the CIA and higher-level national security officials. The plan would have been in the presidential briefing and it is quite conceivable he would have been called on to approve of it.
Read the whole thing.

If those sources are accurate, there are additional reasons why Obama has not been forthcoming with what happened and tried to blame the attack on a video:

  • Publicly discussing Ambassador's Stevens's mission would be an admission of just how dangerous the situation in the Middle East actually is -- and undercut Obama's we-got-bin Laden narrative.
  • The Obama would naturally want to hide the fact that the war to oust Ghaddafi resulted in US weapons ending up in the hands of terrorists
  • Knowledge of the result of US military assistance in Libya would undercut similar assistance the Obama administration is looking to provide in Syria

Rubin quotes from a key point Obama made during the second Presidential debate with Romney:
But when it comes to our national security, I mean what I say. I said I'd end the war in Libya — in Iraq, and I did. I said that we'd go after al-Qaida and bin Laden. We have. I said we'd transition out of Afghanistan and start making sure that Afghans are responsible for their own security. That's what I'm doing.

Revealing the truth behind the murder of Ambassador Stevens would demonstrate the absurdity of that claim.

As Rubin writes about the Obama's boast:
Yet the wars continue. The assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Libya was an event in that war.

Which calls Obama's Middle East policy and conduct of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria into question.


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