The Obama administration is...

...insane.

"The report also found that a State official brought up a question about whether Marines should wear civilian clothing instead of their uniforms. Under secretary of State for management Patrick Kennedy told investigators he wanted to ensure that security was enhanced, not hurt by flags on the uniforms of any U.S. military presence.

But, one commander told the committee that as they were readying themselves to deploy they kept having to change in and out of their uniforms four times.

The military never deployed to Benghazi." Tar and Feathers.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news....

...add this to the pile of "not news."

//Clinton’s public statement on September 12 again referred to “a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” while her private chat with the Egyptian prime minister clearly said, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest. … Based on the information we saw today, we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Each day it goes on like this: Clinton tells family members of those killed in Benghazi that the video was to blame, while privately admitting their deaths had nothing to do with a spontaneous protest of a video. Administration members’ public statements all talk about the video, while most private statements don’t.

One exception would be Ben Rhodes’ email that says, “Goals: To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

So, Hillary says:

1.  She first was told that Benghazi was an organized attack.

2. She told her daughter and the Egyptian ambassador that it was an organized attack.

3.  But then the group taking credit withdrew their claim and the CIA then said....?...not clear but they were writing the talking points....which is not true.

4. Then there were protests about the video, so maybe it was the video? It was definitely the fog of war.

 5. But the family members who said that she blamed Benghazi on the video were emotionally distraught and have a right not to remember what she said,and

6. She definitely didn't say it was the video to them.

But why didn't she say it was the video.  Her explanation is that what she told her daughter and the Egyptian was wrong and she changed her mind....to the video as the cause.

So, if that's true, why deny that she said that?

What we see in Hillary's story is that she has told so many lies and had to tailor her story to fit the unfolding facts that she has to make U-turns and deny clear facts with the "calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces."

As for me, Hillary's statement to the family that they were going to have the video-maker arrested, and the fact that he was arrested in the middle of the night, confirms that his arrest was arranged by the White House.

Why have we never heard from this guy?  If Bush had done this, this guy would have been famous as a martyr to free speech.

Not just hers...

...the entire Obama administration.

//Liar, liar, pantsuit on fire: Hillary Clinton still insists she didn’t tell the grieving families of the Benghazi victims that an anti-Islam video was to blame.

Yet family members say she said just that, three days after the attack, at the Sept. 14, 2012, ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base.

George Stephanopoulos asked her Sunday if she’d told the victims it was about the film. Clinton gave a flat “no.”

She added: “I said very clearly there had been a terrorist group, uh, that had taken responsibility on Facebook, um . . .”

At least four family members disagree.

Tyrone Woods’ father said he hugged Clinton and shook her hand. Then “she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son . . . She said ‘the filmmaker who was responsible for the death of your son.’ ”


Sean Smith’s mother said Hillary is “absolutely lying . . . She said it was because of the video.” Smith’s uncle backs her up.

Glen Doherty’s sister agreed: “When I think back now to that day and what she knew, it shows me a lot about her character that she would choose in that moment to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue.”

“What she knew” refers to Clinton’s words to daughter Chelsea the night of the assault and the next day to Egypt’s prime minister, which made it plain the secretary of state knew full well that a terror group had long planned the attack.

The lie’s even in her words at the Sept. 14 ceremony: “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Just why the administration united around this lie is another editorial. The disgrace here is Clinton’s refusal to admit her role — even pushing the fib to “comfort” the bereaved.

Stiff as the competition is, this has to count as her lowest-down, dirtiest lie of all.//

And when Hillary decreed that the past should be that she did not tell grieving families that "'we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son"...

...the Ministry of Truth sprang into well-oiled, practiced action, memory-holing the contrary truth and fabricating useful artifacts to support the new and better truth.

Hillary accuses Benghazi families of lying.

//Did you tell the families that the attack was about the film?  Answer: No.  Justin has addressed her subsequent "fog of war" dissembling, which is belied by the fact that she consistently managed to get it right in private discussions, while peddling a very different tale in public.  But let's ignore that part of her answer for the moment.  She was asked a direct question: Did she, or did she not, tell those family members that the Internet film was responsible for their loved ones' deaths?  She says she did not.  This is a direct contradiction of very explicit memories shared on the record by multiple people who have far less incentive to lie than, say, a truth-challenged politician seeking power.  This should be a serious problem for Hillary Clinton.  The media spent an enormous amount of time fact-checking Donald Trump's false claim about watching "thousands" of Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey on live television after 9/11.  Here we have the presumptive Democratic nominee essentially arguing that Benghazi victims' relatives are either forgetful simpletons, or liars.  How mysterious that they all "forgot" in exactly the same way, and that their "lies" all match up.  Is this another one of those conspiracies Hillary sees around every corner when her political ambitions are threatened?  Stephanopoulos didn't follow-up on this point during the interview.  Other journalists should, relentlessly.  She's sure she didn't blame the video in those discussions?  If so, why are the families saying she did?  And if they're inventing a collective memory out of whole cloth, is it just a coincidence that Hillary happened to invoke that video during her public remarks that day?  And that another administration spokesperson made the same untrue connection on national television the next day?  C'mon. //

"What does it matter now," she asked.

Not much, apart from the questions, the possible death of Americans for unexplained, possibly corrupt reasons, throwing the First Amendment under the bus, justifying murders of Americans on the grounds that Free Speech makes extremists Muslims murderous, slandering the soldiers who said that they were ready to go to the rescue as liars, lying to the grieving families to their faces.....

Email reveals that American forces were ready to go to rescue in Benghazi:

//American military forces were available for a rescue operation not long after the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists Sept. 11, 2012, according to an email to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.

The Sept. 11, 2012, email was sent at 7:19 p.m. EST by then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash. The text reads:

“I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [an apparent reference to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton]

“After consulting with General Dempsey, General Ham and the Joint Staff, we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak. They include a [REDACTED].

“Assuming Principals agree to deploy these elements, we will ask State to procure the approval from host nation. Please advise how you wish to convey that approval to us [REDACTED].”

Among the recipients of Bash’s email are Jacob Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides.

The first assault on the U.S. facility’s main compound began at approximately 9:40 pm Libya time, which was 3:40 p.m. EDT in Washington, DC.  The second attack on a related CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning or 6 p.m. EST.//

Turns out that Hillary signed a document acknowledging that she was subject to the law.

Whether she actually is subject to the law - which is, after all, for the little people - is anyone's guess.

Hillary had two versions of the Benghazi story: one where she told the truth to her family and foreign countries, and ...

...one for Americans where she blamed America's robust tradition of Free Speech for causing the deaths of Americans.

Obama's policy of lying of sacrificing the values of the First Amendment couldn't get any worse.

Likewise, someone who would lie to throw the First Amendment under the bus rather than defend it doesn't deserve to be president.

//Two days after the 9/11/2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the United States embassy in Tripoli, Libya, was warning the State Department via email not to conflate the Innocence of Muslims YouTube video with the attacks.

The email, released by the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Saturday, was sent by a Tripoli embassy official to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staffers in Washington, D.C., at 6:43 a.m. on September 14, 2012.

That is the day Clinton declared at the transfer of remains ceremony, “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

It was two days before Susan Rice appeared on  five Sunday talk shows to blame the violence in Benghazi on the video.

Here, via the Select Committee on Benghazi, is the full email with appropriate redactions:

Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions.

Our monitoring of the Libyan media and conversations with Libyans suggest that the films not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. The overwhelming majority of the FB comments and tweets we’ve received from Libyans since the Ambassador’s death have expressed deep sympathy, sorrow, and regret. They have expressed anger at the attackers, and emphasized that this attack does not represent Libyans or Islam. Relatively few have even mentioned the inflammatory video.

So if we post messaging about the video specifically, we may draw unwanted attention to it. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence. It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well-planned attack by militant extremists. I have discussed this with [redacted] and he shares PAS’s view.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Remember how families of a dead soldier had "unlimited moral authority" to sit outside of Bush's ranch for years?

So much window dressing.

If it is a Democrat in the White House, then who cares?

Father of Benghazi victim calls Hillary "scum."

She could put a puppy into a blender on live TV and still get the Democrat nomination...

...she pretty much did that already.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

Opinion Journal Video

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on Hillary Clinton's testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Photo credit: Getty Images.

What that House committee did Thursday was finally expose the initial deception. To understand the willful depth of that trickery, let’s briefly recall the history.

In early September 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joe Biden summarized to thunderous applause the administration’s re-election pitch: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” Translation: The president had revived the economy, even as he had put “al Qaeda on the run,” as Mr. Obama put it. Five days later, four Americans in Benghazi were dead. It appeared the White House had slept through a terror attack on the anniversary of 9/11.

The administration instead immediately presented the attack as a spontaneous mob backlash to an anti-Muslim YouTube video. At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. She repeated the charge in a speech the next day. President Obama gave his own speech that day, referring to the video and refusing to use the word “terrorism.”

The next day, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the video twice more. The day after that, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” Mrs. Clinton promised the father of one of the victims that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” In his weekly address, Mr. Obama talked about the video. When the Libyan president said there was evidence the attack was planned months in advance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice contradicted him. She instead told five Sunday talk shows—five days after the attack—that “based on the best information we have to date,” the attack “began spontaneously” in response to “this hateful video.” Mr. Obama for two full weeks continued to talk about YouTube.

Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans.

That same evening, Mrs. Clinton spoke on the phone with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf, around 8 p.m. The notes from that conversation, in a State Department email, describe her as saying: “We have asked for the Libyan government to provide additional security to the compound immediately as there is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for.” Ansar al Sharia is al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula. So several hours into the attack, Mrs. Clinton already believed that al Qaeda was attacking U.S. facilities.

The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.

In other news Thursday, Judicial Watch unveiled a new cable, sent the day after the attack, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the State Department Command Center. It explains that the attack was carried out by a “Salafi terrorism group” in “retaliation for the killing of an Al Qaeda operative.”

The cable says “the attack was an organized operation with specific information that the U.S. Ambassador was present.” The cable included details about the group’s movements and the weapons it used in the assault.

Count on the Obama administration to again resort to blaming “confusing” and “conflicting” information at the time for its two-week spin. That was Mrs. Clinton’s flimsy excuse at the hearing. But her own conversations prove she was in no doubt about what happened—while it was still happening.

Democrats on the committee spent most of the hearing complaining that it was a waste of time and money. Quite the opposite. It was invaluable, for the clarity provided by those three emails alone.

Reprehensible.

I head a liberal from San Francisco crowing about how Hillary had won at the hearing, but he doesn't seem to understand how so many of Hillary's answers revolt normal people or how her answers are going to be the prime feature of the 2016 campaign a year from now.

//It was only a day after Clinton appeared in front of the Benghazi Select Committee, scoring what the mainstream media declared  a great victory by seeming “presidential.” Ironically, the same performance made me dislike her more than ever, as now we had absolute email evidence she lied to the parents of the Benghazi victims at their funeral when she already knew the four had been killed in a terror attack, not because of some amateurish video.  (Yes, I had always strongly suspected it, but now there was concrete evidence.) Yet as Charles Woods, Tyrone Woods’ father, wrote in his diary from that day: ”I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son.”

As a parent, I can’t imagine anything more despicable than the secretary of state (and the president) lying to me at my son’s funeral about his death while in service to our country. What kind of human being does that?  It makes my head spin.//

Which do you believe?

That an elderly woman has early onset Alzheimers or..

...that everyone else misremembers Hillary blaming the video?

Clinton Claims She Didn't Blame Benghazi Attack on a YouTube Video

Throwing the First Amendment under the bus.

Remember how the Clinton administration explained that the Benghazi attack was the righteous response of Muslims to provocation?

We knew they were lying.

They knew they were lying.

Revealed: Hillary told Egyptian PM day after Benghazi attack that Mohammed movie had nothing to do with it.

//But it gets worse. Remember this post? Charles Woods, the father of former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in Benghazi, claims that none other than Hillary Clinton told him after the attack, “‘We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.’”According to the document Jordan mentions in the clip, she knew the whole time that the movie was a red herring. Why was she still telling people, including family members of the fallen, things to the contrary when she was telling Chelsea Clinton in e-mails the day it all went down that an “Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible? (And why, for that matter, did she think the U.S. government should or could arrest and prosecute a man for making a film it didn’t like?) Did some other intelligence come to light later suggesting that the movie was a motive for the Benghazi attack? If so, how come Hillary didn’t mention that to Jordan today?//

Treason against the First Amendment.

The media's spinelessness on the Benghazi story was as close to treason against the Constitution. The story was a blatant lie from the beginning, an American's right to free speech was thrown under the bus, a movie producer was put in prison without a peep from the media, and without a bit of curiosity from the media, Candy Crowley sided with Obama in the debate on the Benghazi issue, Obama lied to the American people...

...heads should roll.

//Given the Weekly Standard piece's length, this is a good time to interject how Thomas Lifson at American Thinker interprets what happened to Logan's story: "the words 'set up' start to come to mind." Here's why Lifson would write that, Getting back to Hemingway's report:

According to a source with extensive knowledge of CBS News operations, of all the senior figures at CBS News and 60 Minutes, Drumheller had a “close relationship” with Bill Owens who was charged with fact checking the story. While New York [Magazine] notes that 60 Minutes made “no calls were made to the State Department or the FBI specifically to vet Davies’s claims,” based on the publicly available emails it would appear that CBS News’s intelligence consultant should have had no problems getting information from the highest levels of the State Department.
All three outlets cited in this post mention another person who was a CBS reporter at the time but no longer is. Here's what the IBD editorial has to say about her:

At least three CBS journalists did try to get the facts — and in varying ways were all punished by their bosses, who were being advised by Drumheller.

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson was repeatedly treated as a troublemaker by CBS executives for her Benghazi coverage, which she recounted in her book "Stonewalled," and saw her stories relegated to the CBS website instead of the evening news.

If this were a story about a Republican administration and conflicts of interest at a center-right media outlet, the establishment press would have had this matter on the front pages and nightly newscasts by now, and would be doing their own independent digging into this conflict-of-interest-riddled mess.

Instead, it involves heavily protected Democrats and the so-called Tiffany network. Thus, a search at the Associated Press on Tyler Drumheller's last name comes up empty, and a Google News search on his full name (not in quotes, sorted by date) returns only the American Thinker item cited earlier.

Perhaps someone at Google can explain why Hemingway's work, which comes up in a general web search, doesn't come up in the news search.//

Don't know...but the big issue is the Bill O'Reilly is a windbag!

//SO WHY DID HILLARY, AND SUSAN RICE, AND EVERYBODY ELSE, KEEP LYING ABOUT A VIDEO AND GET THE FILMMAKER THROWN IN JAIL? Hillary Clinton’s Top Aides Knew from First Minutes that Benghazi Was a Terrorist Attack, E-mails Disclose.//

From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility. These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA litigation focuses on Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the government actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was murdered by terrorists. Also killed in the attack were State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were contract security employees and who had fought heroically, saving numerous American lives. At least ten other Americans were wounded, some quite seriously. At 4:07 p.m., just minutes after the terrorist attack began, Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief-of-staff, and Joseph McManus, Mrs. Clinton’s executive assistant, received an e-mail from the State Department’s operations center (forwarded to her by Maria Sand, a special assistant to Secretary Clinton). It contained a report from the State Department’s regional security officer (RSO), entitled “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi is Under Attack.” The e-mail explained that approximately 20 armed people had fired shots at the diplomatic mission, that explosions had been heard as well, and that Ambassador Stevens was believed to be in the compound with at least four other State Department officials.

But, then, the Left has been repressing Free Speech in America because of the concerns of foreign crazys for at least the last four years...

...but nobody cared when it was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

There wasn't any liberal skin in the game when it was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

Who is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula?, you ask.

//The foothold to censorship was established years ago. But Oswalt and his ilk didn’t care about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. They weren’t screaming about his First Amendment rights when Obama falsely blamed him for a terrorist attack in front of the whole world




They were too worried about the 2012 election to give a damn about free speech.

Now North Korea has successfully proven that the future will not belong to those who slander Kim Jong-un. They didn’t do it by hacking us. They did it by watching how we respond to terrorist threats.

This is the world you’ve made, leftists. Now you don’t like it. If only you were capable of learning something from the experience.//

For me, the worst moment of the Obama presidency was when Obama threw the First Amendment under the bus.

Now we have clear evidence from Leon Panetta of how much of a loathsome lie that was.

And has anyone ever interviewed the "film-maker"?  If this was a Republican administration, that guy would be giving speeches at colleges just like a certain convicted cop killer.

Host Andrea Mitchell asked Panetta, “You wrote in the book that you disagreed with David Petraeus and told the situation room he thought it was a spontaneous demonstration outside the consulate that night. Why did you disagree. What didn’t ring true about that?”

Panetta fired: “I didn’t have any specific information, but the fact was that when you bring grenade launchers to a demonstration, something else is going on. From the very beginning I sensed that this was an attack, a terrorist attack on the compound. I remember saying look, based on the ones I see and the nature of the attack, I think this was a terrorist attack. He said look, the information we are getting from intelligence sources is that it really was a demonstration. I said you know, David, i don’t see it that way.”

Both President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the protest point of view. For weeks after the attack both Clinton and Obama blamed the attack on an obscure YouTube video. The producer of that video was later arrested and spent a year in prison on parole violations.

Up to now, Panetta’s criticisms of Obama’s handling of foreign policy, in particular his handling of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State, could be seen through the lens of Panetta tearing away at Obama to help his longtime friend Hillary Clinton distance herself from the unpopular president as she gears up to run for president in 2016.

But Panetta’s Benghazi comments are different. Clinton stood before the bodies of the four Americans who were killed in the Benghazi attack and blamed the protest. She reportedly told the parents of one of the slain Americans that a video was to blame, and its producer would be prosecuted. He was.//

Hillary wants to turn the feature of American free speech into the bug of "why do they hate us?"

That was the problem with the Obama political strategy on Benghazi in the first place and it is chilling that so many Americans are willing to tank the First Amendment.

Clinton will need the help. Based on the excerpts from the leaked chapter published in Politico, she risks revisiting the biggest public diplomacy mistake of her career.

It's all about the video -- specifically, a promotional trailer for a planned film called "The Innocence of Muslims," which Islamist extremists fished from YouTube obscurity and used to fire up mobs across the Middle East and South Asia to facilitate planned terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

By repeating -- and defending -- the now-debunked claim that the video was to blame for the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Clinton risks a renewed focus on the shameful manner in which she and President Obama handled the Benghazi disaster.

The war against Islamist extremism is as much a war of ideas as it is one of special operations raids and drone strikes, and in this case the administration surrendered unconditionally.

After the attacks, Clinton and Obama fiercely condemned the video multiple times, and even spent $70,000 on television ads in Pakistan condemning it.

The maker of the video, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was arrested on a probation violation and jailed for a year. A pastor of a small church in rural Florida got a phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff urging him to withdraw his support for the film.

But what they didn't do was make clear why the First Amendment protections of religious freedom -- including freedom from religion -- and free speech are so important to Americans.

Their vague lip service to the values on which those freedoms are based never even came close to explaining why Americans are willing to tolerate harsh, offensive, even deliberately deceptive criticism of ideas -- and why people in the Islamic world should do the same.

People died; Obama lied.

Austin Bay writes:

According to the now-available congressional transcripts, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey (after speaking with AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham) informed President Barack Obama that the consulate had suffered a terror attack. Panetta and Dempsey told the president within an hour after the first assault began.

Yet Obama Administration officials continued to peddle the "video did it" canard for almost two weeks after the assault. Why peddle a blatant falsehood? Because "the video did it" narrative advanced a propaganda campaign supporting central Obama re-election political themes. Obama claimed his presidency would dramatically change Arab Muslim perceptions of America. Though he never equated killing Osama bin Laden with defeating al-Qaida, he implied al-Qaida was fading fast. The Benghazi disaster countered these touts. Obama had to leave the American public with the definite impression that the Benghazi assault was spontaneous. Why, that nasty video incited inexplicable anger!

The president calculated carefully. As his spokespeople blamed the video, Obama hedged and fudged by referring to Benghazi as "an act of terror." His goal was -- and still is -- rhetorical wiggle room to blunt charges of deceit. However, at least three times during the campaign, Obama refused to call Benghazi an attack by terrorists.

The transcripts leave President Obama and his minions with a lot more deceit to blunt.

The transcripts also indicate that this administration gave security for U.S. diplomatic facilities lip service, not executive attention. Inter-agency security coordination was, at best, slap-dash. Take this exchange between Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Joint Staff vice-director of operations, Major-General Darryl Roberson.

Mr. Chaffetz: General, following up, I just want to make sure I heard this absolutely right. You said, quote, everything requested from State we provided them. This goes back from 2011 when -- after the (Libyan) air campaign.

General Roberson: Yes, sir.

Mr. Chaffetz: To the best of your knowledge, there was nothing else for the security prior to the attack, prior to the attack that State Department asked for that you denied.

General Roberson: That is correct.

Chaffetz then added that he asked the question because many apologists for the Benghazi fiasco alleged that the consulate lacked security "because we (Congress) didn't provide certain funding for the embassy. And I think we find that argument is totally false and without merit. They simply didn't ask in many ways. And these assets were available and were there previously, but those on the ground were not able to keep those assets."

Chaffetz' conclusion will be disputed. Alas, long passages of key testimony remain classified, blotted from the transcripts with thick blocks of gray and black ink.