Remember that picture of the White House Situation room two years ago, with President Obama and his top advisers transfixed by real-time video of the the Navy Seals attacking and killing Usama Bin Laden? We could almost feel the tension along with them – would the SEALs find bin Laden? Would they kill him? Would the SEALs make it out safely? Americans from coast to coast erupted in cheers when the president told us the Navy SEALs had found and killed bin Laden.
Turns out there was another real-time video, on September 11, that was captured by a surveillance drone and fed to classified computer screens of senior officials at State, Defense, the CIA and the White House, maybe even to President Obama himself. This video wasn’t of Navy SEALs attacking a terrorist compound and killing Al Qaeda, it was of Al Qaeda terrorists attacking two US compounds and killing former Navy SEALs.
After the bin Laden killing the highest administration officials told the American people in vivid detail how they tracked and killed the terror mastermind. But the Benghazi video? No heroic Oval Office speech. No self-congratulatory press conferences. No photos of a brave president making a gutsy decision to bring terrorists to justice, come what may.
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This time? From the White House? Lies…. Obfuscation… Indecision….Confusion…. Cover-up. And from the mainstream media? Hear no evil….See no evil…..Speak no evil….Silence.
It’s now six weeks and counting and we STILL have no answers to why and how four Americans were killed in Benghazi. We have yet to get a straight story about who killed them. No officials have explained why repeated requests for security were denied before September 11. The secretary of state and the president have said they were responsible, but neither have explained why, once Americans were under attack, they did not send forces to rescue them. Even now, there have been no efforts to punish those who killed them.
We are told to wait, there is an investigation underway that will sort through the emails and clear the fog of war and we will know the truth – after the election. In the end, maybe the entire Benghazi affair boils down to one thing – don’t do anything to jeopardize the president’s chances for reelection. Have we really descended to the point where in nothing matters – not protecting US diplomats abroad, not rescuing them when they’re attacked, not seeking out their killers – as much as getting reelected. Is that the new standard of “leadership” in Washington?
No matter what happens on Election Day, the questions remain -- what did the president know and when did he know it?
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