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Republicans Push the Benghazi Video Lie to Discredit Hillary Clinton

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Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:41 pm

The conservative Washington Free Beacon crowed on Tuesday, “Documents obtained by Judicial Watch from their May 2014 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed against the State Department and the Department of Defense revealed that the Obama administration knew about the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi at least 10 days before the attack.”

Judicial Watch self-identifies as “a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation” Unfortunately, “conservative” and “nonpartisan” cannot co-exist in the same sentence, and Judicial Watch’s appeal to its own “high standards of ethics” is questionable at best.

To back up their assertions, they trot out people like conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, who likes to talk about Democrats’ “ethical contortions,” (without mentioning that she’s a conservative) and Brett Bair of Fox News, the folks who invented ethical contortions.

Maybe “nonpartisan” is synonymous with “fair and balanced.”

To take just one example, Judicial Watch – and you almost require a drum roll here – warns readers that, “Other documents show that State Department officials initially described the incident as an “attack.”

Oh no! Foul deeds afoot! Terrorists attack the Benghazi Mission and it is somehow NOT an attack? THAT would be news!

Whatever will be next? President Obama taking to the Rose Garden to refer to “an act of terror” when it was actually a terrorist attack?

Wait…was it an attack or not an attack? If you say it was a terrorist attack, why can’t the State Department call it an “attack” or does “attack” mean something different if the administration uses it, and oh by the way, how is an attack not an act of some kind?

Let’s face it: GOP problems don’t revolve so much as what was said as who said it.

Jerome Corsi writes at World Net Daily that it is “the Hillary terror lie.” Supposedly, Hillary knew from the moment it happened that terrorists were attacking the Benghazi Mission on September 11, 2012, not a bunch of protesters upset by what the National Review refers to dismissively as a “supposedly offensive video,” or as one right-wing media source called it, “a video no one had ever seen.”

As though the motivation of the attackers matters all that much. President Obama identified the attack as a terrorist attack from the very beginning. Republicans want to make that distinction, but there is no distinction to be made. An act of terror is an act of terror, whatever the motivating factors.

You would think the video itself had never existed, but had been invented by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Greta Van Susteren tweeted last night, suggesting sinister plot lines:

But it really was an offensive video – “The Innocence Of Muslims” – not supposedly but actually, and it did actually offend Muslims, and it did actually play a role in the attack that left four Americans dead.

As David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, who actually talked to people and examined actual evidence rather than just inventing stuff from his desk, wrote in 2013 in his analysis of the events that night,

Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters.

Kirkpatrick went on to write that,

There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.

Republicans have decided that the Obama administration should have seen the attack coming – and in fact did see the attack coming – and that Obama and Hillary decided to blame it all on a video.

The National Review speaks of “a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Obama administration” which “managed to put the press off the story and mislead the American people,” and claims that, “The brazenness and scope of the disinformation would make any KGB colonel sigh with admiration.”

Red State says, “Now that we know that the White House was actively involved in pushing a blatant lie about the genesis of the Benghazi attack in order to deflect blame it is only fair to ask who came up with the story to begin with.”

Who indeed? Just ask yourself. Who do Republicans fear more than any living human being? Who do they really, really, not want to see running against them in 2016? (and with all due respect, it’s not Bernie Sanders).

It isn’t enough to start a movement to retroactively impeach her as Secretary of State, apparently. It is a shame Republicans were never this interested in how it came to pass that al Qaeda was able to slip past President George W. Bush’s watch to kill not four, but three thousand Americans on a previous September 11.

Or how the Bush administration was able to orchestrate a completely unnecessary and illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein, who was an enemy of al Qaeda, had something to do with the attack on 9/11, or that he had mysterious “weapons of mass destruction,” or simply because, when all else failed, we just wanted to export freedom at the point of a bayonet.

Sidney Blumenthal warned in the released Clinton emails that Republicans would use Benghazi to attack her. As Wonkette deadpanned with more basis in fact that any right wing source we’ve looked at here, “so gross Sidney Blumenthal is looking like a goddamned prophet at this point.”

Apparently, there is some law somewhere or another that Blumenthal is not allowed to give Hillary Clinton his opinions on what’s happening. But listening to the right wing media, you would think these are all impeachable offenses. But then again, this is coming from people who think they can impeach President Obama for not doing what they want.

Republicans are no more going to let go of Benghazi than they are going to pay more than lip-service to the idea that the Iraq War was a mistake. And this latest example of Hillary Derangement Syndrome won’t be the last.

I suppose the next one will revolve around how Obama himself planned the Benghazi attack, just so he could make himself and Hillary look bad. Can’t wait for it! Who needs Game of Thrones when you have Fox News and people like Greta Van Susteren for fictional intrigue?

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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