Posted on 10/27/2015 4:44:53 PM PDT by Benny Huang
The mainstream media is loath to admit it but Hillary Clinton had a very bad day testifying before the Benghazi committee. When Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) confronted the former Secretary of State with her own emails concerning the 2012 terrorist attack, Mrs. Clinton flailed gracelessly and backpedaled from previous statements.
The emails concern the motive for the attack and its perpetrators. It was never about The Innocence of Muslims, a Youtube video that portrayed the historical Mohammad as a truly villainous character. Nearly everyone now admits that the video did not spark the great Benghazi conflagration that left four Americans dead and a consulate in ruinsand by everyone, I mean members of the Obama Administration. It was like pulling teeth to get them to concede the point but they apparently have. Their current position is that they made an honest mistake in the Clausewitzian fog of war. As difficult as it was to defend the honest mistake narrative before Clintons emails were uncovered, it is now impossibleor at least its impossible for people who care about facts.
Three emails discovered on Mrs. Clintons illegal private email serverthe one she wiped to stymie investigatorsreveal that the secretary never believed the Youtube yarn for a moment. The night of the attack she confided in her daughter Chelsea via email that the compound had been besieged by an al-Qaeda like group. She said something similar to the president of Libya, and to Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil she wrote: We know the attack in Libya had nothing to with the film. It was a planned attack not a protest. These words were written approximately twenty-four hours after the attack.
Being the skilled liar that she is, Clinton actually tried to deny that she had ever claimed otherwise. Clearly it was a terrorist attack, not a spontaneous protest gone awry, and she had said so all along!
Okay, not really. On the night of the attack, she addressed the nation, saying:
Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.
So there are two lies in that brief statementthat our government values religious tolerance (LOL!) and that the attack was spurred by a video. Im sure her defenders, weasels that they are, will argue that Clinton never definitively blamed the video but only claimed that some sought to justify the attack on those grounds. Who those some are is unclear, especially when one considers that the rumor was spawned at the highest levels of the US government. In any case, its weak sauce. She was clearly blaming The Innocence of Muslims, just as the rest of the administration did. They had their talking points coordinated and they spoke with one voiceblame the video!
This new revelation should go a long way toward debunking the results of the sham investigation concluded last November which found the administration blameless. How anyone could have come to that conclusion without examining all the evidence is beyond me. They obviously never subpoenaed the secretarys emails or they would have discovered, months before anyone else did, that Hillary was using a private, unsecured email server. They didnt find any fault because they didnt look very hard.
It would be prudent at this point for Mrs. Clinton and her former boss to apologize to the American public for misleading them. Itll never happen, I know. But theres another person, a non-American, who also deserves an apology. His name is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula and he produced the video under the pseudonym Sam Bacile. Mr. Nakoula was the administrations sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter so that the administration could appease the mob, escape blame, and win reelection. Besides the four dead Americans and their families, of course, no one has suffered more than he.
When Mrs. Clinton attended the funeral of Tyrone Woods, a security contractor and former Navy SEAL who gave his life trying to hold back the angry hordes, she approached Charles Woods, the victims father, and told him that she would seek retributionnot against the barbarians who killed his son, of course, but against Nakoula Bassely Nakoula. According to Mr. Woods, Clinton said Were going to make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted. Yikes!
Nakoula was of course arrested and imprisoned just as Clinton promised he would be. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the picture of a man being hauled off by Los Angeles County sheriffs, his identity obscured behind a hat, a heavy buttoned-up coat, and what appears to be gauze across his face. It was another one of the many They cant do that in America! moments that Ive witnessed in recent years. Our government doesnt jail people for making movies; or at least its not supposed to. Thats the kind of stuff you think happens only in places like China and Venezuela. It cant happen here.
Oh, but it can and it did. Granted, the man wasnt charged with making an inflammatory film. He was charged with violating the terms of his probation, which forbad him, among other things, from using aliases. He also lied to the police about his involvement in the film. Both of his minor crimes can be understood as the actions of a man in fear for his life and those of his family.
Im not so naïve as to believe that the charge was really the charge. Its no coincidence that he was arrested just four days after the Benghazi attack though his video had been on Youtube for three months. His arrest and prosecution fulfilled Hillary Clintons promise to Charles Woods and appeased the Muslim worldat the expense of the first amendment, of course. Authorities had to find something to charge Nakoula with and minor probation violations were a good fit. Nakoula was sentenced to a year in prison.
What a disgraceful episode in American history. While no one in the government was obliged to defend the content of the video, someone should have stood up for our sacred freedoms. The current administration instead caved to the mobs cries for vengeance. Barack Obama even appealed directly to Youtube, asking it to review the video to determine if it violated its terms of service, a clear suggestion that it should be removed. Thats too close to government censorship for my liking. To its credit, Youtube did not comply.
I was reminded of Nakoula again when I recently learned of Clintons 2010 meeting with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, where she promised to curb Islamophobia through the employment of some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people dont feel that they have the support to do what we abhor. The OIC advocates for laws that would criminalize criticism of Islam as illegal defamation. Clinton was essentially meeting them halfway, trying to demonstrate that the defamation they feared could be rooted out by softer forms of censorship.
If this doesnt frighten you, it should. Government officials should never talk this way. While peer pressure and shaming may sound like constitutional methods for making people shut their pie holes, they can quickly devolve into first amendment violations when practiced by the government. The dustup over The Innocence of Muslims offers an excellent case in point. No, the government wont jail a man for making a videoit will find a pretext and jail him for that instead. No, the government wont order Youtube to censor the filmit will ask Youtube to review its terms of service in hopes of persuading someone else to censor it instead.
See? Its all perfectly legal!
Nakoula Bassely Nakoula paid a price that no one in a free society should ever have to pay for making a film. The administration should have had some testicular fortitude and told the Muslim world where to stick it. But it did the cowardly thing instead, as you knew it would, and fed the ravenous alligators in hopes of being eaten last. The Benghazi attacks death toll ought to include the names of four dead Americans, of course, but also the first amendment, which died a little that day in September 2012.
The GOP, especially McCain, was behind Benghazi
with Obama.
The Kabuki theater of treason will continue.
And how long have you did you know about this PLANNED ATTACK, ms. rodham?
to know it was a PLANNED attack indicates to me that you must have know a plan was in the works for some time.
I've never heard a peep from any of them during the committee "hearings".
Instead of blaming the Muslims who were the actual killers she scapegoated a Coptic Christian who had nothing to do with the attack. A cynical observer might think that Hillary hoped to trigger anti-Copt riots in Egypt to draw attention away from her colossal failure in Libya.
It is interesting to me that the Cairo embassy tweeted it's first apology for the "video" early in the morning on Sept. 11th 2012 many hours before the attack in Benghazi. Even before the protests in Cairo.
It is also interesting that no one seems to have brought this up in the Benghazi hearings, any of the other investigations or in the MSM.
The following also seems to get ignored...
The protests and attack in Cairo (or anywhere in the world) weren't about that stupid 'video' either.
Brian Lilley: The MSM is lying about the muslim riots
Interviews on the streets of Cairo. 'Video' had nothing to do with protests and attack.
"Blame it on the Video" was a Fraud for the Cairo Rioting, Too
I believe that Gowdy’s committee has interviewed over 50 people in private, and I believe some of those must be those Benghazi survivors.
At least that is my hope.
I expect names will be deleted in the final report, but I am hoping we will find out a good deal more about the attack, and partial rescue, in that report. Whenever it will be released. !
Benghazi ping.
Let Republicanprofessor know if you want on or off this ping list.
Well we “saw” a major protest from the Hollyweird crowd on the film maker’s arrest, DIDN’T we, very loudly, hello!!!
Where were they???
Benghazi-Gate is a QUACKMIRE, like quicksand !!!
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