The NY Times’ Attempt to Whitewash Benghazi: Not Just Wrong, But Futile
Paul and Tom Joscelyn have done an excellent job of dissecting the New York Times’ revisionist account of Benghazi. The Times, attempting to shore up Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy, tries to show that the attacks on American facilities in Benghazi that took place on September 11, 2012, were not orchestrated by al Qaeda. The paper’s reporter reaches this conclusion, as Paul and Tom show, by simply ignoring most of the relevant facts. Further, the paper tries to resurrect the theory that an obscure YouTube video had something to do with the death of four Americans. Sure, that’s highly plausible: for the first time ever, movie critics were armed with mortars.But more fundamentally, so what? The Times’ revisionism fails to answer any of the most important questions. Why didn’t Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, respond to any of Ambassador Chris Stevens’ several requests for increased security? The Times offers no answer to this fundamental question. On the contrary, it sets Stevens up as the principal American expert on the various militias and terrorist groups operating in Libya. Which means that his pleas for more security should have been viewed as highly credible. Stevens obviously was correct when he told Clinton that Benghazi needed better security, yet she ignored his repeated pleas. Why?
Further: Where were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the night of September 11, 2012, and what orders, if any, did they give? The news media’s lack of curiosity as to what Obama and Clinton were doing during the seven or eight hours that went by while four Americans, including an ambassador, were under attack and ultimately were murdered, is remarkable. If we had a real president or a real Secretary of State, they would have been in control that night, and would have taken responsibility for the decisions they made. Instead, Washington did nothing to try to help the besieged Americans, and no one knows whether either Obama or Clinton ever made any decisions at all, or whether they were off partying somewhere. Or fast asleep.
And finally: Why haven’t the perpetrators of the murders been found and punished? President Obama vowed to find and punish those responsible for the murders of the Americans. One would think that Hillary Clinton, too, would be interested in identifying and punishing those who killed an ambassador who was serving under her. And yet, even though many of those who participated in that night’s carnage have been happy to give interviews to New York Times reporters and others, nothing has been done to bring justice to the perpetrators of the greatest outrage against American honor in recent years.
It is remarkable that the New York Times, with all its resources, cannot come up with an account of the Benghazi disaster that even addresses, let alone satisfactorily explains, the Obama administration’s principal failures.
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