Even The Brits’ BBC Think Benghazi Is Actually A Big Deal

by Tim Brown

The other day, during the hearings before the House Oversight Committee on Benghazi, I watched my Twitter feed (something I rarely do), in order to keep up posts on the page where our live feed was conducted.

One thing that stood out to me was how there wasn’t a peep about the Benghazi hearings coming from the major news networks.

However, what was telling was that as soon as the Jodi Arias (in case you didn’t know, she was a Mormon sex freak who murdered her ex-boyfriend by stabbing him repeatedly, slitting his throat and shooting him in the head) verdict was ready to be read, tweets came through like crazy wanting people to watch and follow that!

This has been typical for years under the Obama administration as real news that affects the nation gets sidelined for things that don’t have any impact on our lives at all and many continue to push the idea that Benghazi just isn’t important and no cover-up was, and is, going on, like our friend Juan Williams at Fox News demonstrates below.

However, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is now saying that Benghazi is a pretty big deal.

Mark Mardell, the North America editor for the BBC, referenced an ABC article, in which new evidence has been obtained that the Obama administration did deliberately purge any reference to “terrorism” from the accounts of the attacks that took place in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

According to ABC:

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community.  They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

Mardel commented:

In the interests of full disclosure I have to say I have not in the past been persuaded that allegations of a cover-up were a big deal. It seemed to me a partisan attack based on very little.

I remember listening to reports from the BBC and others at the time that did suggest the attack in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to a rather puerile anti-Islamic video.

I understand President Barack Obama’s careful use of the word “terrorism” when it actually means something, rather than as a knee-jerk description of any violence by foreigners against Americans, often in order to justify a “war on terror.”

…

But the evidence is there in black and white, unless we doubt the documents obtained by ABC, which I don’t.

Mardell says that he is not persuaded that the changes in the language of the talking points were changed because it would “prejudice the FBI investigation.” There wasn’t one at the time. He believes the “butt-guarding” rationale “is more credible.”

“As Ms Nuland puts it,” Mardell writes, “such a report ‘could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?’ However you read the motives, the state department and apparently the White House did get the CIA to change its story.”

His conclusion is that is “very serious” and that he suspects that heads will roll.

One would expect that of course, but with this administration, will it be the heads rolling of those responsible. After all, even if it were someone like Ben Rhodes who came up with the talking points about the YouTube video or general counsel and chief of staff to Secretary Hillary Clinton Cheryl Mills or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, it doesn’t matter.

These and others, including White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, along with countless others openly declared on national television that the attacks were the result of a protest of a benign YouTube video. That my friends is a documented fact. It is so clear that even the people across the pond can see it!