Jennifer Rubin July 2, 2014


Recent events have not been kind to Hillary Clinton, but she is far from an innocent victim in what surely is one of the worst revival tours in memory.

Hillary Clinton, still unwilling to acknowledge her and her boss’s failure to accurately assess the threats from al-Qaeda and the spread of jihaists into Libya, stubbornly insists we really don’t know why the jihadists attacked and killed our people. Oh, puhleez. While not a supporter of civilian trials for enemy combatants, I must admit there is something satisfying about the prosecution’s version of events laid out for all to see.

The New York Times (which fell for the maybe-it-was-the-video rationalization from the administration) delivers the blow:

[The indictment] said that in the days before the attack, he voiced “concern and opposition to the presence of an American facility in Benghazi,” the government said.

On the night of Sept. 11, 2012, a group of at least 20 men armed with machine guns, handguns and rocket-propelled grenades gathered outside the United States Mission in Benghazi and “aggressively breached” its gate, according to the document.

The men went on to set fire to the United States Mission. It was that fire that killed Mr. Stevens and a State Department employee. A little later, Mr. Abu Khattala “entered the compound and supervised the exploitation of material from the scene by numerous men, many of whom were armed.”

He then went to one of his militia’s camps, where many of its members had gathered and prepared a second attack, on another American outpost. Fearing that the United States was going to retaliate after the attacks, he tried to obtain weapons in the following days.

Hmm. Sounds like an al-Qaeda terrorist didn’t get word that “al-Qaeda is Dead, G.M. is alive” (an Obama campaign slogan).

Regardless of when we knew this — and the weight of evidence from administration intelligence officials is that it was within a day — we certainly know now that the administration didn’t have al-Qaeda on its heels. And we know, just as we know from the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, that the Obama-Clinton-John Kerry team hyped al-Qaeda’s demise and convinced themselves they were “ending” wars. In doing so, they let al-Qaeda come back, more widespread than ever before.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/righ...ntinue/?hpid=z3