President Nixon learned this by ordering an elaborate, but easily traceable, cover-up of a break-in at DNC headquarters. The more he proclaimed his innocence and brought in others to take shots at the messengers, the deeper hole he dug for himself. Had he not resigned in 1974 he would have been impeached, not for the crime, but for the cover-up.
President Reagan had his own troubles with Iran Contra, which essentially robbed him of any real influence in his final two years in office. It also dragged Bush 41 down for his first two years, prompting his awful domestic calculation to raise taxes even though his lips said otherwise.
Bill Clinton saw his entire second term fall apart by covering up for a number of sexual escapades. It wasn’t an affair with Monica Lewinsky that divided the country, it was his ill-conceived cover-up and the ensuing attempts to discredit anyone who suggested he wasn't anything other than a man of high fidelity. In fact most people don’t remember we would've never heard about Monica had she not been asked to swear false testimony to cover up his sexual advances on Paula Jones.
In each case – well, except for Nixon – the public would have likely given each president a pass had they been truthful and forceful in their defense at the start. Reagan figured out a way to get around the Boland Amendment by finding a clever way to arm the Contras in Nicaragua. Lost in the hubbub of several investigations was that Congress had voted to fund and defund aid to the Contras a half dozen times, leaving them to scratch their chins on whether or not the U.S. was with them or against them. Whatever you felt about the policy, had Reagan stood up and said, “Hell yeah I’m funding them. I’m the Commander In Chief and I want the Contras to have our support instead of getting the run-around,” there would have been dozens of editorials written about his imperial attitude and his lack of regard for the separate branches of power. But it never would have dogged him the way it did if he hadn’t given the “Who, me?” defense.
As for Clinton, was there anyone on the planet who didn’t know he was a skirt chaser? As we got to know more about Hillary, was there anyone who didn’t blame him? He should have given Paula Jones what she wanted; money and an open apology and thus the end of the Monica Lewinsky saga that sprang from it. Oddly, it was the open apology that both sides refused to budge on, not the money. Had they agreed, most of us would have quickly moved on. There would have been a month or two of a political firestorm as several people would have made references to his low moral character as the leader of the Free World, but it would have blown over soon enough everywhere but in the White House residence.
Which brings us to the current occupant of the White House. Defending our consulate in Benghazi could have been President Obama's finest hour. Now it will be his own special hell whether or not he wins the election in two weeks. The facts are dripping out and they are becoming indisputable that President Obama knew or should have known in real time what was going on in Libya. So far three e-mails have surfaced that were sent from Benghazi, urgently announcing the Benghazi consulate was under attack, including one e-mail naming the terrorist arm of al Queda that was claiming responsibility for the attack while it was happening. The e-mails were sent to the White House Situation Room, which happens to be in the White House, the Director of National Intelligence, who happens to report directly to the president, and the FBI who, well who knows who they report to? These e-mails directly refute the president and his administration’s 14-day storyline of an ignorant mob of angry Libyans protesting a video that had been online since June and nobody had seen. The White House story included several direct stares into TV cameras by the president and his administration retelling this narrative that likely they alone believed. The filmmaker must have been a big enough pain that he found himself in jail and won’t be let out, coincidentally, until three days after the election.
Now the entire Benghazi affair looks like either a cover-up or such a high level of incompetence that there will be a day of reckoning when the rest of the facts come to light. Already we know several things that point to a cover up. The e-mails suggest the White House knew there was an attack and it wasn’t a run of the mill attack. They knew their ambassador was there and in trouble, and they knew that this wasn’t an angry mob but a group of well-armed Jihadists hell-bent on taking down the consulate and later our embassy. We know there was a drone in the air catching, in real time, the melee on the ground. And we know there were Special Forces and several Viper gunships an hour away in Italy that are specifically used for crowd dispersion. Each of these assets could have been very helpful in what was a seven-hour battle, especially when you consider the last two Americans killed died in the final hour of the battle.
If the president had ordered the special forces to move on the terrorists (I have no problem calling them that) who had attacked our consulate – i.e. our sovereign territory – he would have been the hero of the hour and looked so presidential that he wouldn’t be thinking about retirement in Hawaii today. It’s possible the ambassador and his computer aid wouldn’t have been saved, but two others could have and, nearly equally important, we could have retaken our consulate and been able to secure thousands of highly sensitive documents that were looted from the consulate, including the names of Libyan nationals who were working for us and are now likely no longer among the living. There may have also been a bigger prize stashed in warehouses adjacent to the consulate that I'll get to in a moment.
Theories abound about why the president did nothing but keep to his schedule of fundraisers and campaign events. The most often cited is that terror groups attacking a consulate and killing a U.S. ambassador and three others doesn’t fit into the larger picture the campaign was selling the American people – bin Laden was dead and al Queda was in tatters. I have another theory and it’s culled together from a few conversations and information in the open press – although from the foreign press since the American protectors of the First Amendment have been too busy talking about “binders of women.”
The first thing that seemed out of place was the drone. Nobody has said a drone wasn’t there as if it’s a normal thing to have a drone flying over every city in the world. Contrary to popular fiction, we don’t have that many drones and they are infrequently flying. Drones need to be tasked by the U.S. Central Command out of Tampa. It can often take two weeks to 30 days to get such approval. This is in part because of the demand for drones, the fact they can only stay in the air for about 48 hours (most times fewer than two hours), and because the computer data required sending and receiving information takes up a huge amount of bandwidth. The fantasy that a drone just happened to be in the area at the time of the attack is ridiculous. Somebody knew it needed to be there that night, but nobody so far has given an answer as to why.
While asking about a drone in the area, we may as well ask the same question about Ambassador Stevens. Why was he in Benghazi, especially on the anniversary of 9/11 in a compound that had been threatened for months, in an insecure building guarded by a makeshift security team of Libyans who hadn’t been paid in a while and weren’t about to give their lives for any American in a fancy suit? Ambassador Stevens had just met with a Turkish diplomat a few hours before the attack and it has been an open secret that Turkey has been instrumental arming the rebels in Syria. Why was this meeting so important that the ambassador felt compelled to slip into Al Qaeda-held Benghazi on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks, knowing that Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had called for revenge for the killing of his Libyan deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi? Where was his concern that he might have been on an Al Qaeda hit list and fully aware that he was terribly exposed with completely inadequate security? Benghazi had been the epicenter of the civil war that President Obama had taken sides on and is still the hub of military leadership in a country in huge disarray. As the saying goes, “to the victors go the spoils,” and this includes the massive amount of arms left from the Qaddafi regime in Benghazi that is now under the control of the new military leadership. Many people believe the weapons were in the consulate warehouses that were nominally under U.S. control.
Last summer, what may have began as democratic protests against the Qaddafi regime was quickly hijacked by militant Islamist who believed Qaddafi wasn’t down for the struggle against Zionism and was a little too secular in his belief in Sharia law. Knowing this, we still armed this group and gave them air support to take out a crazy dictator, but a crazy dictator who had agreed to be less of a rascal in exchange for him stealing from his own people to the tune of $88 billion. The group we armed and who is now in charge is highly influenced by al Qaeda in the Maghreb, which is connected in spirit to the Muslim Brotherhood and who both have an interest in removing Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Assad, like Saddam Hussein, is a Ba'athist and is considered impure to most Islamists. As a result, the more pure from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and now Libya want to see him replaced with a more zealous follower of the Koran. Turkey just doesn’t want him there because he’s a bully in the neighborhood, an ally of Iran and there is disagreement where Turkey ends and Syria begins.
If you’re going to support a militant uprising against a well-armed, well-entrenched dictator, you better come to the fight with something more than pocket knives. With a kinship toward their Syrian brothers, the Libyans needed a way to get heavy arms into the fray and, based on reports by the Times of London, Ambassador Stevens was either the middleman of a shipment of 400 tons of arms to Syria or at least knew about it. This shipment included game-changing SA-7s that can take out Syrian helicopters and aircraft.
Through numerous presidents, we’ve never had clean hands in the Islamic world. We’ve backed an endless line of despots and ne’er-do-wells who have looted and tortured their people and bombed their neighbors and even their own citizens using weapons supplied by our thirsty defense industry. If the American public knew the secret dealings of our activities in the region, we’d all feel a bit dirtier today. Even if the cause was supposedly for the greater good, such as the arming of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, we still had to get the Egyptians to agree to buy weapons from the Israelis to supply to the Pakistanis to hand over to the muj – who happened to include bin Laden. We even taught them how to make IEDs, something they learned very well and demonstrated their proficiency on us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s not with naiveté that I look at the whole Benghazi affair. We were, after all, taking sides in a civil war and helping the rebels corner and kill Qaddafi. Therefore it’s not surprising our ambassador was involved to some degree in brokering an arms arrangement for the Libyans fighters who went to fight alongside their brothers against Assad. The questions that remain are, to what extent did Steven’s dealings lead to his death and the attack on our consulate, and is this the president’s larger cover-up that’s unraveling before him when a convenient second-rate video didn’t pass the smell test with the American people? There’s a lot of smoke in that area of the world, it shouldn’t surprise anyone there’s plenty of fire going around, too.
UPDATE: Since this is an every changing story, it's difficult to keep track of what's real and what's not. One thing is certain, there is a massive cover-up underway. Stories have been all over the news that CIA operators on the ground reported our consulate under attack and our ambassador in peril and/or missing. This would have been a huge flash in the White House Situation Room and would have necessitated the involvement of the president. Requests were made for security operators to get in the fray in Benghazi and bring the ambassador and his staff to safety. The requests were denied numerous times. In fact, several operators went against those orders and went to the aid of the ambassador even painting a laser on the site where terrorists were firing mortars that eventually killed two Americans. The target was painted and desperate pleas to take out the mortar site never happened.
The news is crashing down around the president now, leaving just two conclusions: he told the operators and the CIA to stand down, or he was never told about what was happening and there's simply no excuse for that. The choice of not protecting our consulate and ambassador for whatever reason or gross incompetence are not very flattering choices.
There has been a lot of chatter that the president was in the Situation Room, the very one he was so proud to be photographed in watching the killing of bin Laden. Why is he so bashful to talk about the very same room now? Because this was happening around 4 p.m. in Washington and the president was in the White House at the time, it's simply not believable he wouldn't have been brought down to watch what was going on and to make command decisions. An ambassador in a country gone missing is not news you keep from the president. To not inform him would be a twist on the famed Hilary ad about the 3 a.m. call. Only in this case, the president would be AWOL during regular business hours.
General David Petraeus is the head of the CIA and he had his spokesperson put out a very specific Tweet (as an aside, can we not write something longer than 144 characters anymore? Can you imagine Tolstoy writing War and Peace as a Tweet?). It said: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate." Whether intentional or not, and I think it was written in such a crafty way it was intentional, Petraeus was pointing his finger at others and there aren't very many people in the direction of that finger other than the president. The word in the special ops community -- isn't community a nice sounding word for a bunch or trained killers? -- was that Obama himself gave a no response order at 5 p.m., less than an hour after the raid began. If that turns out to be true, especially in light of the stonewalling and the false narrative of the video, his second term, if there is one, will be mired in Congressional hearings until 2016.
