Steve posted: "How much more before my head explodes I don't know.
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Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest
By James Rosen Publis" Respond to this post by replying above this line
New post on *Fellowship of the Minds*
<http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/author/stungunsandmace/> Benghazi
Transcripts Prove Obama, Hillary, Lied About Attack Being A
Protest.<http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2014/01/15/benghazi-transcripts-prove-obama-hillary-lied-about-attack-being-a-protest/>
by
Steve <http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/author/stungunsandmace/>
How much more before my head explodes I don't know.
[image: I'm Mad as hell and I'm not going to take it
anymore!]<http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/sangry_blowsupheart_100-100.gif>
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Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest
By James Rosen<http://www.foxnews.com/archive/author/james-rosen/index.html>
Published January 14, 2014
FoxNews.com
Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on
Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials
-- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President
Obama -- were informed that the event was a "*terrorist attack,*"
declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why
the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president's Cabinet,
allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a
false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.
Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense
Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House
in classified testimony last year that it was him who broke the news about
the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
tense briefing -- in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to
Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing --
occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for
their session with the *commander in chief.*
*Skippy Knew*
According to declassified
testimony<http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=17D69AFC-744A-43DA-8BEA-D582975C1277>
obtained
by Fox News, Ham -- who was working out of his Pentagon office on the
afternoon of Sept. 11 -- said he learned about the assault on the consulate
compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42 p.m. Libya time,
through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command Center.
"My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say,
'Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told
lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigation on June 26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We
immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta."
Ham's account of that fateful day was included in some 450 pages of
testimony given by senior Pentagon officials in classified, closed-door
hearings conducted last year by the Armed Services subcommittee. The
testimony, given under "Top Secret" clearance and only declassified this
month, presents a rare glimpse into how information during a crisis travels
at the top echelons of America's national security apparatus, all the way
up to the president.
Also among those whose secret testimony was declassified was Dempsey, the
first person Ham briefed about Benghazi. Ham told lawmakers he considered
it a fortuitous "happenstance" that he was able to rope Dempsey and Panetta
into one meeting, so that, as Ham put it, "they had the basic information
as they headed across for the meeting at the White House." Ham also told
lawmakers he met with Panetta and Dempsey when they returned from their
30-minute session with President Obama on Sept. 11.
Armed Services Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., sitting in on the
subcommittee's hearing with Ham last June, reserved for himself an
especially sensitive line of questioning: namely, whether senior Obama
administration officials, in the *very earliest stages of their knowledge
of Benghazi, had any* *reason to believe that the assault grew
spontaneously out of a demonstration over an anti-Islam video produced in
America.*
*Numerous aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton repeatedly told the public in the weeks following the murder of
Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans that night -- as Obama's hotly
contested bid for re-election was entering its final stretch -- that there
was no evidence the killings were the result of a premeditated terrorist
attack, but rather were the result of a protest gone awry. Subsequent
disclosures exposed the falsity of that narrative, and the Obama
administration ultimately acknowledged that its early statements on
Benghazi were untrue.*
"In your discussions with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta," McKeon
asked, "was there any mention of a demonstration or was all discussion
about an attack?" Ham initially testified that there was some "peripheral"
discussion of this subject, but added "at that initial meeting, *we knew
that a U.S. facility had* *been attacked and was under attack, and we knew
at that point that we had two individuals, Ambassador Stevens and Mr.
[Sean] Smith, unaccounted for."*
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a first-term lawmaker with experience as an
Iraq war veteran and Army reserve officer, pressed Ham further on the
point, prodding the 29-year Army veteran to admit that "the nature of the
conversation" he had with Panetta and Dempsey was that "this was a
terrorist attack."
The transcript reads as follows:
*WENSTRUP*: "As a military person, I am concerned that someone in the
military would be advising that this was a demonstration. I would hope that
our military leadership would be advising that this was a terrorist attack."
*HAM*: "Again, sir, I think, you know, there was some preliminary
discussion about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at
the command, I personally and I think the command very quickly got to the
point that this was not a demonstration,* this was a terrorist attack." *
*WENSTRUP*: "And you would have advised as such if asked. Would that be
correct?"
*HAM*: *"Well, and with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta, that is the
nature of the conversation we had, yes, sir." *
*Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year
that it was him who informed the president that "there was an apparent
attack going on in Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you believe that
unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?" asked
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question in my mind that this was a
terrorist attack," Panetta replied* *This is the smoking Gun*
Senior State Department officials who were in direct, real-time contact
with the Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made clear they,
too, knew immediately -- from surveillance video and eyewitness accounts --
that the *incident was a terrorist attack.* After providing the first
substantive "tick-tock" of the events in Benghazi, during a background
briefing conducted on the evening of Oct. 9, 2012, *a reporter asked two
top aides to then-Secretary Clinton: "What in all of these events that
you've described led officials to believe for the first several days that
this was prompted by protests against the video?" *
*"That is a question that you would have to ask others," replied one of the
senior officials. "That was not our conclusion."*
*Ham's declassified testimony further underscores that Obama's earliest
briefing on Benghazi was solely to the effect that the incident was a
terrorist attack,* and raises once again the question of how the narrative
about the offensive video, and a demonstration that never occurred, took
root within the White House as the explanation for Benghazi.
The day after the attacks, which marked the first killing of an American
ambassador in the line of duty since 1979, *Obama strode to the Rose Garden
to* *comment on the loss, taking pains in his statement to say: "We
reject* *all
efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.*" *As late as Sept.
24, during an appearance on the talk show "The View," when asked directly
by co-host Joy Behar if Benghazi had been "an act of terrorism," the
president hedged, saying: "Well, we're still doing an investigation." *
*He Lied, and people Died, Repeat after me. He lied and people died.*
The declassified transcripts show that beyond Ham, Panetta and Dempsey,
other key officers and channels throughout the Pentagon and its combatant
commands were similarly quick to label the incident a *terrorist attack*.
In a classified session on July 31 of last year, Westrup raised the
question with Marine Corps Col. George Bristol, commander of AFRICOM's
Joint Special Operations Task Force for the Trans Sahara region.
Bristol, who was traveling in Dakar, Senegal when the attack occurred, said
he received a call from the Joint Operations Center alerting him to "a
considerable event unfolding in Libya." Bristol's next call was to Lt. Col.
S.E. Gibson, an Army commander stationed in Tripoli. Gibson informed
Bristol that Stevens was missing, and that "there was a fight going on" at
the consulate compound.
*WESTRUP*: "So no one from the military was ever advising, that you are
aware of, that this was a demonstration gone out of control, it was always
considered an attack -"
*BRISTOL*: "Yes, sir."
*WENSTRUP*: "-- on the United States?"
*BRISTOL*: "Yes, sir. ... We referred to it as the attack."
Staffers on the Armed Services subcommittee conducted nine classified
sessions on the Benghazi attacks, and are close to issuing what they call
an "interim" report on the affair. Fox News reported in October their
preliminary conclusion that U.S. forces on the night of the Benghazi
attacks were postured in such a way as to make military rescue or
intervention impossible -- a finding that buttresses the claims of Dempsey
and other senior Pentagon officials.
*While their investigation continues, staffers say they still want to
question Panetta directly. But the former defense secretary, now retired,
has resisted such calls for additional testimony. *
*Never heard of a subpoena? *
"He is in the president's Cabinet," said Rep. Martha Roby R-Ala., chair of
the panel that collected the testimony, of Panetta. "The American people
deserve the truth. They deserve to know what's going on, and I honestly
think that that's why you have seen -- beyond the tragedy that there was a
loss of four Americans' lives -- is that the American people feel misled."
"Leon Panetta should have spoken up," agreed Kim R. Holmes, a former
assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush and now a
distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The people at the
Pentagon and frankly, the people at the CIA stood back while all of this
was unfolding and allowed this narrative to go on longer than they should
have."
Neither Panetta's office nor the White House responded to Fox News'
requests for comment.
~Steve~
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/14/benghazi-transcripts-top-defense-officials-briefed-obama-on-attack-not-video-or/#
*Steve <http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/author/stungunsandmace/>* |
January 15, 2014 at 4:12 am | Categories: 2012
Election<http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/?cat=4934384>,
2014 Election <http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/?cat=44872111>, Benghazi
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Congress<http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/?cat=4308>,
Conservatives <http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/?cat=35268289>,
conspiracy<http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/?cat=11808>,
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