THE TANGLED WEB OF BENGHAZI
It was poet Walter Scott who said “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” I thought about this so many times Thursday as I watched the Benghazi hearings featuring Hillary Clinton.
I also thought about William Safire’s description of Hillary in a column for the New York Times on January 8, 1996. Safire, a long time syndicated political columnist for the Times, and a talented wordsmith, said she was a “congenital liar” and then wrote “Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.”
As I watched the lengthy hearings on media news Thursday, I was amazed to think that she could have saved herself so much trouble and time and attorney fees had she just told the truth to begin with.
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But she could not. The web had become too tangled. I have studied and researched and thought a lot about the incident since it first happened in 2012, mostly because it involved the death of some of the most heroic members of our military that I have ever heard about. I did not know of Ambassador Stevens at the time, but I want to always honor our men and women in uniform and so I took up their story as a “cause”.
I was also angered at the pain Obama and Clinton caused Sean’s mother, Pat Smith, by lying to her and telling her that her son’s death was caused by a video, and also by telling her she wasn’t entitled to any other information about his death because she wasn’t “a member of the immediate family.”
We learned Thursday that Hillary persuaded the President to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. She used the word “persuaded” proudly as she talked about overcoming obstacles presented by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden and others in the Department of Defense and in the White House.
As someone on the panel said Thursday, Libya was Hillary’s “baby” and all of her actions with regard to lack of security at Benghazi and the attack that night were premised on the fact that she didn’t want the public to know there had been a policy of failure in her pet project. Hillary was never going to admit that she had been wrong about Libya.
This part of the story also ties in with the information we have about the President on that night in September 2012. Hillary talked to him one time that evening. He told her to do whatever had to be done then he went on to bed. After all he had a big fundraiser with Beyonce and her gang the next day in Las Vegas and couldn’t be bothered with details about the attack on our brave men.
Furthermore, the country was less than two months away from an election in which he hoped to win a second term, and problems in Libya just didn’t fit into his campaign rhetoric that Bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda had been decimated. He and Hillary had to maintain their image of Libya being all sunshine and roses, and the rest of the world was doing hunky-dory, on the eve of Obama’s re-election. There was simply no time nor place for violence in Libya and especially violence against Americans.
Then there was the video. Or maybe it was the video that never was. There is no doubt that the anti-Muslim video had caused some disruption in Egypt and a few other places, but it had nothing to do with Benghazi.
But in the tangled web of Hillary’s mind, she latched on to the video narrative. However, she emailed her daughter to tell her that Benghazi had been attacked and some of our men had been killed by “al Quada-like terrorists”. She also contacted the Egyptian Prime Minister and the President of Libya, and told them she knew the attack had nothing to do with protesting against the video but was a planned attack by terrorists.
And guess what. Good old email came through again. Literally. The email to Chelsea showed up somewhere in the stacks that the State Department released and came straight through to Gowdy’s committee.
This is an opinion column so I’m going to give you my opinion on something else that happened this week which is also related to the Hillary hearing and which I have not heard put forth by anyone else so far.
Many of us were taken aback not only by Joe Biden’s sudden appearance with his wife and the President in the Rose Garden on Wednesday but by the timing.
Most political observers I having listened to thought that Biden would not make a decision about running until after the Benghazi hearing so he could get a feeling for the public’s perception of Hillary’s testimony there. So why did he choose to come out just 24 hours before her testimony to tell us and assure Hillary and the President that he did not intend to run?
I believe there was a three way meeting sometime early this week between Obama, Biden and Hillary. The President knew he was extremely vulnerable to anything Hillary might be asked about his role the night Benghazi fell to the terrorists. Hillary knew she was extremely vulnerable to losing the election if Biden ran. So, Joe Biden, who had mixed emotions about running anyway, was given an “easy out” when his good friend and president asked him to sacrifice his aspirations for the White House so that Benghazi would leave no taint on his presidency, knowing full well that Hillary would protect him at any cost to have Biden out of the race. She would never have agreed to protect the President unless she received the big prize of an assured coronation. There is no love lost between the Clintons and the Obamas, but this is politics, after all.
© Joan Rowden Hart for the newspaper
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