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Revelations in Wednesday’s congressional hearings on the Benghazi terrorist attacks prove it is a massive scandal that will carry significant consequences for those involved in the cover-up, according to retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
McInerney served at the highest levels in the Air Force, including time as assistant vice chief of staff and vice commander in chief of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe.
He believes the Obama administration deliberately misled the American people on the motivation for the attack and is now covering its tracks on decisions to prevent a military rescue in Benghazi. He told WND that it is more clear than ever following Wednesday’s testimony of former Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and two others before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “This is going to be the biggest scandal. It is going to make Watergate look like kindergarten because Watergate was primarily limited to the Oval Office. This cuts across the whole national security apparatus, where people were lying and covering up,” McInerney said. “It is a dereliction of duty that this nation has never seen before.”
So what consequences could that mean for the highest levels of the administration? “Well, just see what the consequences were in Watergate. If it’s far worse than Watergate, the consequences will go right into the Oval Office,” he said.
McInerney said the tell-tale sign of Obama’s dereliction of duty can be determined in the admitted White House narrative of the president’s actions as the terrorist attack played out the night of Sept. 11, 2012. “When is the exact minute he knew? We don’t have the timeline, and it was well before the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went over there. He only talked to the secretary of defense one time, so it’s obvious he knew that he had given the stand-down order and did not need to talk to the secretary of defense or anybody else after that,” McInerney said. “Then he goes the next day out on a fundraising campaign to Las Vegas. That is a low for the commander in chief of this great nation.” He also insists the stand-down order could only come from one source: the president himself.
“The only person who could have given it was the president, and he had to give it through the secretary of defense, secretary of state. The word came out so it came from the combatant commands and other unites below, but nobody could have given that except the president of the United States, and that is very clear,” said McInerney, who noted that the State Department’s own Accountability Review Board likely reached a similar conclusion in its report, which is why so few have seen it and why the leaders of that study refuse to appear before Congress. McInerney believes they should be subpoenaed.
While he believes Obama has a lot to answer for, McInerney made it clear that many top-level subordinates deserve a lot of the blame too, and that’s what makes the scandal so troubling.
“It’s going to have significant consequences because it impacts two CIA directors, two secretaries of state, two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two secretaries of defense that are all involved now with the cover-up,” he said.
The general also singled out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her comment at congressional hearings in January in which she bristled severely at accusations the administration concocted a plan to blame the attack on a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam YouTube video that got out of hand. Clinton slammed Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, saying, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
[OBVIOIUSLY SHE HAS STILL BIG POLITICAL AMBITIONS SHE DOESN'T WANT BESMIRCHED]
McInerney sees that as a low point in American history.
“That is one of the most despicable statements that any American has said about such a tragic incident when you lose people like that. It makes a huge difference that our troops know that they will always be protected as much as they can and we’ll do anything to protect them,” he said. “She says, what difference does it make? That will live with her til the day she dies. I can tell you, all the people I know, both active and retired, think that is one of the most despicable statements we have ever heard a civilian leader say in our country’s history.”
In another article from WND:
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Suspicions surrounding the administration’s actions were amplified during the hearing when Greg Hicks, the No. 2 person in Libya when the Sept. 11, 2012, attack took place, testified under questioning from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that he was told to “not allow himself to be interviewed by a congressional delegation, led by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, as to what he knew about the attack.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., asked, “The question is: Why would they do a cover-up? What are they covering up?
“You know, a week before the ambassador was killed in Libya, a ship left Libya and docked in Turkey,” Senator Paul told WND. “[T]he captain of that ship said there were arms on board and that he actually witnessed the rebels taking the arms and disputing over who got what.”
So why is it only in the commenting online by netizens, ordinary brainstormers or writers, publishers and videograpers working on their own understanding, that we hear more about those 'weapons', about 'motives', about who handled such suspicious magnets for a need for coverup? We don't believe that cleverness is so completely absent in government-'humans' and we use that designation loosely. Government strategy sessions are not so different from corporate strategic planning sessions and we testify that those are openly focused on cleverness. So why should we be expected to swallow the characterization of government officials as simply incompetent. Observations and open discussion in the marketplace of ideas online produces clear fitting of the puzzle together, calling it what makes it worthy of investigating, in plain language. For example. freethought commented:
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In the home stretch of Obama's presidential campaign, where saving his ambassador would have been of real benefit; one needs to ask why a politician, as calculating as obama, chose not to be the strong hero, but made the decision to sentence Ambassador Stevens to a certain death.
I believe the answer lies in the mission of Ambassador Stevens, to locate and track where arms sent to Libya have ended up.
Obama calculated that losing an ambassador through perceived incompetence would be less damaging than the answers to where the weapons went in Libya; this is very troubling that silencing Stevens through execution by proxy was calculated by obama to be less damaging than the report from Stevens of the answers the ambassador was seeking.
The administration was not incompetent in their decision to deny security to a currently serving foreign ambassador, they are not that incompetent; they purposely killed Stevens, by inaction, to silence him and any report of the arms deals ordered by the administration just before an election.
I believe the administration is guilty of premeditated murder, and they only used the attack on the diplomatic safe house as they do all crises, it did not go to waste!
We had read that it was Hillary Clinton's idea in a State Department brainstorming session that she thought it was possible to get around the prohibitions, official and public knowledge, against sending boots-on-the-ground assistance to the admittedly Al Qaida rebels fighting with the Syrian government by shipping arms to Libya as expected for their own security against Gadaffi's former troops, then cross shipping those weapons out of that country to Turkey where the Syrian rebels could access them. In the testimony before congress, Clinton feigned amnesia of such an inspiration but admitted she would have thought it possible that she did. ?
Hence someone was 'inspired'. Arms moved. Syria kept burning. Libya remained disrupted, needing U.S. assistance.
And the official prohibition responsibility of the Ambassador was apparently taken 'too seriously' by Ambassador Stevens and his finding out what was going on at the CIA dock headquarters on the Embassy doorstep may be the snafu that the presidentially ambitious types were intensely seeking to stifle.
Besides... a "proof of need" for homeland security targeting 'fanatics' with free speech, and raising more anti-moslem talking by the public that the administration could demand be silenced while pointing everyone to it was even better than the risk of looking foolish in the Administration's disinformation posing about some anti-mohammed youtube video that would even make points for government control of internet sites, at least in the minds of some, inside legislative circles and out in public.
You might even want to know how long it took to produce that slipshod video to serve as the pretext. How quickly the Administration became aware of it (EVEN graciously MAKING IT PUBLICIZED TO FANATICS ABROAD WITH ADMINISTRATION HELP so that other clerics could proxy protest as potential confirmation of the disinformation).
If that slipshod video job coincided with the time of arrival of the Steven's reporting to the Administration on his findings and/or suspicions, then the whole production could have been a premeditated operation to commit murder and stage another public demonstration to move opinion against middle eastern THREATS to virtuous Americans that the U.S. 'ought' to be doing something about and denigrate any remaining vestiges of peace-seeking activism and likewise denigrate libertarian realism on letting people solve their own problems as naivete.
And one other ominous puzzle, pointed out on PJTV by Bill Whittle, was the UNEXPLAINABLE reticence (in the furor at the time) of the Republican Romney IN THE DEBATES with fully national public venue. Romney rejected that pure golden opportunity to expose the incompetence of his opponent. Draw your own conclusions about what 'they' and their sources knew about CIA involvements and future plans for wars.
