Bengazi and gun running

Originally posted by sasquatch672
You know - you make sense for about three lines, and then you fall back to this "video" crap, which completely disregards that the security situation in Benghazi had been deteriorating for months before the attack - to the point where Britain had ordered its diplomats out of the country. As for the New York Times, Mother Jones has more credibility as an independent news source.

That you don't want to believe the truth is hardly surprising.

From Reuters:

Reuters Reporter On NPR: "Almost Everybody Here Believes That It Was A Reaction To The Movie." One the September 13 edition of NPR's Morning Edition, the network interviewed Hadeel Al-Shalchi of Reuters, who "ha[d] been talking with authorities and protestors." According to Al-Shalchi, Libyans who visited the ruins of the diplomatic facility linked the attack to the film. From Morning Edition:

AL-SHALCHI: In Benghazi at the consulate, the consulate is now not secure at all, like, you can walk in and out of it. And people all day yesterday were doing that. They would come, sort of take a stroll inside the grounds, you know, take pictures and little videos of the damage.

The majority of those people said two things. They said, first of all, why did the United States allow something like this movie to happen? Because at the end of the day, almost everybody here believes that it was a reaction to the movie that - and they believe that the United States had a responsibility to stop the production or...

STEVE INSKEEP (HOST): This is a film that was spreading on the Internet that was seen as insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Go on.

AL-SHALCHI: Exactly. And so they said, why did this happen? But in the next breath, they say: But we don't condone this kind of thing. There are civilized ways to show and express our anger, and this is not one of them. This should never have happened.

From Al Jazeera:

Al Jazeera: Attackers Were Responding To News Of "American Movie Insulting The Prophet Mohammed. On September 12, Al Jazeera producer Suleiman El Dressi reported from Benghazi:

About 11:30 PM, a group of people calling themselves as "Islamic law supporters" heard the news that there will be an American movie insulting the Prophet Mohammed. Once they heard this news they came out of their military garrison and they went into the street calling [unintelligible] to gather and go ahead and attack the American consulate in Benghazi.

From the AP:

Associated Press: "Witness Accounts... Suggest The Militants May Have Used The Film Controversy As A Cover For the Attack." An October 27 Associated Press account bylined Tripoli, Libya, reported that witness accounts both "corroborate the conclusion largely reached by American officials that it was a planned militant assault" and "suggest the militants may have used the film controversy as a cover for the attack." From the article:

There was no sign of a spontaneous protest against an American-made movie denigrating Islam's Prophet Muhammad. But a lawyer passing by the scene said he saw the militants gathering around 20 youths from nearby to chant against the film. Within an hour or so, the assault began, guns blazing as the militants blasted into the compound.

One of the consulate's private Libyan guards said masked militants grabbed him and beat him, one of them calling him "an infidel protecting infidels who insulted the prophet."

The witness accounts gathered by The Associated Press give a from-the-ground perspective for the sharply partisan debate in the U.S. over the attack that left U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. They corroborate the conclusion largely reached by American officials that it was a planned militant assault. But they also suggest the militants may have used the film controversy as a cover for the attack.

[...]

A day after the Benghazi attack, an unidentified Ansar al-Shariah spokesman said the militia was not involved "as an organization" -- leaving open the possibility members were involved. He praised the attack as a popular "uprising" sparked by the anti-Islam film, further propagating the image of a mob attack against the consulate.

So far, the attackers' motives can only be speculated at.


From: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/05/14/four-media-reports-from-libya-that-linked-the-b/194073

So...let's for the sake of argument agree that some of the people on the ground in Benghazi not only stated but truly believed that (and were motivated by) the attack being the source of the video. I can certainly see a plausible scenario where somebody was truly outraged by the video and picked up a rock. OK.

What about the repeated requests for increased security by people on the ground in the months leading up to the attack? What about the repeated requests of the military to remain on station in Libya, or the repeated requests to retain assets in Libya? I'm not talking about the day of the attack. I'm talking about the requests that occurred months prior to the attack. What about the documents in the two to three days following the attack that precisely stated "terror attack"? What about the grotesquely modified talking points - that Obama was still playing off of twelve days later?

Originally posted by sasquatch672
So...let's for the sake of argument agree that some of the people on the ground in Benghazi not only stated but truly believed that (and were motivated by) the attack being the source of the video. I can certainly see a plausible scenario where somebody was truly outraged by the video and picked up a rock. OK.

What about the repeated requests for ...[text shortened]... rotesquely modified talking points - that Obama was still playing off of twelve days later?

The security issues were already covered in the Pickering report. But making every single CIA front defensible against a 100 or so heavily armed attackers is impossible.

No, these people weren't mad about the video and "picked up a rock". They were a heavily armed, extremist militia that picked up their AK-47s and RPGs. And there is really nothing that could have been realistically done to prevent it as military officials have publicly stated over and over and over again.

Any chance Iran was behind the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack?

Salafis were apparently the ones who did it...they aren't big fans of Shi'ites from what I can tell.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/502/32/Muslim%20Brothers%20and%20Salafis.aspx

More recently, the Salafis and the Muslim Brothers have also come to loggerheads over foreign policy matters. The former have kept up constant pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood to prevent it from showing a more tolerant attitude towards Shia Iran.

Originally posted by whodey
No comparison with Iran/Contra? Are you saying that supplying the rebels in Syria is legal or are you just blowing smoke up everyones arse once again?

Think whodey think. No Boland Amendment.