"Mr. Graham said that Obama administration officials knew within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks in Libya that they were well-coordinated, not a spontaneous riot spurred by an anti-Islam video, as administration officials first said they believed." -- Wall Street Journal, Oct 14
I'm breaking radio silence to express concern that no one in the GOP involved with Romney's election or the press has picked up yet on the obvious fact that Fox News host Greta Van Susteren pointed out on national television on Friday night -- a fact that had eluded everyone else in the news media and blogosphere as well as the GOP political campaign:
Although security and fortifications were inadequate for the consulate, State had installed CCTV cameras there with a live feed to State headquarters. The feed could be activated by anyone in the consulate pressing a 'panic' button. This would allow people at State to see. almost in 'real time,' what was going on in the consulate environs. Given this sophisticated danger notification system, Obama administration officials would have been informed immediately if there had been riots or even peaceful protests outside the consulate in the hours preceding the September 11 attack on the consulate.
This fact came out during the October 10 hearings on Capitol Hill about security for U.S. diplomatic personnel serving in Libya. The obvious implication is that because of the very volatile situation in eastern Libya, the consulate would have immediately informed State if there had been any disturbance outside the consulate.
[Oct. 15 Update: It turns out that the information about CCTVs at the Benghazi compound came out a day earlier than the hearing, on October 9, at a State Dept. background press briefing, but the reference, which only mentioned "cameras" at the compound, was clearly lost in the shuffle of the discussion.]
In fact, activating the live feed would have been backed up by a phone call to State -- another point that came out at the hearing.
This means State and all relevant officials in the Obama administration who claimed to be depending on the "intelligence community" to learn whether there were protests outside the consulate on September 11 were lying.
Again, all this was implied by testimony in the hearing. Yet only Van Susteren picked up on the implications of the testimony. On Friday night she spelled out the implications to a panel of journalists -- male journalists -- one from Roll Call, another from The Hill, the third I can't remember, but all three are savvy and well informed on the Benghazi incident and the political fallout it created. So all three understood immediately the full import of Van Susteren's observation, which was political dynamite.
Although she didn't call out administration officials as liars, she didn't have to. It's now tragically obvious that they'd blatantly lied about needing to wait on the intelligence community to learn about conditions outside the Benghazi consulate prior to the attack.
Yet here we are on Sunday night, in the wake of the Sunday-morning talk show chatter about Benghazi and the blizzard of reports today about Sen. Graham's incendiary statements, and still the obvious hasn't dawned, not even with help from Greta Van Susteren.
I did my part on Friday night by posting about Greta's comments. But where is the press?
I hope this isn't an instance of male bias against genuinely intelligent females being the first to bat a home run on an issue. The stakes are too high this time for envy to show its face.
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