So explain to me why conservatives are shitting themselves over Benghazi

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by DJ_Critterus

Christ, you can't be this stupid, Phil. We know it was a terrorist attack. Like Clinton, we care more about our POTUS blatantly lying to us and expecting us to believe it. it's that simple.

This Administration has done all it can to NEVER call a terrorist attack a Terrorist attack until they are confronted by massive evidence. From the Underwear bomber, to FT Hood to the Times Square bomber to Benghazi it is always 'Random acts" and not terror related then within a week or two the facts get out and it's still downplayed.

2 embassies were attacked on Sept 11th. The one in Cairo had been planed for over one month. The intelligence community KNEW it was going to happen and why. ( Blind Sheik and Political issues in Egypt). We also knew they were working with their Libyan partners as well.

The President, his cabinet and the Administration reverted to form and denied it was a planned coordinated attack and feel back to "Tolerant Islam was pissed because we are BAD people" bullshit line.

The whole narrative of the BHO admin is that we are NOT AT WAR with radical Islam. And their refusal to accept that reality is causing us to fall behind and will cost more American lifes.

[onedef92]

The problem is the Obama administration views the Middle East through the lens of what they hope it will become, not what it currently is.

The whole "Arab Spring" notion that what is going on in the Middle East is merely the seedlings of a flourishing democracy is completely wrong, IMO.

First, when confronting a truly mass movement (as the Arab Spring is), the resulting governments are much more likely to reflect the underlying values of the culture than the previous, undemocratic dictatorships.

Second, while everyone seems to exalt "democracy" without qualification, democracies that do not respect individual liberties are just another form of tyranny.

Third, while it may (arguably) be true that the human heart longs to be free, there is nothing in the human heart that typically longs to make someone else free — especially if that someone else has substantially different religious beliefs and values from you.

Thus, an Arab spring that combines a culture that seethes with anti-Semitism and a population captivated (at least for now) by Islamists cannot possibly be good for America (or Israel) in the short term.

It has certainly not been good for religious minorities in the Arab world. Much of the irrational exuberance over the various Arab rebellions rests in naive misunderstandings of modern Middle Eastern culture

[RetiredSFC 97]

My God what kind of dumbassed question is this

[Joecooool]

Originally Posted by Loco Vette

Didn't even go to HuffPo. A video does not "help spark" a coordinated well armed assault on a compound weakened by a lack of security. Obama UN Speech Challenges World Leaders To Confront Intolerance At Home

He still never blamed the attack on the video.

The one thing I am enjoying is the fact that you are actually now researching this and learning it to be true.

Originally Posted by TR6speed

The intent of what Romney was trying to get across last night was to show that this president has no concern for anyone but himself. He stated that the day after the attack that killed 4 Americans the president was on his plane headed for a fund raiser.
His speech in the Rose Garden did not say that the 4 were killed in a planned terrorist attack. Here is a paragraph from that statement:
"Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts."
That is pretty clear that he was looking at this attack as a part of the demonstrations going on through the Arab world over the YouTube video.
His mention of terror in the tenth paragraph and then he did not say that the attack was a planned terrorist attack.
Candy Crowley overstepped her role in defending Obama. He was wrong and he knows it. I am sure next Monday's debate this will come up again and lets see how he tries to explain it.

You are full of shit. He called it an act of terror. And I still have no fuking clue why that specific word is so important to the right wing loons.

Originally Posted by RetiredSFC 97

My God what kind of dumbassed question is this

One that has yet to be answered.

[RedLS1GTO]

obama's #1 campaign point... "I killed Bin Laden! I defeated al qaeda! I beat the terrorists! Yay me!"

Let's take a look at a couple of his speeches (all after Libya), shall we?

"Four years ago, I made a few commitments to you. I told you I'd end the war in Iraq, and I did. I said I'd end the war in Afghanistan, and we are. I said we'd refocus on the people who actually attacked us on 9/11 -- and today, al Qaeda is on its heels and Osama bin Laden is no more," he said in a campaign stop in San Francisco on Oct. 9.

-October 9 San Fransisco

"Four years ago, I told you we'd end the war in Iraq -- and we did. I said that we'd end the war in Afghanistan -- and we are. I said that we'd refocus on the people who actually attacked us on 9/11 -- and today, al Qaeda is on its heels and Osama bin Laden is dead,"

-October 11 Miami

Now... Since it has been brought to light that it was no doubt, a pre-planned, well thought out, coordinated TERRORIST attack:

"I said that I'd end the war in Iraq, and I did. I said we'd refocus attention on those who actually attacked us on 9/11, and we have gone after Al Qaeda's leadership like never before and Osama bin Laden is dead,"

The single thing that he was campaigning as a positive just went away. He went from claiming victory to very clearly something still in progress (at best) and you are actually too dense to wonder why it is important?

A 5 hour long assault that kills an ambassador and 3 other Americans and you think the appropriate response is to go out fundraising??

The fact that you don't seem to comprehend ANY of the reasons that this is a big deal is just... There's no way you are actually that ignorant.

[Joecooool]

Originally Posted by RedLS1GTO

obama's #1 campaign point... "I killed Bin Laden! I defeated al qaeda! I beat the terrorists! Yay me!"

Let's take a look at a couple of his speeches (all after Libya), shall we?






Now... Since it has been brought to light that it was no doubt, a pre-planned, well thought out, coordinated TERRORIST attack:




The single thing that he was campaigning as a positive just went away. He went from claiming victory to very clearly something still in progress (at best) and you are actually too dense to wonder why it is important?

A 5 hour long assault that kills an ambassador and 3 other Americans and you think the appropriate response is to go out fundraising??

The fact that you don't seem to comprehend ANY of the reasons that this is a big deal is just... There's no way you are actually that ignorant.

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

Obama's points stand.

[Taurus]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

Obama's points stand.

And the guy that was busted yesterday trying to blow up the Federal Reserve who was here with the support of Al Qaeda and with Al Qaeda contacts in New York was not inolved with Al Qaeda either?

You are lost......................

[RedLS1GTO]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

...and where exactly did I say they were?


Maybe you can help us explain why he took his go-to line out of all of his speeches over the last few days? Maybe someone forgot to put it on the teleprompter...

Originally Posted by RedLS1GTO

There's no way you are actually that ignorant.

Hell, I could be wrong...

[Broken Wind]

Originally Posted by Broken Wind

Fk it. It's not worth the effort.

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

Obama's points stand.

The people rest, you honor.

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

Obama's points stand.

So the leader of the group that lead the attack was released from Gitmo and was/is an Al Qaeda operative yet " Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks"?

[Doug28450]

The United States of America has not had an Ambassador killed on foreign soil since Iran in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was President. We don't need to go down this road again.

Oh and...

Trying to discuss real issues with Phil is similar to trying to teach a pig to sing.

All it does is waste your time and annoy the pig.

[Joecooool]

Originally Posted by RedLS1GTO

...and where exactly did I say they were?


Maybe you can help us explain why he took his go-to line out of all of his speeches over the last few days? Maybe someone forgot to put it on the teleprompter...

Are you kidding? You highlighted it several times in your post.

[Joecooool]

Originally Posted by VITE1

So the leader of the group that lead the attack was released from Gitmo and was/is an Al Qaeda operative yet " Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks"?

Bullshit. There's no intelligence suggesting that is true.

And you sure as shit better hope is stays that way, he was released under Bush.

[Loco Vette]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

You are full of shit. He called it an act of terror.

Not in the speech in question he didn't. He made a bland catchall statement designed to make his candyassed apologist administration look tough by saying "we will not tolerate acts of terror" but he never said Benghazi was a terrorist act.

And we seem to have been doing a damn good job of tolerating what even he eventually admitted was a terrorist act for the last 3 weeks.

[Loco Vette]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Al Qaeda was not behind the attacks.

Obama's points stand.

Got a hotline into the camp do you?

[RedLS1GTO]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Are you kidding? You highlighted it several times in your post.

He used that line in his speeches as long as possible. Over the last few days... as in after the previous speeches that I highlighted... since all of this blew up in his face, he has suddenly stopped using it, including leaving it out of a speech today.

Not sure what part of this is somehow beyond your comprehension.

[Loco Vette]

Originally Posted by Chris Fowler

They blamed a video...for over a week.

And now deny the whole thing.

But clearly they had no indication it was anything other than a spontaneous outbreak of rioting:

Libya Attack: CIA Found Militant Links 1 Day After U.S. Consulate Killings

Originally Posted by HuffPo

Libya Attack: CIA Found Militant Links 1 Day After U.S. Consulate Killings
AP | By KIMBERLY DOZIER Posted: 10/19/2012 3:27 am EDT Updated: 10/19/2012 9:17 am EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month's deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob upset about an American-made video ridiculing Islam's Prophet Muhammad, U.S. officials have told The Associated Press.

It is unclear who, if anyone, saw the cable outside the CIA at that point and how high up in the agency the information went. The Obama administration maintained publicly for a week that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was a result of the mobs that staged less-deadly protests across the Muslim world around the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.

Those statements have become highly charged political fodder as the presidential election approaches. A Republican-led House committee questioned State Department officials for hours about what GOP lawmakers said was lax security at the consulate, given the growth of extremist Islamic militants in North Africa.

And in their debate on Tuesday, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney argued over when Obama first said it was a terror attack. In his Rose Garden address the morning after the killings, Obama said, "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for."

But Republicans say he was speaking generally and didn't specifically call the Benghazi attack a terror attack until weeks later, with the president and other key members of his administration referring at first to the anti-Muslim movie circulating on the Internet as a precipitating event.

Now congressional intelligence committees are demanding documents to show what the spy agencies knew and when, before, during and after the attacks.

The White House now says the attack probably was carried out by an al Qaida-linked group, with no public demonstration beforehand. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed the "fog of war" for the early conflicting accounts.


The officials who told the AP about the CIA cable spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to release such information publicly.

Congressional aides say they expect to get the documents by the end of this week to build a timeline of what the intelligence community knew and compare that to what the White House was telling the public about the attack. That could give Romney ammunition to use in his foreign policy debate with Obama on Monday night.

The two U.S. officials said the CIA station chief in Libya compiled intelligence reports from eyewitnesses within 24 hours of the assault on the consulate that indicated militants launched the violence, using the pretext of demonstrations against U.S. facilities in Egypt against the film to cover their intent. The report from the station chief was written late Wednesday, Sept. 12, and reached intelligence agencies in Washington the next day, intelligence officials said.

Yet, on Saturday of that week, briefing points sent by the CIA to Congress said "demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault."

The briefing points, obtained by the AP, added: "There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations" but did not mention eyewitness accounts that blamed militants alone.

Such raw intelligence reports by the CIA on the ground would normally be sent first to analysts at the headquarters in Langley, Va., for vetting and comparing against other intelligence derived from eavesdropping drones and satellite images. Only then would such intelligence generally be shared with the White House and later, Congress, a process that can take hours, or days if the intelligence is coming only from one or two sources who may or may not be trusted.

U.S. intelligence officials say in this case the delay was due in part to the time it took to analyze various conflicting accounts. One official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the incident publicly, explained that "it was clear a group of people gathered that evening" in Benghazi, but that the early question was "whether extremists took over a crowd or they were the crowd."

But that explanation has been met with concern in Congress.

"The early sense from the intelligence community differs from what we are hearing now," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said. "It ended up being pretty far afield, so we want to figure out why ... though we don't want to deter the intelligence community from sharing their best first impressions" after such events in the future.

"The intelligence briefings we got a week to 10 days after were consistent with what the administration was saying," said Rep. William Thornberry, R-Texas, a member of the House Intelligence and Armed Services committees. Thornberry would not confirm the existence of the early CIA report but voiced skepticism over how sure intelligence officials, including CIA Director David Petraeus, seemed of their original account when they briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"How could they be so certain immediately after such events, I just don't know," he said. "That raises suspicions that there was political motivation."

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor declined comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.

Two officials who witnessed Petraeus' closed-door testimony to lawmakers in the week after the attack said that during questioning he acknowledged that there were some intelligence analysts who disagreed with the conclusion that an unruly mob angry over the video had initiated the violence. But those officials said Petraeus did not mention the CIA's early eyewitness reports. He did warn legislators that the account could change as more intelligence was uncovered, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the hearing was closed.

Beyond the question of what was known immediately after the attack, it's also proving difficult to pinpoint those who set the fire that apparently killed Stevens and his communications aide or launched the mortars that killed two ex-Navy SEALs who were working as contract security guards at a fallback location. That delay is prompting lawmakers to question whether the intelligence community has the resources it needs to investigate this attack in particular or to wage the larger fight against al-Qaida in Libya or across Africa.

Intelligence officials say the leading suspected culprit is a local Benghazi militia, Ansar al-Shariah. The group denies responsibility for the attack but is known to have ties to a leading African terror group, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. Some of its leaders and fighters were spotted by Libyan locals at the consulate during the violence, and intelligence intercepts show the militants were in contact with AQIM militants before and after the attack, one U.S. intelligence official said.

But U.S. intelligence has not been able to match those reported sightings with the faces of attackers caught on security camera recordings during the attack since many U.S. intelligence agents were pulled out of Benghazi in the aftermath of the violence, the two U.S. intelligence officials said.

Nor have they found proof to back up their suspicion that the attack was preplanned, as indicated by the military-style tactics the attackers used, setting up a perimeter of roadblocks around the consulate and the backup compounds, then attacking the main entrance to distract, while sending a larger force to assault the rear.

Clear-cut answers may prove elusive because such an attack is not hard to bring about relatively swiftly with little preplanning or coordination in a post-revolutionary country awash with weapons, where the government is so new it still relies on armed militants to keep the peace. Plus, the location of U.S. diplomat enclaves is an open secret for the locals.

[Fasglas]

Originally Posted by TxAg

There it is! The Bush hater rears his head.

I swear people who hate Bush this much must be gay.

I knew the Bush card would appear, sooner or later.

[Torqaholic]

Originally Posted by lander

....

Americans are dead, and this President lied to the American public and does nothing about it.

...

Same thing can be said about the Fast and Furious plot. He set that up to steal our second amendment rights. I'll give you one guess which right he wants to take away this time using that video as an excuse.

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by Joecooool

Bullshit. There's no intelligence suggesting that is true.

And you sure as shit better hope is stays that way, he was released under Bush.

So and Al Queda operative, released under Bush, is thought to be part of the attack by this estimate?


So why are you for closing down Gitmo?

Al Qaeda, ex-Gitmo detainee involved in consulate attack, intelligence sources say | Fox News

Al Qaeda, ex-Gitmo detainee involved in consulate attack, intelligence sources say


Published September 20, 2012

Intelligence sources tell Fox News they are convinced the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was directly tied to Al Qaeda -- with a former Guantanamo detainee involved.

That revelation comes on the same day a top Obama administration official called last week's deadly assault a "terrorist attack" -- the first time the attack has been described that way by the administration after claims it had been a "spontaneous" act.

"Yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy," Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Olsen echoed administration colleagues in saying U.S. officials have no specific intelligence about "significant advanced planning or coordination" for the attack.

However, his statement goes beyond White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, saying the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate was spontaneous. He is the first top administration official to call the strike an act of terrorism.

Sufyan Ben Qumu is thought to have been involved and even may have led the attack, Fox News' intelligence sources said. Qumu, a Libyan, was released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007 and transferred into Libyan custody on the condition he be kept in jail. He was released by the Qaddafi regime as part of its reconciliation effort with Islamists in 2008.

His Guantanamo files also show he has ties to the financiers behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The declassified files also point to ties with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a known Al Qaeda affiliate.

Olsen, repeating Wednesday that the FBI is handling the Benghazi investigation, also acknowledged the attack could lead back to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

"We are looking at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda's affiliates, in particular Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," he said at the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

Still, Olsen said "the facts that we have now indicate that this was an opportunistic attack on our embassy, the attack began and evolved and escalated over several hours," Olsen said.

Carney said hours earlier that there still is "no evidence of a preplanned or pre-meditated attack," which occurred on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

"I made that clear last week, Ambassador Rice made that clear Sunday," Carney said at the daily White House press briefing.

Rice appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and four other morning talk shows to say the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was "spontaneous" and sparked by an early protest that day outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, over an anti-Islamic video.

"It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States," Rice told Fox News. "The best information and the best assessment we have today is that this was not a pre-planned, pre-meditated attack. What happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo."

However, that account clashed with claims by the Libyan president that the attack was in fact premeditated. Other sources, including an intelligence source in Libya who spoke to Fox News, have echoed those claims. The intelligence source even said that, contrary to the suggestion by the Obama administration, there was no major protest in Benghazi before the deadly attack which killed four Americans. A U.S. official did not dispute the claim.

In the face of these conflicting accounts, Carney on Tuesday deferred to the ongoing investigation and opened the door to the possibility of other explanations.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called Wednesday for an independent review of the attack.

"A State Department Accountability Review Board to look into the Benghazi attack is not sufficient," Collins said. "Given the loss of the lives of four Americans who were serving their country and the serious questions that have been raised about the security at our Consulate in Benghazi, it is imperative that a non-political, no-holds-barred examination be conducted."


Read more: Al Qaeda, ex-Gitmo detainee involved in consulate attack, intelligence sources say | Fox News

Libyans Identify Leader Of Benghazi Attack