After nearly two days of editing, then CIA director David Petraeus was sent the revised Benghazi talking points on September 15, 2012. He was less than impressed, to put it mildly.
The White House has touted the Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigation of the Benghazi massacre as a review “led by two men of unimpeachable expertise and credibility that oversaw a process that was rigorous and unsparing.” In fact, the report was purposefully incomplete and willfully misleading.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the Benghazi hearings didn't reveal "new" information:
“It’s a tragedy,” said Kerry. “But I hate to see it turned into a pure, prolonged, political process that really doesn’t tell us anything new about the facts.”
At a White House press briefing on May 1, Barack Obama spokesman Jay Carney attempted to frame new reporting on the Benghazi attacks as old news by noting that the attacks had taken place "a long time ago."
Just ten days have passed since he uttered that infelicitous phrase. But it feels like a long time ago.
Last December, Hillary Clinton's State Department famously threw four career officials under the bus for Benghazi (while of course exculpating all senior and political appointees). One of them was Raymond Maxwell, the deputy assistant secretary for Maghreb Affairs in the Near East Bureau. But Hillary didn't reckon on the fact that Maxwell was also an aspiring poet. He soon became a participant in National Poetry Writing Month, and Diplopundit has republished one of his efforts, a poem a clef about the former secretary of state called "Invitation."
Fresh off of Wednesday's House hearing on the Benghazi attack, America Rising has a new video juxtaposing the statements of the whistleblowers to those then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made at an earlier hearing. Watch the video below:
In a statement to the press, the State Department is calling "on all Libyans to refrain from armed protest and violence during this difficult time in the democratic transition."
The congressional hearings on the 9/11 Benghazi attacks this week will likely focus on the classic questions often asked on such occasions: what did those involved know, and when did they know it? Not only will the post-attack words and actions of government officials come under scrutiny, but those preceding the September 11, 2012 attacks on the Benghazi consulate, as well. One largely overlooked aspect of the investigations thus far involves a report issued by the State Department's "Overseas Security Advisory Council" on September 6, 2012, just five days before the attack. That report was removed from the OSAC website on September 14, just three days after the attacks because, in the words of a State Department official in an email this week, "the content had expired." The report was removed the same day that the now infamous "talking points" were undergoing extensive revision. The report begins as follows (the text of the entire report is included at the end of this article):
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