Cover up!

It’s a pity that one has to turn to the foreign press these days to get reasonably factual reports on our own foreign policy disasters, but with the American media falling in as Obama’s willing propaganda militia, that’s just the way it is.

Con Coughlin of The Telegraph weighs in with an important and perfectly legitimate question: “Did the White house order a cover-up over the murder of Libya’s U.S. ambassador?”

But the real smoking gun is whether the Obama administration was warned in advance that al-Qaeda was planning an attack. A number of Israeli newspapers have suggested that Washington was warned as early as September 4 – a week earlier – that the environment in Benghazi was becoming increasingly hostile and anti-American, while in London the Foreign Office took the decision to withdraw all its consular staff from Benghazi two months before the murders. This decision was based on an intelligence assessment made by MI6 that al-Qaeda was openly operating in the area following a failed assassination attempt on Sir Dominic Asquith, Britain's ambassador to Libya, in June.

It is well known that British intelligence works closely with its counterpart in America, and if MI6 knew al-Qaeda was operating in the Benghazi region, then it is highly likely that the CIA did too.

I also heard some local conservative radio hosts discussing the issue this morning, and one raised what I thought was a first-rate question: Why was Susan Rice, our ambassador to the U.N., trotted out to represent the White House on the talk shows after the attack in Benghazi? The U.N. ambassador doesn’t have anything to do with our embassies and consulates, or with their security. Could it be because Hillary Clinton knew that the argument - the film made ‘em do it! - was a lie, and that to go out and make that statement would have been a career-ending move for her? I can well imagine her reluctance to admit any negligence on her part, or to fall on her sword to cover up for Obama’s fecklessness; so perhaps Rice was the sacrificial goat. This is an important issue, particularly in light of recent reports that the consulate in Benghazi had requested additional security and had been turned down by the State Department. And the issue isn’t going away simply because the American “mediacracy” refuses to pay sufficient attention to it. Eventually the emboldened terrorists of the Middle East will attempt to repeat their performance – with results that will have proved to be predictable to everybody except for the invincibly ignorant “smart diplomacy” advocates of the Obama administration.