(John
8:44 KJV) Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your
father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of
his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
One does
not lie to his employer.
The
several sovereign peoples of the several sovereign states have a duty under God
to hold accountable those to whom they have delegated limited authority. (Rom
13.1)
The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials
briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/14/benghazi-transcripts-top-defense-officials-briefed-obama-on-attack-not-video-or/
or http://fxn.ws/1aZiJii
Minutes
after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012,
the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a
previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed
that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show.
The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom
was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama
administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for
two weeks afterward.
Gen.
Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department
combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified
testimony last year that it was him who broke the news about the unfolding
situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin
Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing -- in
which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens
had been targeted and had gone missing -- occurred just before the two senior
officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.
According
to declassified testimony obtained by Fox News, Ham -- who was working out of
his Pentagon office on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- said he learned about the
assault on the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at
9:42 p.m. Libya time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command
Center.
"My
first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say, 'Hey, I am
headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told lawmakers
on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June
26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs
to meet with Secretary Panetta."
Ham's
account of that fateful day was included in some 450 pages of testimony given
by senior Pentagon officials in classified, closed-door hearings conducted last
year by the Armed Services subcommittee. The testimony, given under "Top
Secret" clearance and only declassified this month, presents a rare
glimpse into how information during a crisis travels at the top echelons of
America's national security apparatus, all the way up to the president.
Also
among those whose secret testimony was declassified was Dempsey, the first
person Ham briefed about Benghazi. Ham told lawmakers he considered it a
fortuitous "happenstance" that he was able to rope Dempsey and
Panetta into one meeting, so that, as Ham put it, "they had the basic
information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House." Ham
also told lawmakers he met with Panetta and Dempsey when they returned from
their 30-minute session with President Obama on Sept. 11.
Armed
Services Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., sitting in on the
subcommittee's hearing with Ham last June, reserved for himself an especially
sensitive line of questioning: namely, whether senior Obama administration
officials, in the very earliest stages of their knowledge of Benghazi, had any
reason to believe that the assault grew spontaneously out of a demonstration
over an anti-Islam video produced in America.
Numerous
aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly
told the public in the weeks following the murder of Ambassador Stevens and
three other Americans that night -- as Obama's hotly contested bid for
re-election was entering its final stretch -- that there was no evidence the
killings were the result of a premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were
the result of a protest gone awry. Subsequent disclosures exposed the falsity
of that narrative, and the Obama administration ultimately acknowledged that
its early statements on Benghazi were untrue.
"In
your discussions with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta," McKeon asked,
"was there any mention of a demonstration or was all discussion about an
attack?" Ham initially testified that there was some
"peripheral" discussion of this subject, but added "at that
initial meeting, we knew that a U.S. facility had been attacked and was under
attack, and we knew at that point that we had two individuals, Ambassador
Stevens and Mr. [Sean] Smith, unaccounted for."
Rep.
Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a first-term lawmaker with experience as an Iraq war
veteran and Army reserve officer, pressed Ham further on the point, prodding
the 29-year Army veteran to admit that "the nature of the
conversation" he had with Panetta and Dempsey was that "this was a
terrorist attack."
The
transcript reads as follows:
WENSTRUP:
"As a military person, I am concerned that someone in the military would
be advising that this was a demonstration. I would hope that our military
leadership would be advising that this was a terrorist attack."
HAM:
"Again, sir, I think, you know, there was some preliminary discussion
about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at the
command, I personally and I think the command very quickly got to the point
that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack."
WENSTRUP:
"And you would have advised as such if asked. Would that be correct?"
HAM:
"Well, and with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta, that is the nature
of the conversation we had, yes, sir."
Panetta
told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was
him who informed the president that "there was an apparent attack going on
in Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally
at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?" asked Sen. Jim
Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question in my mind that this was a
terrorist attack," Panetta replied.
Senior
State Department officials who were in direct, real-time contact with the
Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made clear they, too, knew
immediately -- from surveillance video and eyewitness accounts -- that the
incident was a terrorist attack. After providing the first substantive
"tick-tock" of the events in Benghazi, during a background briefing
conducted on the evening of Oct. 9, 2012, a reporter asked two top aides to
then-Secretary Clinton: "What in all of these events that you've described
led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by
protests against the video?"
"That
is a question that you would have to ask others," replied one of the
senior officials. "That was not our conclusion."
Ham's
declassified testimony further underscores that Obama's earliest briefing on
Benghazi was solely to the effect that the incident was a terrorist attack, and
raises once again the question of how the narrative about the offensive video,
and a demonstration that never occurred, took root within the White House as
the explanation for Benghazi.
The day
after the attacks, which marked the first killing of an American ambassador in
the line of duty since 1979, Obama strode to the Rose Garden to comment on the
loss, taking pains in his statement to say: "We reject all efforts to
denigrate the religious beliefs of others." As late as Sept. 24,
during an appearance on the talk show "The View," when asked
directly by co-host Joy Behar if Benghazi had been "an act of
terrorism," the president hedged, saying: "Well, we're still doing an
investigation."
The
declassified transcripts show that beyond Ham, Panetta and Dempsey, other key
officers and channels throughout the Pentagon and its combatant commands were
similarly quick to label the incident a terrorist attack. In a classified
session on July 31 of last year, Westrup raised the question with Marine Corps
Col. George Bristol, commander of AFRICOM's Joint Special Operations Task Force
for the Trans Sahara region.
Bristol,
who was traveling in Dakar, Senegal when the attack occurred, said he received a
call from the Joint Operations Center alerting him to "a considerable
event unfolding in Libya." Bristol's next call was to Lt. Col. S.E.
Gibson, an Army commander stationed in Tripoli. Gibson informed Bristol that
Stevens was missing, and that "there was a fight going on" at the
consulate compound.
WESTRUP:
"So no one from the military was ever advising, that you are aware of,
that this was a demonstration gone out of control, it was always considered an
attack -"
BRISTOL:
"Yes, sir."
WENSTRUP:
"-- on the United States?"
BRISTOL:
"Yes, sir. ... We referred to it as the attack."
Staffers
on the Armed Services subcommittee conducted nine classified sessions on the
Benghazi attacks, and are close to issuing what they call an
"interim" report on the affair. Fox News reported in October their
preliminary conclusion that U.S. forces on the night of the Benghazi attacks
were postured in such a way as to make military rescue or intervention
impossible -- a finding that buttresses the claims of Dempsey and other senior
Pentagon officials.
While
their investigation continues, staffers say they still want to question Panetta
directly. But the former defense secretary, now retired, has resisted such
calls for additional testimony.
"He
is in the president's Cabinet," said Rep. Martha Roby R-Ala., chair of the
panel that collected the testimony, of Panetta. "The American people
deserve the truth. They deserve to know what's going on, and I honestly think
that that's why you have seen -- beyond the tragedy that there was a loss of
four Americans' lives -- is that the
American people feel misled." [[N.B. The several sovereign
peoples of the several sovereign states have a duty under God to hold accountable
those to whom they have delegated limited authority. (Rom 13.1)]]
"Leon
Panetta should have spoken up," agreed Kim R. Holmes, a former assistant
secretary of state under President George W. Bush and now a distinguished
fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The people at the Pentagon and
frankly, the people at the CIA stood back while all of this was unfolding and
allowed this narrative to go on longer than they should have."
Neither
Panetta's office nor the White House responded to Fox News' requests for
comment.
James
Rosen joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1999. He currently serves as the chief
Washington correspondent and hosts the online show "The Foxhole."
I2C
140114a Joh 8v44 Egregious Malfeasance / I2C / 140114 0852 / John 8:44 Egregious
Malfeasance / Sovereign peoples responsible for officials
