Hillary and the Video Lie
By Daniel John Sobieski
AmericanThinker.com
In a monumental display of self-serving chutzpah, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was there to testify before the Benghazi Select Committee to honor the service and memory of the four men killed in the terrorist attack. Then why, Madam Secretary, did you tell the parents of the dead as you and they stood in front of their sons’ caskets that you were going to get the maker of the video you blamed for their deaths?
In sharp questioning by. Rep. James Jordan, R-Ohio, Mrs. Clinton denied she was the source of the video lie even though she was the first to mention it in the context of the Benghazi attack. Jordan pointed out that at 10:08 on Sept. 11, 2012, as the battle was still raging, Mrs. Clinton issued the following statement:
Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this
kind.
She told Jordan she was only saying that others were claiming it as a motivation for their participation and she was not herself assigning blame. Yet this became the Obama administration mantra, being repeated five times on the Sunday talk show circuit and six times in a single speech to the United Nations by President Obama. Worse yet, she told both Charles Woods and Patricia Smith as they stood in front of their son’s caskets that she would see to it that she would get the person who made that inflammatory video. Investor’s Business Daily noted how much Hillary’s expression of regrets over Benghazi meant to these mourning parents:
Not much, particularly to Charles Woods and Patricia Smith, parents of Ty Woods and Sean Smith, respectively, two of the four Americans murdered by al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists in an attack Clinton blamed on a video.
Clinton expressed no regrets for repeating the video lie to Woods in front of his son's casket as it arrived at Dover Air Force Base:
"Her countenance was not good, and she made this statement to me . .. she said we will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted," he told radio host Glenn Beck, adding that he "could tell that she was not telling me the truth."
As we have pointed out, phony scandals don't produce body bags. Smith testified before the House Oversight Committee about how President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Clinton, among other top administration officials, approached her at the casket ceremony when her son's body was returned.
"Every one of them came up to me, gave me a big hug, and I asked them, 'What happened, please tell me?' And every one of them said it was the video. And we all know that it wasn't the video. Even at that time they knew it wasn't the video. So they all lied to me."
Hillary Clinton that night knew that the video in question had nothing to do with Benghazi. Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of station in Libya at the time of the attack and a career foreign officer for over two decades, told the truth before Congress and was rewarded with a demotion:
We have the testimony of Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya and a foreign service officer for 22 years. He was demoted to desk officer for telling the truth that those in Libya knew it was a terrorist attack from the "get-go," that there was no "protest" or mention of one from anyone on the ground, and that the infamous YouTube video was "a non-event" in Libya.
We also have the public testimony of Mike Morrell, then acting CIA director, who has also said that the video and the Benghazi attack had nothing to do with each other:
Morell's public testimony comes a day after the CIA's top officer on the ground in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attack appeared before a House panel for the first time. In closed-door testimony, he confirmed the attack was "not an escalation of protests." Morell received that message in Washington, D.C., in an email on Sept. 15, 2012. It was the day before Rice went on five Sunday talk shows to spread the false video narrative.
Hillary Clinton testified that she personally sent Ambassador Christopher Stevens to Benghazi yet had no responsibility for his personal security. She corresponded with Sidney Blumenthal on Libya at great length but admitted that his plaintive emails about lack of security and Benghazi being surrounded by terrorist training camps never rose to the level where it warranted her concern. Her excuses won’t wash.
The Benghazi attack shortly before the 2012 election didn’t fit the administration narrative that the war on terror was over and that al-Qaida was on the run. It endangered President Obama’s reelection chances and Hillary’s chances to succeed him. That is why she invented and propagated the Benghazi video lie and told it to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their son’s caskets.
Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.