Benghazi FOIA dump
Apr. 30th, 2014 04:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tangaroaJudicial Watch got another batch of Benghazi emails. In short: nothing exciting.
Page 14, what has the Republicans riled up tonight is a September 14 memo from speechwriter Ben Rhodes pushing the message that "these protests are rooted in an Internet video" and calling on White House staff to attack the video. From last May's batch of emails we know that Rhodes was part of a group that scrubbed a set of talking points following the direction of CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston who cited "express instructions from NSS/DOJ/FBI" to modify even internal intelligence reporting on Benghazi. So, this is not news.
Page 27, Caroline Tess relayed a statement by Matt Olsen of the National Counterterrorism Center on the 19th:
There was no specific intelligence of significant, advanced planning or coordination ahead of the attack. We're still looking for this, but we haven't seen it yet.
Andy Wood claimed the opposite: plenty of such intelligence was collected by the Pentagon and forwarded to State. If Wood was telling the truth, his reports never made it to NCTC even a week after the attack.
Page 39, from Eric J. Pelofsky on Sep 11 on the night of the attack, somebody received a phone call from Ambassador Stevens's phone reporting that Stevens was alive and well. Pelofsky adds: "Of course, if he were alive and well, one could ask why he didn't make the call himself." The next line is censored so we don't know if it contained details of who made the call.
On page 48, on Sep 12 Jeffrey Feltman reported that one of Stevens's friends "kept insisting he was alive, and kept giving me weird mobile phone numbers to call in Libya to track him down."
Scattered around various pages, the official remarks of Clinton and Obama on the 12th call the attack an attack. There is no newspeak or rewriting history yet.
Page 82, on September 16 Obama spokesman Jay Carney appeared on Fox News and blamed the September 11 attacks on US embassies worldwide on "a very hateful very offensive video that has offended many people around the world." He also blamed Salman Rushdie as the proximate cause for the fatwa against him and the murder of his Japanese publisher, and he blamed the creators of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons for the violence and death threats surrounding that situation. So if anyone was still wondering why those people who watch Fox News seem to think that Obama blamed the attack on a video and blamed the victims of terrorism for the violence, Obama's spokesman who speaks for Obama did exactly that on Fox News.
