The previous administration deliberately understated al-Qaeda’s strength in 2012 so President Obama’s worse-than-useless counter-terrorism policy would seem like it was actually working, clearing the way for his easy reelection victory over Republican Mitt Romney, according to new evidence.
Intelligence was just one of the many areas of government activity relentlessly politicized by the Obama administration. In the Obama era, the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Education, to name only a few of the affected federal agencies, were also infested with determined radical ideologues bent on fundamentally transforming American society. Many of the left-wing extremists are still in positions of authority in the government as they undermine President Trump’s policies and directives every day.
For conservatives and other patriots, proof Obama twisted the facts about al-Qaeda for his own gain is yet another painful reminder of the Left’s virtually unchallenged mastery of the art of story-telling, even when, as in this instance, the story is a complete and utter lie, one of many propagated by Team Obama. Led by creative writer and Obama aide Ben Rhodes, left-wingers also managed to trick reporters and others into disseminating dangerous falsehoods about the laughably weak, unenforceable nuclear nonproliferation deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Rhodes is also credited with writing Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech, a piece of public relations outreach intended to flatter Muslims.
And it turns out the picture Obama’s people painted of Osama bin Laden, who was dispatched to the hereafter by U.S. Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011, was completely wrong. In the lead-up to his death, bin Laden wasn’t some out-of-touch, semi-retired, has-been figurehead in al-Qaeda, the Muslim terrorist group that engineered the 9/11 attacks. From his nondescript compound in jihadist-friendly Pakistan, he was in fact minutely involved in day-to-day operations and planning for al-Qaeda, as thousands of documents recently released by the Trump administration show. The U.S. military seized the material from bin Laden’s home.
It was New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi who spilled the beans Friday at an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), putting into context the 17 cherry-picked documents the Obama administration made public in May 2012 in an effort to downplay the continuing significance of al-Qaeda.
“The overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated, he had lost control of this group,” Callimachi said, according to a report in the Weekly Standard.
This prompted fellow journalist Kim Dozier to ask her: “Do you think that was something that was kept from the public’s view because it revealed that there had to be reams of communication going back and forth, which means U.S. intelligence, Western intelligence, was missing this?”
“Think back to when bin Laden was killed,” Callimachi said. “It was 2011, it was right before a major campaign season. I don’t want to underplay the role that the killing of Osama bin Laden had, but I think that that was theorized into something much bigger.”
“The head of the organization has been killed, and now—these are literally quotes that I would get: the organization has been ‘decimated,’ the organization is in ‘disarray,’ the organization is ‘on the run,’” she added. “At the same time that we were preparing to pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, I think that it was important to portray this [i.e. al-Qaeda] as a problem that no longer existed.”
Expanding on this line of thinking, FDD’s Thomas Jocelyn said, “that narrative that came out in 2012, we knew immediately was wrong, totally wrong, and was basically a cherry-picked version of what’s going on.”
The masters of propaganda at the DNC succeeded in driving Obama’s misleading talking points home to the American voters.
They crafted that made-for-TV moment on Sept. 6, 2012, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., when Vice President Joe Biden triumphantly declared, “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive,” to thunderous applause. The speech helped to crystallize in the public consciousness the false idea that President Obama was giving the jihadists hell, instead of the reality, which was that Obama was merely inconveniencing the terrorists from time to time.
Although Biden’s assertions about OBL and GM were true, bin Laden’s terrorist group, al-Qaeda, wasn’t “decimated,” or even “on the run,” as President Obama said in his stump speeches on the campaign trail that year. It was thriving.
Team Obama promoted other lies to ensure the 44th president’s reelection. When bad news in Libya briefly caused the Obama campaign heartburn, the leftist propaganda machine kicked into high gear.
Obama White House officials told anyone willing to listen that a spontaneous demonstration sparked by Muslim anger over an obscure anti-Islam video had magically materialized in a city blanketed by al-Qaeda flags and that within hours this supposedly organic melee had turned deadly. Obama sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice onto five Sunday talk shows to promote the made-up story.
The false narrative obscured then-Secretary of State and future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s bungling of the response to the politically inconvenient Sept. 11, 2012, Muslim terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Early reports indicated Stevens had been violently sexually abused before being killed by his jihadist captors. The rape claim has neither been proven nor refuted, and no autopsy report for Stevens has seen the light of day.
Unless conservatives brush up on their narrative-creating skills, they are going to keep getting ambushed by leftist liars over and over again.
Who knows how many more Obama wannabes the Democratic Party has in the pipeline?