My article from the September 14, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:
Obama Had Advance Knowledge of Mideast Attacks
By Matthew Vadum
Although the Obama administration had “credible” evidence of this week’s deadly Islamist attacks on U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt a full two days before they happened, no effort was made to protect U.S. government personnel, The Independent reports.
The Islamofascist offensive took place on September 11, a day of great symbolic importance to both America and the Islamic world because it was the eleventh anniversary of al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The U.S. media, of course, seems barely aware of this symbolism because it has been focused laser-like on savagely attacking President Obama’s opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, for daring to criticize Obama’s foreign policy.
Senior diplomatic sources told the British newspaper that “the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and ‘lockdown’, under which movement is severely restricted.”
Unfortunately, there’s much more bad news. Important secret papers are missing from the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and refuges for U.S. personnel across that recently liberated North African nation are no longer considered “safe.”
The AWOL documents are sensitive enough to make Julian Assange salivate.
“Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts,” the paper reports.
Americans have also been subjected to the grotesque spectacle of a dead envoy’s body being dragged around Benghazi. U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and at least three other Americans were killed in a firefight at the U.S. consulate in that city. Stevens was apparently tortured and may have been sodomized by his assassins in a ritual of humiliation popular among Islamic terrorists.
Libyan leader Mohammed Magarief promptly apologized “to the United States, the people and to the whole world for what happened” in Benghazi.
Although U.S. Marines are normally stationed at the full embassy in Tripoli, for reasons unknown, no Marines were guarding the facility in Benghazi. President Obama has reportedly since dispatched a contingent of Marines to Libya.
Despite President Obama’s curious statement about Egypt, that “I don’t think we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” U.S. officials in Cairo had been counting on increasingly hostile Egyptian authorities to protect the diplomatic compound. Hillary Clinton’s State Department reportedly ordered the Marines defending the embassy in Cairo not to carry live ammunition. At the Pentagon, Marines Lt. Col. Chris Hughes denied the report, saying, “No restrictions on weapons or weapons status [had] been imposed.”
At press time anti-American protests had spread to the Gaza Strip, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, and Bangladesh, and were still continuing in Cairo. Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Morsi has condemned the Benghazi assault but his critics don’t believe he was being sincere.
Initially it was reported that the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo were spontaneous, prompted by a movie trailer on YouTube for Innocence of Muslims, which offers an unflattering portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed. This is a convincing enough cover story because Muslims have rioted over far less. Muslims not only do not tolerate unkind cinematic depictions of Mohammed, they do not tolerate any cinematic depiction of Mohammed. (Watching The Message, a Muslim-approved full-length feature film from 1977 starring Anthony Quinn, requires an unusual degree of suspension of disbelief. Mohammed is a character but he’s not shown or heard.)
But now it is unclear if such a movie actually exists. Innocence of Muslims might even turn out to be a so-called false flag operation created as a pretext for Islamist attacks on U.S. interests. Hollywood figures are reportedly unaware of the film and the actors in the 14-minute Ed Wood-quality production now claim they were misled about the storyline.
The story gets stranger. The Wall Street Journal spoke to someone who called himself Sam Bacile. Bacile claimed to be the director of the celluloid schlock. The newspaper of record said Bacile “described himself as a 52-year-old Israeli-American real-estate developer, called Islam a ‘cancer,’ and said the film had been funded by Jewish donors to the tune of $5 million.”
Bacile, it turns out, may not exist. There are no records of him in the U.S. or Israel. Bacile’s telephone number corresponds to an address in Cerritos, California, which seems to be the home of someone else. Someone who answered the phone and might reside there reportedly may or may not be a man who did time in prison for bank fraud. And so on and so on.
An under-secretary named Patrick Kennedy at the State Department said the assault in Benghazi was carefully planned. The attack might have been payback for the U.S. killing of Libyan-born Mohamed Hassan Qaid (also known as Abu Yahya al-Libi), a senior al Qaeda official. Qaid was cremated in a drone strike in Pakistan three months ago.
Then again, maybe not.
Stateside, the apoplectic Obama-worshipping media has been pounding Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for days for speaking truth to power.
In response to perceived Muslim anger over Innocence of Muslims, the U.S. mission in Cairo released a bizarre statement Tuesday condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”
Expressing the views of many Americans, Romney said it was “disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
In words that will likely come back to haunt him, President Obama, the man who once mocked Cambridge, Massachusetts police by saying they “acted stupidly” by arresting Obama’s close personal friend, told “60 Minutes” that Romney’s comment wasn’t presidential. Romney has “a tendency to shoot first and aim later.” This is the same thing that unlucky Jimmy Carter said of then-challenger Ronald Reagan.
Some might criticize President Obama for not seeming to care about national security issues and foreign policy.
After all, his wife, First Nanny Michelle Obama, just said that obesity is “absolutely” the greatest threat to national security.
And remember, as I reported in Subversion Inc., this is an administration that views each September 11 not as a solemn day of remembrance but as a Kumbaya-encrusted day of rainbows and unicorns. Obama’s September 11 observance isn’t about the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans by Norman Invasion-era theocratic totalitarians. In Obama’s words, it’s about “solving today’s most pressing challenges: clean energy, energy efficiency, health care, education, economic opportunity, veterans and military families.”
At the 2009 law-signing ceremony creating the “National Day of Service and Remembrance,” President Obama said nothing about 9/11, except in passing. He said he hoped that the generation of young people “that came of age amidst the horrors of 9/11 and [Hurricane] Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economic crisis without precedent,” would come forward and volunteer to work for “change.” And it’s never been clear why this National Day of Service has to be held – of all the 365 days in a year – on September 11.
President Obama, an avid golfer, doesn’t even show up for many of his regular intelligence briefings. His fans suggest the president is able to fully absorb the daily terrorist threat matrix by osmosis.
As Election Day draws nearer, now Governor Romney will be given daily intelligence briefings.
Chances are he’ll show up.