Once Again, Obama Won’t Give Straight Answers on Benghazi

Helle Dale / February 03, 2014

AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/GettyImages/Newscom

Pulling teeth would be easy compared to getting straight answers on the Benghazi scandal out of President Obama. Yesterday, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly made another valiant attempt in his pre-Super Bowl interview with the President. And yet again Obama balked at answering obvious and legitimate questions, playing fast and loose with the facts.

The recent declassification of documents by the House Armed Services Committee has revealed that the then-Commander of the U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Carter Ham, informed his superiors within 15 minutes that a terrorist attack had launched against the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. His superiors, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey went straight to the White House to brief Obama.

>>> Check Out: Obamacare Is Already Reducing Employment

What transpired in that Oval Office conversation has been a matter of keen interest, since the Obama administration was quick to place the blame on a sophomoric anti-Muslim video, rather than admit the truth that Americans were under terrorist attack – again.

O’Reilly, therefore, asked the right questions, such as what Panetta had said to Obama when he came to the White House. Obama responded:

“What he said to me was, we’ve got an attack on our compound. … We don’t know yet who’s doing it. Understand, by definition, Bill, when somebody is attacking our compound… that’s an act of terror, which is how I characterized it the day after it happened.”

O’Reilly later mentioned Susan Rice, then ambassador to the United Nations, who had stated on five news networks the following Sunday that the Benghazi attack was caused by the video. Obama replied, after some back and forth:

“We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time. The notion that we would hide the ball for political purposes when, a week later, we all said, in fact, there was a terrorist attack taking place the day after, I said it was an act of terror, that wouldn’t be a very good cover-up… if that’s what we were interested in.”

In actual fact, every government agency involved, from the State Department, to the Pentagon to the Intelligence Community knew it was a terrorist attack and even knew the identity of some of the attackers almost immediately. Even so, Obama, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rice and others kept repeating the false narrative for two weeks, attempting to shift the blame to a hapless California filmmaker and away from their own short-comings.

Obama’s pre-Superbowl performance came on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s declaration last week that the fact that Benghazi happened is her biggest “regret” as Secretary of State. Well, who doesn’t regret it? The outrage is that Obama and Clinton persist in refusing to take responsibility for their failure to protect Americans posted to Benghazi, a rat’s nest of terrorist activity. Until we have better answers, the questions – however inconvenient – will keep coming.