The Audacity of Spin: Obama Admin Claims it Always Called Benghazi Attack Terrorist

Even the best crafted political spin tends to unravel in the face of brute fact. As the intelligence community (and the entire global community of rational persons) continues to publicly confirm that the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi was a well-coordinated terrorist strike, the Obama administration has been compelled to completely retool its tale of random violence, a Youtube video, and a whole lot of bad luck. After some soul searching a few hundred billable hours with a PR firm they came up with a plan: pretend we called it a terrorist attack from the beginning.

It’s political communication based on those popular choose-your-own-adventure books: if the conclusion turns out unpalatable, jump back fifty pages and start over from scratch. On CNN’s State of the Union, Candy Crowley asked David Axelrod to account for the radical revision of their earlier claims and he blithely asserted there simply was no such revision:

“Well, first of all, Candy, as you know, the President called it an act of terror the day after it happened, But when you’re the responsible party, when you’re the administration and you have a responsibility to act on what you know and what the intelligence community believes. This is being thoroughly investigated because we need to bring to justice.”

However, this is brazenly false. On September 12th, Obama used the word “terror” in his remarks but studiously skirted the issue of whether or not the embassy attacks were themselves terrorist attacks. Here are the only two comments where the word “terror” surfaces:

• “No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America.”
• “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act.”

Also, the Obama administration repeatedly insisted with vigor that these attacks were not premeditated, that they were random convulsions of violence in response to an offensive Youtube video, that the well-armed mob that materialized out of thin air and moved with tactical precision were not trained soldiers, and that they simply guessed right about the Ambassador’s whereabouts and did not have privileged access to leaked inside information. If Obama believed this was a terrorist offensive from the start (and the evidence now strongly supports this thesis) then why dance around the issue with oblique circumlocutions and nebulous legalese? And why send his UN Ambassador Susan Rice on a talk show tour denying that this was a terrorist attack with unshakeable conviction?

Rewriting the past by committee turns out to be a difficult enterprise to pull off consistently. On Meet The Press, Obama advisor David Plouffe was asked the same question as Axelrod but responded differently:

“Well, this is an event of great interest, obviously, to the public, to the news media. Information was being provided in real-time. Obviously, you’re going to know more two weeks after an event than a week after an event. And as Ambassador Rice was- that was the information from the intelligence community. It was the same information provided for Congress. The reason obviously we now have stipulated this is a terrorist attack is that came from the intelligence agencies. So as information has become available, as this investigation has continued, we’re obviously making that information known.”

Here, Plouffe unambiguously admits that the Obama administration did not, in fact, call it a terrorist attack initially and that they held off doing so for weeks. He still tows, however, the now thoroughly discredited line that this was the preliminary analysis provided by the intelligence community.

And predictably, frustratingly, maddeningly, the press has opted to present these willful obfuscations as empirically confirmable truth. As Alana Goodman reports at Commentary magazine, Josh Gerstein at Politico ostentatiously shows off his journalistic gullibility:

“Despite a drumbeat from the right and even independent fact-checkers that President Barack Obama has been unwilling to label as terrorism the attack on a United States diplomatic mission in Libya, the president indicated just a day after the killing of the American ambassador there that the assault was part of a series of “acts of terror” the U.S. has faced.”

And Mark Landler, writing for the New York Times, takes his own turn at fiction:

“The White House maintains that its account changed as intelligence agencies gathered more details about the attack, not from any desire to diminish its gravity. Mr. Obama, his aides point out, labeled the assault an “act of terror” in his first public response, in the Rose Garden, a day after it happened.”

The Obama administration clearly hopes that gossamer fantasy gets transformed into accepted fact if the media presents it as such, as if a fairy tale can become true if read aloud earnestly enough. They have the advantage of a vast cadre of committed storytellers on their side but their powerful adversary is reality itself, and now also an increasingly skeptical public.

And why does it matter if Obama called it a terrorist attack? Is this not just a picayune squabble over words, a petty gripe regarding semantic precision? No, for two important reasons. The first is practical: if Obama had properly labeled the attacks terrorist from the get-go, he would have been empowered to choose from a wider range of military options under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. The slow crawl of a response was at least partially a function of this terminological reticence, allowing a lack of courage in speech to translate into fecklessness in deed. This is why, now three weeks following the attacks, that the FBI has still been unable to properly investigate what little remains of the embassy in Benghazi. So much for Obama’s bluster about bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Also, and just as importantly, the world looks with wide eyes upon us for signs of moral lameness, for a dearth of fortitude in the face of unremitting threats, gathering about us like an angry swarm of bees. No one, including our enemies, doubts the unmatched power of the United States to project eviscerating force from one end of the globe to the other. However, there are grave, and not altogether unreasonable, suspicions about our steadfastness amidst national trauma, doubts regarding our courage when met by catastrophe. Our resources intimidate no one when delinked from resoluteness, and our fearfulness and languor is spiritual sustenance to those who pray for our demise. If we cannot muster the gumption to call terror by its name, we cannot be expected to vanquish it when it shows up at our door. When confronted by an act of war on what counts as American soil Obama blinked, our antagonists noticed, and now the world burns. This is the only true story, and unfortunately, the only one the world’s terrorists believe.

Category: Featured, International