A video didn't kill four Americans in Benghazi

October 13, 2012 12:10 am

NEW YORK--

An anonymous State Department official told the AP last Tuesday: "That was not our conclusion" --namely that a notorious YouTube video that lampooned the Islamic prophet Mohammed unleashed deadly mayhem upon America's consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

This denial should shock anyone who watched the news after U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were murdered on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. That video's culpability certainly was the "conclusion" among top administration officials, including President Obama. They fingered the video for eight days, even as evidence mounted that the Americans died in a commando-style operation involving machine guns and mortar shells, not banners and placards.

As Fox News Channel's Bret Baier and Bill O'Reilly each have detailed, Team Obama energetically promoted this now-repudiated "conclusion."

At 9:40 p.m. local time, however, gunfire and explosions rock the consulate.

That day, as the murdered Americans' remains reach Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton says: "We have seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

Why would Team Obama essentially accuse a video of these murders, even as Lt. Col. Andrew Wood--leader of a 16-man, dedicated military unit withdrawn from Libya last August--called the hit "instantly recognizable" as terrorism?

During President Obama's difficult campaign, that fantasy was far more palatable than this reality: a pre-meditated, well-executed al-Qaida strike on a U.S. mission eradicated four Americans, even after they longed for the security assistance that might have prevented them from coming home in caskets.

Ambassador Stevens warned Washington that Libya "remains unpredictable, volatile, and violent."

Eric Nordstrom, a former U.S. security officer in Libya, told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on Wednesday that State documented 230 security incidents in Libya between June 2011 and July 2012. Nordstrom consequently requested 12 more security personnel.

"You are asking for the sun, moon, and the stars," a regional director complained. Nordstrom concluded that "we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident." He wondered, "How thin does the ice need to get until someone falls through?"

These inconvenient truths would have obviated Team Obama's "bin Laden is dead/al-Qaida is comatose" re-election theme. Thus, the same government that apparently leaks secrets to make the president look tough evidently oozed falsehoods to keep him from looking weak.

In short: People died, Obama lied.

Deroy Murdock, a Scripps Howard columnist, is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.