Politics: Hillary Clinton displayed in her Fox interview a chilling combination of cluelessness and obfuscation. Just standing by Susan Rice's Benghazi lies calls into question her qualifications for the presidency.
In live sit-down interviews Tuesday on Fox News' "Special Report" and "On the Record," the former secretary of state and White House wannabe reached into her bag of clichés and blamed the lie that the Benghazi terrorist attack was caused by that inflammatory video on the "fog of war."
This, despite the fact that nobody in a position to know that night or now says there was a smidgen of evidence linking the attack to a video.
The interviews came ironically — or is it conveniently? — as the administration announced the capture of one of the Benghazi attackers, Ahmed Abu Khattala. As far as we know, he never went to film school. But he was a leader of Ansar al-Sharia, the group that took credit for the Sept. 11 attack.
We note that it took two years to grab Khattala, the gentleman the New York Times on Oct. 18, 2012, reported "spent two leisurely hours on (a) Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio." During those two years Khattala gave at least five major media interviews.
We have the testimony of Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya and a foreign service officer for 22 years. He was demoted to desk officer for telling the truth that those in Libya knew it was a terrorist attack from the "get-go," that there was no "protest" or mention of one from anyone on the ground, and that the infamous YouTube video was "a non-event" in Libya.
Eric Stahl, a recently retired major from the U.S. Air Force, was the commander and pilot who flew the survivors and corpses of the four killed at the Benghazi mission to Germany. Stahl, who — like Clinton — was for some strange reason never interviewed by the State Department's Accountability Review Board, says that none of the survivors knew anything about a spontaneous protest or a video that was repeatedly put forth by her and President Obama as the cause.
Then there's the statement of Libyan President Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf. He told CBS News' "Face The Nation" on Sept. 16 that Benghazi was a terrorist attack after then-U.N. Ambassador and now National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on five talk shows that Sunday after the attack saying the video was to blame.
"It was planned, definitely; it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," El-Magariaf said.
Recently declassified transcripts of congressional testimony show that Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time headed Africom, the Defense Department combat command with jurisdiction over Libya, testified "the command very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration but a terrorist attack."
And that, Ham said, was the "nature of the conversation" he had with then-Defense Secretary Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey moments before their 30-minute meeting with Obama the night of the attack.
There was no "fog of war," only the stench of a cover-up as Obama's claims that al-Qaida was on the run and the war on terror was over were burning in the Libya desert. As we have documented, Clinton may not have just repeated the video lie, as she did to the parents of the dead before their sons' caskets, but is arguably the author of it.
As we and others have shown, the language in an email from Obama aide Ben Rhodes used to prep Rice is virtually identical to one issued under Clinton's name 36 hours before — the first public official to mention the video.
That Clinton would lie to re-elect a president whose second term was a necessary springboard for her own White House run disqualifies her for any office, let alone the presidency.
