Benghazi attackers communicated using captured State Dept. cell phones | Human Events

Benghazi attackers communicated using captured State Dept. cell phones | Human Events

We already knew Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest were lying through their teeth when they pinned the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video.  The depth of their folly is still being measured.  Here’s Fox Newswith the latest sounding:

The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.

 The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.

Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.

In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”

Fox confirmed this report with a second source, described as a “U.S. official with intimate details of the bloody events of that night,” who had personally reviewed contemporary intelligence reports of terrorists using State Department cell phones to communicate with their leadership.  Stahl says he was talking to State Department people as soon as he got off the plane in Germany.  But still we got endless blather from Obama, Clinton, and their spokesliars about a “spontaneous video protest.”  Naturally, all of this was conveniently overlooked by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “Accountability Review Board.”

But wait, it gets even more outrageous, as we once again turn to the subject of whether quicker action by Obama and Clinton could have saved lives that night, and why there weren’t more emergency assets in place to cover a U.S. ambassador sent into an insurgent beehive on Terrorist Fourth of July:

Stahl also contended that given his crew’s alert status and location, they could have reached Benghazi in time to have played a role in rescuing the victims of the assault, and ferrying them to safety in Germany, had they been asked to do so. “We were on a 45-day deployment to Ramstein air base,” he told Fox News. “And we were there basically to pick up priority missions, last-minute missions that needed to be accomplished.”

“You would’ve thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11,” Stahl added. “A hurried-up timeline probably would take us [an] hour-and-a-half to get off the ground and three hours and fifteen minutes to get down there. So we could’ve gone down there and gotten them easily.”

So yes, Obama and his crew knew that not only was this a coordinated terrorist attack from Minute One, but the terrorists were doing the coordinating on State Department cell phones.  Normally I’d say that’s a pretty stupid thing to do – it’s like a bank robber planning his heist on a cell phone he stole from a cop – but this is the Obama Administration we’re talking about.  It turns out the terrorists were correct in thinking they didn’t have much to worry about.  In fact, they might well have been using captured State Department phones because they wanted the Americans to hear them, a sort of third-party gloating festival.  They must have been puzzled when Obama and Clinton covered for them by cooking up that story about a video protest gone wild.

Presumably the upcoming Benghazi hearings chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) will review some of the Administration’s previous testimony about what they knew and when.  It’ll be fun to revisit those transcripts, knowing they were immediately aware that the attackers were using State Department phones to organize their act of extreme movie criticism.  You can see why this irresponsible and entirely political President wouldn’t want the American people knowing that little detail at a crucial moment of his re-election campaign.