Meanwhile, in Washington, the White House yesterday finally admitted that the murder of the US ambassador to Libya on Sept. 11 was a well-planned terrorist act.
We’d say the confession makes a fool out of UN Ambassador Susan Rice, had she not done that job so well Sunday, travelling the talk shows swearing it was all about the Mohammed video, and nothing else.
But there are still two big words Team Obama refuses to speak aloud:
Intelligence. And failure.
Which is the only way to describe what happened in Benghazi, where the functionally defenseless Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in a strike that intelligence officials now say was likely launched by a Guantanamo alum and al Qaeda operative.
Fox News reports that the seasoned Libyan terrorist Abu Sufian bin Qumu is believed to have led, if not planned, the bloody assault.
Who is Qumu? The Libyan government called him a “dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts.” And the United States considered him “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies” if he were ever released from Gitmo.
So why was he free to kill again? In 2007, the US transferred him to Libyan custody; the next year, Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy released him in a blanket amnesty for Libyan terrorists.
The presence of jihadists in Libya shouldn’t have surprised the White House. Qumu’s home of Derna, 180 miles from Benghazi, is a one-industry town: It produces suicide bombers by the busload.
And Libyan officials say the State Department was warned more than 48 hours beforehand that US diplomats were in jihadi crosshairs.
That is, all the signs of a pending slaughter were there for the White House to see.
But it failed to prepare for anything — and the slaughter ensued.
So Team Obama did what comes naturally: It lied.
White House spokesman Jay Carney and other officials spent a week claiming there was no evidence “any of this unrest was pre-planned,” and that the attack — which employed rocket-propelled grenades and mortars — was an impromptu “response to a video” about Mohammed.
But, except for the White House, nobody bought it — because it was too obvious that the attack was timed for the anniversary of 9/11 and had nothing to do with that obscure film.
Yesterday, Carney finally bowed to reality and said it’s “self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”
Self-evident? To everybody but you, Jay.
Equally self-evident is that the administration was utterly unready for a wave of violence it should’ve seen coming — and that it then tried to lie its way out of a difficult spot.
The White House must live with the consequences. Ambassador Stevens, unfortunately, is not so lucky.