When Al Qaeda attacked Benghazi on Sept. 11 in a well orchestrated storm that lasted eight hours and cost the life of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chis Stevens, and three other Americans, the U.S. public was told that this was a spontaneous protest organized by Muslims offended by some movie nobody in the U.S. had even heard about. It wasn’t: it was a terrorist attack. Now “whistle-blowers” Mark I. Thompson and an independent source are claiming that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deliberately invented talking points that misplaced the true nature of the attack, and that Clinton also attempted to bar the department’s counterterrorism bureau from the chain of reporting and decision making, as Fox News reported.
Mark I. Thompson is a former Marine and is now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. He will be addressing his allegations against Clinton during the House Oversight and Government Reform committee this Wednesday. Another official lodged the same claim last October.
“You should have seen what [Clinton] tried to do to us that night,” said the second official last October.
Meanwhile, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki is calling these allegations “100 percent false,” as has Daniel Benjamin, who ran the department’s Counterterrorism Bureau and who said:
“I ran the bureau then, and I can say now with certainty, as the former Coordinator for Counterterrorism, that this charge is simply untrue. Though I was out of the country on official travel at the time of the attack, I was in frequent contact with the department. At no time did I feel that the Bureau was in any way being left out of deliberations that it should have been part of.”
Clinton for her part insisted she was not an intimate part of decisions being made about security in Benghazi. As for who decided to remove all reference to Al Qaeda, and their known involvement, from “talking points” that were prepared for administrative officers to address to the public, it was senior officials from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State department. Instead, misinformation was given about the event being a spontaneous protest – which was in fact utterly untrue.
