Allied media outlets and lefty think-tanks have trotted out David Kirkpatrick’s dishonest New York Times essay on Benghazi as some sort of definitive reporting in regard to its claims that Al Qaeda was not involved and that the attack was caused by a YouTube video.
Kirkpatrick’s essay is all the stranger because it attempts to revive a cover up of information from US intelligence officials by Hillary’s people that was then tossed aside.
Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard quickly takes apart Kilpatrick’s presumptions and lies showing that US intelligence officials had reported all along and have continued stating that an Al Qaeda linked group was involved.
While Kirkpatrick claims that…
I don’t believe that group was involved. I think that the reporting in our paper was citing some congressional officials saying they thought this Jamal group might have been involved. And the congressional officials in turn were citing a report in the Wall Street Journal and that report seems to me to the best of my knowledge to have come from Egyptian intelligence. And at the end of the day, what it asserts is just that this character Jamal may have run a training camp someplace and people who had been at that training camp may have been involved in the attack. So it’s…to my mind a bogus connection and also a tenuous connection and it is certainly not a connection that the New York Times has ever put its weight behind.
… here’s what the New York Times actually wrote…
Three Congressional investigations and a State Department inquiry are now examining the attack, which American officials said included participants from Ansar al-Shariah, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Muhammad Jamal network, a militant group in Egypt.
The report, which apparently David Kirkpatrick never bothered to read, even though it came from his own newspaper, cites American officials, not Congressional officials or Egyptian intelligence or the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal reports also quote US officials, not Egyptian intelligence or Congressional staffers or the Tooth Fairy.
So is David Kirkpatrick incompetent or a liar? And can’t he be both?
In its October 18, 2013 designation of Jamal and his network as al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, the UN noted the following with respect to Jamal: “Reported to be involved in the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 Sep. 2012.”
That’s a long way a story made up by the Wall Street Journal and a few Republican congressmen. If the UN incorporated material, it came from those same US officials who keep being quoted. And those officials ultimately answer to the White House, not to Congress.
David Kirkpatrick might have gotten away with it. All he had to do was claim that those “initial reports” were wrong. Instead he bizarrely decided to claim that those reports never existed and that no one except a few crazy right-wingers ever said that Al Qaeda was involved.
And that was a brazen lie. And even if Kirkpatrick and his New York Times bosses at Ready for Hillary 2016 had gone that route, the story hasn’t actually changed.
Three current U.S. intelligence officials tell The Weekly Standard that no new information has cast doubt on the Jamal network’s role in Benghazi. Each of the U.S. intelligence officials said that it is their current assessment that Jamal’s network was directly involved.
Leave a Reply