Do You Think The News Media Has Appropiately Covered Benghazi?

Woodward and Bernstein exposing Watergate? HA! For all of the charges of "cover-up" that the right wing media (read: Fox News) has slung against the Obama Administration, their "exposé" amounts to their amateurishly edited video of the statement that the President had made addressing the Benghazi attack in an embarrassingly failed attempt to obfuscate the fact that the President had referred to the attack as an act of terror.

Much like Fox News, you're posts are an endless source of entertainment!

Woodward/Bernstein and Watergate, indeed!

Watergate?

You're off your rocker

Cycloptichorn

I'm old enough to know about Watergate.
I'm educated enough to get the differences between the two.

But I can understand your 'irritations', Finn.
When in 2009 Israel bombed the home of the German diplomatic representative in Gaza, the media coverage was very low, too, ....

Do you believe that Obama was complicit in the attack?

I doubt anyone feels that Obama was complicit in the attack.

But, this close to the election, does Obama want his administration demonstrating it's failure to protect its diplomats from a terrorist attack when it can conveniently blame a video. It makes the administration look weak when they could have prevented an attack but failed to.

I see your point. But I've diverged from the actual question, was the
media coverage appropriate. I'm not sure what "appropriate" would be.

We already know that the group with the heavy weapons who attacked the mission did so because they said they were outraged at the video. They said so.


You think that the administration could have "prevented " the attack?

Or is your complaint that there wasn't sufficient security personnel?

Joe(Two entirely different things)Nation

The Benghazi "controversy" is nothing more than a right wing masturbatory exercise trying to paint Obama as a failed president. The reason no one is paying much attention to the "controversy" is that it is just more of the same from the right wing, trying to score cheap political points over everything that happens.

Heck, when the unemployment rate drops below 8%, the right wing claimed that this was a sign of calamity.

No one, including the press, is paying much attention because no one cares. It is just more of the same from the right wing.

If we still had a decent news media in this country, I might be interested in more coverage of important news events.

As it is, most of them just pete and repeat the copy from the originating "news" agency, never doing any fact checking, interviewing or confirmations of their own.

When I want some balanced, investigative news reporting about events, I turn to the BBC and other international news media and independent writers.

A Woodward/Bernstein standard of expose just isn't possible with today's journalists and publishers in the US.

This leads to the inevitable question of what you mean by "blame" in your assertion.

So, when Ansar al-Sharia says that the reason they attacked the Benghazi mission was in response to the video, we should just ignore them because.....we would rather believe some other hare-brained scenario? And we cannot understand why the News Media is ignoring the harebrained scenario even though we don't even find much there there?

What do you think the New Media is ignoring?

Be specific and by specific I mean, unlike your candidate, actually answer the question in your own words.

Joe(come on...you can do it.)Nation

i've heard charges of a breakdown in communications in regards to threat assessment

lets face it the same accusations were levelled at george bush over 9/11

the difference being 3000+ died on us soil, as opposed to 4 in a dangerous country

shits gonna happen in other countries, information is harder to come by, i see bengahzi as one of the dangers of bring a foriegn diplomat in certain countries

even with more security, the diplomat might have lived, but perhsps mor guards would be killed

Very few of the bad things that Israel does gets spread around in the U.S, because of the very strong conservative jewish lobby in the U.S.. Even when they try to sink our ships and run down our children with bulldozers.

This alleged Benghazi conspiracy created by the rabid right is just as useless, libelous, and inflammatory as the birther conspiracy against Obama.

The polarization in this country is something else.

I can somewhat understand supporters of Obama wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt and buying the "fog of war" and wanting to take time to get it right explanations, but dismissing it out of hand as inconsequential or a manufactured controversy is astounding' and, to me, appalling.

We have a situation where our embassy in a very dangerous place in the world requests additional security and instead has it reduced.

On 9/11 when you would expect our government to be on high alert for Islamist attacks, one, not surprisingly takes place in Benghazi and two of our diplomats, including our ambassador are murdered. Two former Navy seals who are in the vicinity for a thus far unspecified mission (probably associated with getting control of all the weapons that were let loose when Ghadaffi went down) attempt to come to the rescue of our people and themselves are killed.

We now know that our State Department watched the tragedy unfold in real time and within 2 hours of the beginning of the attack sent between 300 and 400 e-mails to top administration staff advising them of the attack and that a known terrorist group had taken responsibility for it.

The next morning, our president made an arguably vague comment about "acts of terror" and then jetted off to Las Vegas for a political fund-raiser.

Thereafter everything coming out of the Administration asserted that the attack was a spontaneous spin-off from a demonstration in reaction to a two-bit video that insulted Mohammed. This extended so far as having UN Ambassador Rice going on five Sunday talk shows to tell the nation that our "best intelligence" was that "in fact" it was a spontaneous spin-off from a demonstration protesting the video.

Meanwhile the President himself repeatedly declared that we didn't yet know if it was a terrorist attack...despite his claim at Debate #2 that he declared it as such on 9/12 in the Rose Garden.

Eventually the story started to crack and people placed under oath before congress acknowledged/admitted it was a terrorist attack (Which, by the way, the Libyan president flatly declared the day after it occurred, and in a manner which essentially mocked the alternative story being told).

Some two weeks after the attack, the White House Press Secretary announces to the press on Airforce One that it is "self-evident" that it was a act of terrorism. At a subsequent briefing he tells the press "there's no question that something went wrong."

Still, the president in one of his bold submissions to the piercing questioning of the ladies on The View, refuses to acknowledge that it was an act of terror, and speaks before the UN without declaring it an attack by terrorists and referring to the video six times.

Now everyone knows absolutely that not only was it an attack on the clearly
significant date of 9/11 by Islamist terrorists, but there was never a demonstration in Benghazi protesting the video.

And this is an insignificant story that doesn't deserve the attention of the news media?

The questions that need to be answered:

Why were the requests for additional security in Libya rejected and existing security reduced? Who made these decisions?

Why did the Administration tell the American people that the two murdered former Seals were part of the Ambassador's security detail when they clearly were not.

Why did Ambassador Rice go on her TV tour to tell a story that the Administration knew was false?

Why wasn't there an effort to come to the aid of embattled Americans in Benghazi? It appears that the diplomats probably died in the first two hours of the attack, but how would the Administration of known that, and it is known that the former Seals didn't meet there end until some seven hours after the attack began. There are reports indicating that they were on a rooftop with a machine gun when hit by RPGs. The machine gun is said to be encrusted with their blood, suggesting that they fought on after being wounded.

We have four heroes murdered by terrorists and there is strong reason to believe that if our government didn't fail them prior to and after the attack, they didn't regard their sacrifice sufficient to deserve the truth about what actually happened.

There are only two possible explanations:

Incredible incompetence
A lying cover-up attempt.

We are less than two weeks away from a presidential election, and the MSM seems content with allowing a governmental "investigation" designed to take it past election day (Remember it took the FBI agents investigation the matter three weeks to get to Benghazi).

"Obviously something went wrong," but the MSM doesn't think voters should know what went wrong and led to another disaster in the region before election day?

As for comparisons to Watergate, I remember that time and I remember partisan supporters of Nixon dismissing it out of hand and arguing that it was a Liberal manufactured controversy.