Tapper Peeks into Benghazigate
CNN's Jake Tapper peeked over the transom of that dark room into which the MSM has swept the Benghazigate scandal, but that peek was just a small blessing for which we should just give small thanks.
His report was not an investigation, and many questions remain, questions that I discussed here, here, and here and questions that I shall recapitulate below in order to prompt readers on things to look for in subsequent reports on Benghazigate.
By the end of September we knew that there were more than 30 people in Benghazi at the time of the attacks and that the facility and annex were involved in gun-running, so Tapper was not reporting anything new about the numbers of people in Benghazi and what they were up to, but rather confirming earlier reports.
The real piece of significant new news in Tapper's report was that the CIA has been conducting an unprecedented number of polygraph examinations of agents and operatives with knwledge of the events in Benghazi, in what appears to be an attempt to intimidate and silence those agents and operatives.
The most important unanswered questions that remain are:
First, who were the intruders into the compound? Tapper's report and the endless commentaries on it do not even address the issue. Dr. Mark Christian from the Global Faith discusses the question here in a report to Gateway Pundit:
Syrian president Bashar el Assad, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah of Lebanon are fully responsible for the death of United States Ambassador Christopher Stevens. President Obama has known this fact since the minute he first learned about the attack.
Read it all, for it presents a compelling argument for that clam.
Second, why did they intrude? Dr. Christian also presents his answer to that question:
Stevens covertly used Benghazi as his base of operation...[to overthrow] Assad in Syria. From his Benghazi compound Stevens stored and supplied weapons for thousands of hired, rebel fighters - many of which were al-Qaeda - headed to Syria.
Third, what did the intruders do after they entered the compound? This has always been the most puzzling question for me because the intruders went first to an empty building and trashed and burned it and the vehicles parked there.
They then slowly made their way to the main building of the compound that was occupied by Ambassador Chris Stephens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and State Department Diplomatic Security agent David Ubben.
After making a half-hearted attempt to enter the secure area, the intruders set the rest of the building afire. They could have used their RPGs to blast their way into the secure area by blowing down the gate separating the two areas of the building, but they didn't.
Nor did they attempt to blast their way into the secure area from the outside, something that would have been very easy for them to do considering that Agent Ubben went out and in several times from one window of the secure area.
Instead, they engaged in a series of "immaculate confrontations" with other security personnel during which the two parties fired at each other to no effect at point-blank range.
And then they left and then returned to engage the agents and the rescue party in further "immaculate confrontations" before leaving again without having done anything else so far as we know.
Tapper's report has a couple of math problems because its breathless headline says "Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack," and the report says:
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
But further on we learn:
Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack. A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously. While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency.
Where I went to grammar school, 21 did not equal "dozens,' but I attended that school long before New Math was introduced to young minds.
Now, we know that there were seven State personnel at the compound, and Tapper says that twenty-one were at the annex. But thirty-five Americans were in Benghazi at the time.
So, who and where were the remaining seven? If they were all CIA, and if all in the annex were CIA, then there were, in fact, slightly more than two dozen CIA agents or operatives.
If the remaining seven were neither at the compound nor the annex, where were they? At a third facility?
My long summary of events may be found here, and in it I discuss other questions that remain unasked and unanswered other than in select outlets.