Hillary knew from the beginning that this was a jihad terror attack from al-Qaeda. She knew it was a “planned attack — not a protest,” and then she went before the world and said it was a protest over a video about Muhammad, and had the filmmaker jailed. The most insidious aspect of this whole disgraceful episode is that she — and the Obama Administration as a whole — chose to blame the freedom of speech for the killings of Ambassador Stevens and the others. And that’s a sure sign that they have the freedom of speech in their gunsights.
“Sharp Questions From Jim Jordan About Night of Attack,” New York Times, October 22, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, pressed Hillary Rodham Clinton on early suggestions that protests against an inflammatory anti-Islam video had played a role in the attack in Benghazi. “Where did the false narrative start?” Mr. Jordan said. “It started with you, Madame Secretary.”
Mrs. Clinton said that she had mentioned the video as a warning to the region, and that she had not been saying it set off the attack. Mr. Jordan then displayed email exchanges that showed Mrs. Clinton calling the incident a “planned attack — not a protest.”
The topic of whether the video led to the attack caused Mrs. Clinton to become flustered in her 2013 testimony about Benghazi, when she responded, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans,” Clinton said then, waving her arms. “What difference–at this point, what difference does it make?”
This time Mrs. Clinton kept her calm as Mr. Jordan pressed her, highlighting emails that he said proved the State Department had intentionally misled the public about whether protests related to the video had led to the attack. Mrs. Clinton said that had not been the case and that it was a fast-moving period with a lot of fluid information. “We were in a position of trying to make sense of a lot of incoming information,” she said.
Mr. Jordan said that a terrorist attack would have hurt the Obama administration in a re-election year and suggested that Mrs. Clinton therefore characterized the Benghazi attack as growing out of spontaneous protests against the video. “You did it because Libya,” Mr. Jordan said, “was supposed to be this great success story.”