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karynnj

(59,474 posts)
Fri May 23, 2014, 01:50 PM May 2014

When a recent President really did lie about a national security failure before an election

With all the Republican nonsense trying to create a view that Obama worked to distort what happened at Benghazi, I remembered when his predecessor did just that.

A President did have people do that right before an election --- in 2004. Remember that Kerry was speaking of how OBL was cornered in Tora Bora and the Bush team "outsourced the effort to capture him to Afghan warlords, who had been allied with the Taliban just weeks before". (Kerry first claimed this WHILE it was happening and then revived the charge before the election.)


In an October 2004 opinion article in The New York Times, General Tommy Franks wrote,

"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time...Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives ... but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.[


In 2005, when Gary Berntsen's book "Jawbreaker" was released, many here (at least in the DU JK group) noted that Kerry had been right. Berntsen had been the CIA lead on finding OBL. In 2009 with Kerry as chair, there was a full SFRC report completed that said:
placed the blame with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks for not assembling enough U.S. troops to seal the mountainous area during the operation. After studying the matter, the Committee came to a conclusion that Osama bin Laden most likely was present at Tora Bora and his subsequent escape prolonged the war in Afghanistan."



Both quotes from :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

The crux of the issue on Benghazi is that a President distorted a foreign policy failure to avoid it being a bigger negative than it became. (Ignore that few would have seen it differently - no matter what the cause).

In the Tora Bora case, the goal was to both discredit Kerry for stating the truth and to distort that Tora Bora was a major error in the Afghanistan War.

To compare again to Benghazi, look at whether this could have impacted the election.

In the case of Benghazi, Romney hurt himself when hours after the deaths, he blasted the fact that the Cairo Embassy had posted an apology distancing the US government from the film. He ignored that it was written before the deaths. The country contrasted the somber President and SoS consoling the families with an opportunistic jerk. He then tried to recover by claiming the President did not call it terrorism -- when he had.

Romney actually managed to convert what should have been a completely not political event that helped neither side, to a negative by showing who he was.

In contrast, starting slightly before the first debate with strong speeches on both Iraq and national security and then a very strong foreign policy debate -- that no one could spin as a Bush win!, Kerry was gaining traction. This claim and the claim that the known ammo dumps were left unguarded (while the records in the oil ministry were secured) and that ammo became the basis of the IEDs killing and maiming innocent Iraqis and "our Kids" were chipping away at the BIG issue in 2004 - who would be better at keeping us safe. On both issues, Kerry was 100% correct and he was powerful in making the claims. In both cases, the Bush team simply lied - saying it was not true. Had the OBL tape not appeared and taken over the entire news media, the ammo charges might have continued to be heard -- and they were more damning than ANYTHING ANYONE could claim on anything at Benghazi -- and they were true.
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