President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton at the ceremony for the Benghazi victims, September 14, 2012 (Courtesy AP)
You be the judge. It is interesting to read an apologia for Clinton - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/feb/09/what-did-hillary-clinton-tell-families-people-who-/ - before considering this: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2015/11/04/video-relatives-of-benghazi-victims-say-hillary-blamed-attack-on-online-video-n2075389
P.S. The broader picture, often ignored, is that President Obama, 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, built his foreign policy reputation on the promise that he would save the world from Salafi-jihadism by reaching out to activist and quietist Salafists. Obama reached out to Turkey's Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in 2009. He also terminated Osama bin Laden with extreme prejudice in 2011 and removed the last U.S. forces from Iraq in late 2011.
Obama had, in his own New Left mind, removed the reason for terrorism. And so we come to the 2012 presidential election cycle, especially on the anniversary of 9/11. At that time, from the Obama Team's perspective, there was no longer any reason for terrorism. The One we had been waiting for had arrived and now the world was healing. Obama had, in other words, declared peace on the world.
Benghazi, according to such a PC narrative, could only be the result of anti-Muslim provocation - in this case, an obscure online video made by an Egyptian Coptic Christian living in America. However, the reality of Benghazi was that Salafi-jihadism remained alive and well. This destroyed the foreign policy credibility of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
No wonder Obama and Clinton were keen to bang on about the online video's "sin of provocation". President Obama did so in an address to the United Nations days after Benghazi. You see, to enter into any other kind of narrative would have undermined his re-election campaign and refuted radical ideology. Some can disagree but common sense tells me that "Lying to the Benghazi parents" deserves its place as Scandal #4.
Clinton apologists will fight hard to demean the parents as liars, because if the relatives are telling the truth - and why would they lie? - then it casts a dark shadow over Hillary Clinton. Not just for this lie, of course, but the failure to protect these Americans' children in the first place. That is, clearly, a double crime committed against "the Benghazi parents". The crime goes onto a third-level of duplicity when we consider that the parents have not only lost their children thanks to Clinton, and then been lied to by Clinton, but then defamed by her on top of that. Truly astonishing.
