Benghazi: A Threat Worse than Watergate?

This is a subject that looks like it will take many months past election day to fully understand – but also looks like it could be a Presidential scandal at least the equal of Watergate if not more serious. I am speaking of the stonewalling and possible cover-up by this White House of the real facts surrounding the Administration’s response to the terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. 20 year CIA veteran, author and counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer said that it is worse than Watergate. Many have taken to calling it Benghazi-gate. Scheuer said, and I quote, "Americans will not learn what happened because President Barack Obama wants to protect his chances at being re-elected."

If this is true, and if President Obama is reelected in part because the voting public did not know enough about the alleged scandal until after the election, then the very foundations of our democratic system will be shaken, and our so-called mainstream media will have been complicit.

Michael Scheuer is a 20-plus year CIA veteran who headed the Osama bin Laden tracking unit in the late 1990s and served as special adviser to the unit’s chief from 2001 to 2004. He said the handling of the Benghazi attack was not a matter of incompetence.

Again I quote Mr. Scheuer: "Had we sent people to try to help the people who were being attacked, we may have been too late, it may have taken too long to get there, we may have run into a bigger battle and lost more people but the key element here is there is no evidence, from day one until today, that the Obama administration did anything at all to help those people… Nothing was … tried. At the end of the day, we abandoned those four people on the orders of the president. The communiques from the DOD and from the agency make it very clear …that at no level within the CIA … did [they] refuse to help those people who needed help. That was as close as General [David] Petraeus could come to saying that we were ready to help and the president and his staff said no use of force to rescue those people."

He went on to say that in the White House, "they were watching it on TV and listening to it in their earphones. This was just a callous, political decision to let Americans die and now they’re in the effort to cover that up in order to allow Mr. Obama to try to get his re-election."

Let me unambiguously admit that this may all be overblown, but if it is, then why has the White House been so obstinate in its refusal to be forthcoming about what really happened? If it is later shown that the President and his advisers committed such a shameful abandonment of Americans in harm’s way because admitting how they had acted would have been politically damaging, and if the President is re-elected, we will face a crisis of national leadership beyond anything we as a nation have ever undergone. In a tight election, millions of voters whose vote could have changed if they had only known before November 6th what they learned after November 6th, and if not only the President but also the Vice President are impeached as a result, we will go through such a period of national paralysis that its impact will go far beyond an inability to respond to the ongoing economic crisis. It is truly too awful to contemplate. If Mr. Scheuer’s accusations are anywhere near true, then I hope and pray that the President is defeated in spite of the failure of our mainstream media to meet their duty to inform the public about the unfolding scandal. If his accusations are false, then the election will have hinged on other factors, because few ever learned of them, in spite of the best efforts of my friends at Fox News Channel, Newsmax, and the Drudge Report.