Ahmed Abu Khattala
Why does Fox News fail to report that the suspect in the Benghazi attack captured Tuesday by the US says the motive for the attack was an anti-Muslim internet video? For the answer to that, we have to take a few steps back.
That the internet video has been reported was the motive for the violence isn’t exactly breaking news. On the day after the September 11, 2012, attack, the New York Times reported:
Fighters involved in the assault, which was spearheaded by a Islamist brigade formed during last year’s uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said in interviews during the battle that they were moved to attack the mission by anger over a 14-minute, American-made video that depicted the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as a villainous, homosexual and child-molesting buffoon. Their attack followed by just a few hours the storming of the compound surrounding the United States Embassy in Cairo by an unarmed mob protesting the same video.
A month later, New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick (10/15/12) quoted several eyewitness telling a similar story:
To those on the ground, circumstances of the attack are hardly a mystery. Most of the attackers made no effort to hide their faces or identities, and during the assault some acknowledged to a Libyan journalist working for the New York Times that they belonged to the group. And their attack drew a crowd, some of whom cheered them on, some of whom just gawked, and some of whom later looted the compound. The fighters said at the time that they were moved to act because of the video, which had first gained attention across the region after a protest in Egypt that day.
Among those who identified the Internet video as the motive was a local construction worker and militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala, who several eyewitnesses (AP, 10/18/12; New York Times, 10/15/12) identified as the leader of the attacks. Abu Khattala denies involvement, but told CNN in May 2013 (aired 8/31/13 ) that he’d been at the scene observing and directing traffic.
Last Sunday, Abu Khattala was captured by US special forces in Benghazi as a suspect in the attacks. Two days later, the Times’ Kirkpatrick (6/17/14) published a profile of Khattala recounting his remarks about the attackers’ motives. Khattala also repeated his claim in an interview with New Yorker writer Mary Fitzgerald last April, published three days ago (6/18/14):
He also maintained that the violence in Benghazi that night grew out of a protest against a movie produced in the United States that lampooned Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, rather than being a planned action by militants.
Since the attacks, even after Abu Khattala’s arrest, despite many prominent reports about him and others citing the Internet video as the motive for the attacks, Fox News has never seen fit to mention his contention.
It’s not that they have a blind spot about Khattala, or just happened to miss the dozens of stories about him in other media. On the contrary, Fox News has aired 11 segments mentioning Khattala–six before his arrest, mostly wondering why he hasn’t ye been arrested (i.e., Fox News Sunday, 9/8/13); and five since his arrest, which are more concerned that Khattala will be tried in US courts, than they are with what might be learned about the details of the attack (e.g., Special Report, 6/18/14.)
So why no mention of the suspect’s stated motive now? Fox News has aired more than 2,000 segments on the Benghazi attacks. Like other right-wing media with the Benghazi bug, Fox News claims that the White House deceived the public by not immediately branding the incident an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attack, but instead claimed that it was a spontaneous reaction to the notorious internet video. The motive for the deception, goes the theory, was the White House’s desire not to remind voters that Al-Qaeda was still active two months before a US presidential elections (e.g., Special Report, 5/14/13.)
Indeed, the conspiracy-mongering got so out of control at one point that the Republicans, with Fox News at their backs, attempted to turn a State Department email mentioning that the anti-Muslim Internet video had caused incidents at a number of US embassies into a smoking gun–evidence, they said, that State Department was trying to repeat inaccurate talking points to be used on Sunday morning chat shows (e.g., Kelly File, 5/1/14). They were ultimately unsuccessful, as more level-headed media corrected the record (e.g., Slate, 4/30/14).
It’s all pretty far-fetched. The president did in fact call the attacks terrorism soon after they happened, and other embassies in the Muslim world were actually attacked. What this all seems to suggest is that Fox News won’t mention the significant evidence that the Internet video was behind the attacks because it is so deeply invested in the story of a White House conspiracy, and it’s too late to change the script. In other words, it’s not about journalism, it’s about politics.
This shouldn’t present any kind of a problem for Fox. The vast majority of its viewers are incapable of understanding the difference between and fiction.
ANOTHER POV FROM NO QUARTER USA
I am struck dumb by the stupidity on air, especially at Fox and CNN, celebrating the capture of the so-called “mastermind” of Benghazi, one Abu Khattala. Sorry boys and girls, but that’s a lie. Khattala is nothing more than low hanging fruit plucked by an incompetent Administration desperate to change the subject.
How do I know? 18 months ago I spoke with a military fellow who had been on the ground in Benghazi hunting down the perpetrators of the 11 September 2012 attack. By that time, our guys had identified at least 10 of the attackers and knew where they were. The Obama Administration refused to give permission to go get them.
Abu Khattala, for example, is a middle-level functionary of the Ansar Al Sharia crew. There are at least three other members of Ansar Al-Sharia who are considered higher priorities. But Ansar Al Sharia are not the only ones on the list. There are other extremists with direct ties to various Al Qaeda linked entities.
Whatever boost Obama gets from this capture will be short-lived when the actual details about this guy are exposed. The simple fact that reporters from CNN and FOX could easily find and interview him should tell you everything you need to know.
Obama is not the first President to try to use an incident like this to gain an advantage. But the desperation of the Obama team is palpable. They are making exaggerated claims that will subsequently be exposed to be total horseshit. Stay tuned.
HAS FAIR BOTHERED TO REPORT ON THE ILLEGAL INVASION OF LIBYA..OR THE THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT LIBYAN CIVILIANS WHO WERE KILLED?
Of how the West won in Libya
by Pepe Escobar
Since the beginning of the NATO operations against Gaddafi‘s Libya and its socialist and anarchist system, the Western business press has not stopped a moment to misinform and alter reality . But it is only because of the enormity of the lie conveyed by the trade press, unanimous in his speech, that little by little, the truth is emerging in all this slander and manipulation. All this thanks to the work of researchers, thinkers and honest journalists, whose logic, analysis, instruct us and show us the dark side of the Libyan tragedy.
Libyan capital Tripoli under NATO bombs, the massive bombing of NATO have killed thousands of innocent civilians and the trade press has never said anything about it.
They fight like vultures on the bodies. The French defense minister said he had been seized with a Rafale fighter jet that fired on the convoy in which he-(…) The Pentagon said it had seized a missile firing Hellfire from a Predator.
Then a wounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sought refuge in a filthy sewer under a highway, a creepy echo “hole” of Saddam Hussein – which was found by the ‘rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC), who, unsurprisingly, he was executed.
Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied the Libyan Qadhafi’s body in an ambulance and who examined him said he died from two bullets, one in the chest and once in the head.
The NTC, which has been selling lies, lies and more lies for months, swears he died in a “crossfire”. Maybe it was a mob. Maybe it was Mohammad al-Bibi, who wore a baseball cap to the Yankees in New York and who posed for the whole world the golden gun wielding Gaddafi, perhaps to collect your ticket the considerable sum of $ 20 million offered as prizes by Gaddafi “dead or alive.”
Everything is becoming more curious when one remembers that this is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in his meteoric visit to Tripoli forty-eight hours before Gaddafi would be “captured or killed.” The Fairy Queenie [ 1 ] satisfy the wishes of Clinton, who learned of the facts by looking at the screen of a BlackBerry , and reacting to the earthquake semantic “WOW.”
For the winners, the spoils. All they did: the Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Pentagon and the NTC. At the time that a United Nations resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya became a permission to change the regime, the plan was always to capture him and kill him. Targeted killing, that’s the official policy of the Obama administration. There was no plan B.
Let me protect you by bombing you!!!
As for the R2P (“responsibility to protect” civilians), any skeptic should cling to the explanation of the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen: “NATO and our partners have successfully launched a historic mandate of United Nations to protect the people of Libya “ .
Anyone who wants to review the NATO protection to civilians only need to jump into a van and reached up to Sirte, the new Fallujah.
Reactions have been very instructive. The NTC bureaucrat Ghoga Abdel went to the Coliseum of the Roman Empire and said, “The revolutionists have the head of the tyrant” .
U.S. President Barack Obama said Gaddafi’s death means that “we’re seeing the strength of American leadership around the world.” That’s how to “grab him” everything one could expect, considering that Washington paid no less than 80% of the cost of the operation of these ceporros of NATO (about 1,000 million dollars, which the squatters of Wall Street would do well to report because they could have been dedicated to creating jobs in the U.S.). How strange that now “we did it” because the White House always said that this was not a war, it was something “kinetic”.And they would not charge.
Can somebody clean up the posts by paid right wing troll BARBK? Who else goes on liberal sites to spew: “I spoke with a US soldier I wont name and he said Obama is protecting terrorists”; if its not a paid troll its somebody without a job and off their meds who can spout for hours, and really thinks Obama protects terrorists. Because Democrats hate America. Go inhale a chemtrail, BARBBF.
The “fair and balance” fraud for all to see.
“Fair and balance (sic) fraud.” criticism by Barbara Mullin of Randall, Here he is writing a blog which is not news reporting. A blog needn’t be fair and balanced. All a blog has to do, in my opinion, is to be accurate. He questions Fox National ‘s not reporting a Benghazi story that doesn’t coincide with Fox’s anti-Obama senarios in regard to Benghazi. No fraud; but I too am a progressive.
The brazenness and scope of the disinformation would make any KGB colonel sigh with admiration. At 10:32 on the night of the attack, Secretary Clinton issued a statement deploring violence in response to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” In the days that followed, the president and his spokesman repeatedly invoked the supposedly offensive video as the cause of the attack. The president and secretary of state even filmed commercials to play in Muslim countries denouncing the video while also upholding America’s tradition of religious and political freedom. “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” said the president. “But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.”
But as the State Department finally disclosed a month after the attack (and as had been widely reported before then), there was no protest outside the American consulate in Benghazi. Nothing. Not a peep.
As the Rhodes memo makes clear, the president sent his U.N. ambassador to the Sunday shows to lie. Susan Rice was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” Rice did as she was told. The election was less than two months away. A foreign policy failure would not be politically convenient, so it would be made to go away. It’s one of the minor injustices of this sorry story that Susan Rice has received more condemnations than the president or secretary of state, who pulled the strings.
Secretary Clinton began to peddle the “Internet video” story from the first moments after the guns went silent in Benghazi. When the Libyan ambassador to the U.S. apologized to her on September 13 for the “terror attack,” she ignored this and burbled on about “The Innocence of Muslims.”