By Douglas J. Hagmann
It is interesting that the corporate media, like sharks attracted to chum in the water, is just now appearing to treat Benghazi as a political scandal similar to Watergate that took down former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon in his second term. While many people see the comparison, I see not only the comparison but also see collusion of a different, more nefarious, and less conspicuous type.
As the details of Benghazi are beginning to emerge from “whistleblowers” and the murderous events are being rightfully elevated to the proper realm of criminal conspiracy, other scandals have suddenly seemed to erupt, almost as if cued by a complicit choreographer. Most egregious misdeeds of the Internal Revenue Service, for example, that allegedly targeted Conservative groups, from 501(c)3 organizations to any group with Tea party or Constitution in their names, were suddenly “revealed.”
Other scandals of lesser significance but poking at the embers of public ire and intolerance are popping up as well. Watching the people reading the multiple news headlines on various news aggregator sites is like watching spectators at Wimbledon, as their heads move from side to side as they follow the ball in play. The white noise of new problems is constantly erupting, resulting in a feeding frenzy in the waters surrounding the Executive branch.
While fascinating to watch, has anyone stopped to consider that the process of chumming the waters with a flurry of cascading news events, combined with a docu-dump of 100 pages of Benghazi e-mails, is a methodically orchestrated diversion? What are we not supposed to see amid the white noise of new controversies of varying values? Are we being told that we’re aboard the Queen Mary and being directed to look over the port side at the antics of the sharks attracted by the chumming of the waters while we’re actually aboard the RMS Lusitania sailing through the Irish Channel on the afternoon of May 7, 1915? Meanwhile, a torpedo fired from a German U-boat travels directly for our starboard side and is about to take the entire ship down.
Like a levy that has been suspiciously breached, the informational flood created by these news events is without recent precedent. The timing of this flood is of particularly critical importance. The headlines divert our attention away from a critical window of investigative value relating to Benghazi. Could it be that we’re seeing a form of force majeure being implemented to overwhelm and distract us from something far more critical to truth seekers and, consequently, much more lethal to Obama’s second term? Perhaps the Cloward-Piven strategy was adapted and modified for the current news cycles of today?
It has become common practice to use the Watergate “scandal” as the basis for any controversy involving the President or the White House, having set some arbitrary high-water mark for behavioral tolerance involving a sitting president. Watergate is commonly used to describe an intricate web of criminal deception during former President Richard Nixon’s second term in the White House and is routinely identified as the cause that brought down Nixon’s presidency.
A critical component of the Watergate investigation involved audio surreptitiously recorded by a little-known audio-taping system installed in the Oval Office in early 1971 that captured nearly all utterances by anyone meeting with the president. During the investigation of the Watergate scandal, the recordings pertaining to relevant discussions were the subject of investigative demands and subpoenas by the investigating committee. Submission of the tapes became a bloody battleground between Nixon and the House Select Committee. After months of fighting, the tapes were finally surrendered, and an unexplained 18 1/2 minute gap, or totality of gaps, was discovered. Analysis of that effacement determined that it was the result of at least five separate manual erasures, verifying that the missing time memorialized by these tapes was no accident.
Whether it’s Watergate or Benghazi, there’s one piece of evidence in these criminal cover-ups from which the actors involved try to deflect your attention by any means possible. It’s the proverbial garden path plotted by the architects of deception themselves. Following this garden path through the winding turns to its origins will expose that one nugget of information needed to unravel the lies and cover-ups elusive to so many. It is a highly protected secret nestled among other less damning facts, diversions, and deceptions.
Benghazi is no exception, but instead provides a textbook example of diversion from the golden nugget hidden inside a crusted shell made to look like all others. So, just what is that particular nugget of criminal naughtiness?
The nugget hidden here is not the content of the memos relating to matters of diplomatic security but something far more nefarious and elusive by its simplicity. Like the questions that surrounded the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate tapes forty years ago, there is a period of missing time that few seem anxious to address. By order of magnitude, however, this missing time is far greater than anything we saw with Watergate. Instead of 18 1/2 minutes of presidential time, it’s nearly 18 1/2 hours involving the actions, utterances, commands, or lack thereof of Barack Hussein Obama as Americans were being killed a half-world away.
Expose that nugget, and I suspect the findings will be far more damaging, far more troubling, and exceedingly more alarming than anyone has begun to imagine. It is this mystical missing period where many clues exist. Where was Barack Hussein Obama following his 5:00 meeting in the Oval Office until the next day? Where wasn’t he? It’s almost as if the Wizard of Oz himself waved his magical wand to divert attention away from those lost hours.
It’s almost as if Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 campaign commercial relating to the proverbial 3:00 a.m. telephone call was precognitive and eerily accurate. If not answering the calls to save American lives during the darkest hours of the night, could he have found a glimmer of light from a bad moon rising from which to order the positioning assets and personnel in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief? If not, then did not Hillary Clinton accurately predict the ringing but an unanswered phone with crystal-ball-like accuracy?
Based on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s unspoken ambitions for a White House bid in 2016, why aren’t partisan mouthpiece sycophants like Media Matters and Think Progress illuminating her prophetic warnings instead of shamelessly working overtime to politicize legitimate questions surrounding the murders in Benghazi? Instead of prepositioning political capital on behalf of Clinton, they are still in full defensive mode to divert all attention away from Obama’s activities under shadowy darkness.
Few have demanded, in the form and fashion of Watergate, to know where Obama was during this most critical time in American history, who he was with, and what he was doing – far beyond the snippets we have been provided. Why does the request for specificity for Obama’s activities during this exact segment of time shape up to be some “third rail” to the Benghazi cover-up?
We know that the Secret Service, in tandem with the National Security Council performs joint drills for emergencies. The Secret Service, among others, possesses very specific logs from that night that could provide answers. Why has no one with authority requested a full accounting of Obama’s location and activities?
Interestingly, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s apparent powers of clairvoyance nearly a half-decade before Benghazi is being ignored rather than celebrated, and questions, much like an incessantly ringing telephone, are being diverted instead of answered.
Perhaps fate placed a much younger Hillary Rodham to serve on the staff assembled for the impeachment of former President Nixon. Students of history know that her activities in this position were not without scandal, but that is another issue for another time. Nonetheless, the outrage caused by the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in audio of conversations between Nixon and others in the Oval Office during a critical time of high-level discussions between Nixon and his closest aides was pivotal in the impeachment proceedings.
Presently, Americans are faced with another erasure of time well beyond the 18 1/2 minutes that was a focus of the Watergate investigation. It is exponentially longer and by orders of magnitude much more prescient to the events of that September day. Today, the questions far exceed the “what did he know and when did he know it” of the Nixon era and well into “where was he, where wasn’t he, what was he doing, and who was he with? The former refers to the potential planning of a cover-up, while the latter refers to a potential cover-up itself. It is a difference with a significant distinction.
With Watergate, we have a deliberate erasure of time that took place long after the primary criminal act occurred. With Benghazi, we have a Commander-in-Chief who, while acting in that capacity, fits the very definition of MIA, or missing-in-action. Not AWOL as some have proclaimed, but MIA. A schedule not erased after the fact but an itinerary deliberately withheld from the purview of us all. The Commander-in-Chief inexplicably went “off the grid” during a national and international crisis. He became MIA, but why?
We are often cautioned not to ascribe conspiracy to that which can be attributed to incompetence. In this case, however, incompetence falls woefully short when a Commander-in-Chief becomes missing in action, especially during a national and international crisis.
It is this golden nugget that is hidden inside a crusted shell that is the subject of diversion. That is why an obscure and inane video was initially grabbed from the inventory of ready-made diversions until it could no longer withstand reasonable scrutiny. His MIA status is the reason behind the $70 million public relations expenditure – no, payoff – by the Department of State to broadcast an apologetic television message across the Middle East.
It is on this issue that we must never lose focus until we are provided answers, wherever and to whomever they might lead.
If you think this matter is trivial, you are not thinking big enough.
