There’s Willful Blindness, Then There’s Willful Stupidity, Then There’s Willful Deception – Meet James Clapper

James Clapper

I’m paraphrasing Andrew McCarthy’s excellent  headline from 2/10/11 at the Corner: There’s Willful Blindness, and Then There’s Willful Stupidity:

James Clapper, the head of intelligence for the United States of America, has explainedto Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular.” It further has “eschewed violence,” decries al-Qaeda as a “perversion of Islam,” and really just wants “social ends” and “a betterment of the political order in Egypt.”

I kid you not.

This is the Muslim Brotherhood whose motto brays that the Koran is its law and jihad is its way. The MB whose Palestinian branch, the terrorist organization Hamas, was created for the specific purpose of destroying Israel — the goal its charter says is a religious obligation. It is the organization dedicated to the establishment of Islamicized societies and, ultimately, a global caliphate.

It’s this genius who has been designated the Regime’s fallguy in the BenghaziGate scandal (he in fact, took credit back on Sept 28: DNI James Clapper on Libya: I Got It Wrong – Not the White House. )

As Ace notes, we’ve suspected this for months.

Now people are saying it was indeed Clapper. Actually they’re saying it was his office — the Director of National Intelligence — and any of several people might have made the changes.

But I will stick with Clapper. He’s proven himself to be a perfect Obama appointee, by which I mean incompetent and eminently malleable in his claims according to Obama’s political needs. Furthermore, we are speaking here of the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador. We are talking about talking points prepared by the CIA to be given to the US Ambassador for wide dissemination on television. And the US Ambassador was appearing on TV at the order of the White House (which I imagine means the President).

As very senior people are involved on all ends of this, I doubt very much the edit job was done by a convenient subordinate. I would imagine another principal– Clapper himself — made the edits. Either way, Clapper is confirmed to have reviewed the edits, at the very least.

As for the reason for the edits:

…an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too “tenuous” to make public, because there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus, however, told Congress he agreed to release the information — the reference to al Qaeda — in an early draft of the talking points, which were also distributed to select lawmakers.

And at this point, you would think CBS News would want to point out that the only thing that was “tenuous” about the whole thing was their bogus story about a spontaneous protest over a stupid YouTube video which actually had zero evidence to back it up. But it would be too much to ask an MSM news outlet to make a giant leap like that.

That is why more hearings are necessary to get to the bottom of this. Let Clapper try to get away with an obfuscation like that in front of the likes of Trey Gowdy, Jason Chaffetz, or Darrell Issa.

The other thing that needs to be discovered – why did Petraeus  so dramatically alter his story from what Peter King remembered as clearly pushing the spontaneous protest narrative …to something entirely else.

Via Diane West, after his Sept 14th briefing, ABC reported:

The attack that killed four Americans in the Libyan consulate began as a spontaneous protest against the film “The Innocence of Muslims,” but Islamic militants who may have links to Al Qaeda used the opportunity to launch an attack, CIA Director David Petreaus told the House Intelligence Committee today according to one lawmaker who attended a closed-door briefing.

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intel committee, said Petraeus laid out “a chronological order exactly what we felt happened, how it happened, and where we’re going in the future.”

“In the Benghazi area, in the beginning we feel that it was spontaneous – the protest- because it went on for two or three hours, which is very relevant because if it was something that was planned, then they could have come and attacked right away,” Ruppersberger, D-Md., said following the hour-long briefing by Petraeus. “At this point it looks as if there was a spontaneous situation that occurred and that as a result of that, the extreme groups that were probably connected to al Qaeda took advantage of that situation and then the attack started.”

This is key. On September 14, the top Democrat on the Intell Committee comes out of the Petraeus briefing and tells the press the Benghazi “protest” went on for two or three hours, and how very important that protest was to the conclusion that this was a “spontaneous” attack.

This is the same Petraeus briefing, Fox New reported, that some members found “shocking” given that they saw the intelligence pointing not to a “spontaneous” movie-riot but to a planned terrorist attack.

That was amended last week to:

…he knew almost immediately that Ansar al Sharia, the al Qaeda sympathizing group was responsible for the preplanned attack on the Consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans. The question of their motivation is where the confusion lies. Initially, there were up to 20 intelligence reports that blamed the YouTube video as the motivation. Those reports were disproven in time, but supposedly not before Petraeus had testified before Congress on the 14th, three days after the attack.

More hearings, please.

Linked by Doug Ross, thanks!