Everyone, including me, has focused on her main comment, "what difference, at this point, does it make". But the comment uttered directly beforehand might be more of a Waterloo moment:
Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided to kill some Americans?Ah, that's a false choice.
The choice wasn't between a protest going out of control or some dudes on the street who just decided to kill Americans, it was between a group that attacked spontaneously after a protest or an organized terror attacked conducted with precision by an Islamic terror group comprised of leaders with ties to AQ timed for September 11, one day after Ayman Zawahiri called for revenge over the death of AQ Number Three Abu Yahya al-Liby (while Z-man's brother was in Egypt calling for the return of the Blind Sheikh).
It's understandable why she wouldn't include that choice, if no other reason but to not remind people about the Blind Sheikh. Clearly the facts pointed to the organized attack, which the former Secretary would have known at the time of her testimony, yet for some reason not worth mentioning in the famous set of choices.
O'Reilly might be a self-important populist blowhard but he's correct on his premise that proving such a thing--that the administration knew it was an organized attack featuring AQ-affiliated actors on the very night of the event because former CIA Director Leon Panetta told them--is the key to this entire brouhaha. If there's no cover-up over that fact, ie, no attempt to spin the event to minimize political damage in the 2012 election then there's no scandal here, just a bungled tragedy (as the administration has said over and over).
But O'Reilly is missing one more component. If ever called to testify again Panetta can easily spin his own explanation over his "one conservation" that night, but we already have the President of Libya on the record as calling it a terrorist attack with foreign fighters on the very day after the attack (and later on the same Sunday that Susan Rice told five Sunday shows the tall tale about the video). Has anyone at Panetta's level ever been asked why President Magarief was so adamant, or whether anyone in the administration spoke to him after the fact and where he might have gotten such early information?
Maybe the source was the CIA, whose initial draft talking points after the attack mentioned an AQ connection, that is, before their Deputy removed the mention, as requested by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland (and others unknown). Nuland was later promoted by the administration and recently re-entered the limelight by being caught dropping an F bomb on the European Union in an intercepted phone call with the Ukrainian Ambassador placed on the internets by a Russian official. So much for the reset.
Perhaps it should also be of interest that the Deputy in question, Mike Morrell, is now working at a private global consulting firm run by Hillary's old right hand man and attack dog Phillipe Reines. Benghazi followers should recognize Reines as the same guy who told the late reporter Michael Hastings to "F off and have a nice life" in an email exchange over a CNN story about Ambassador Stevens' diary found by CNN days after the attack, which mentioned an 'AQ hit list'. This is what a modern phony scandal looks like, friends.
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