The President claimed today that it was justifiable to wonder if a video inspired the Benghazi assault (despite early reports accurately calling it a jihadi assault) because the Cairo embassy near-sacking was provoked by the video.
The problem is, the Cairo embassy riot was known before the riot to be planned in order to pressure America to release the so-called Blind Sheik who is imprisoned for the first unsuccessful attack on the World Trade Center:
As we have covered here before (see, e.g., here), the release and return to Egypt of the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman (whom I prosecuted in the Nineties), has been a cause célèbre in Egypt for many years. On September 10, 2012, the day before rioting at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, an Egyptian weekly, El Fagr, reported that several jihadist organizations, including the Blind Sheik’s group (Gama’at al-Islamia or the Islamic Group) and al Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group (Egyptian Islamic Jihad), were threatening to burn the American embassy in Cairo to the ground. The promised action against the embassy was an effort to extort the release of Abdel Rahman and other jihadists jailed by the United States.
So it is a myth that the Cairo attack was provoked by the video. How our president can say this today is beyond me.
I guess this is one problem of waiting to examine the crisis "so long" after the events. Whose fault is that, anyway?
