More of the same from Fox News on Benghazi report

The following “exclusive” report from Fox News claims that officials within the Obama administration were “fully aware” about a weapons transport between a terrorist post in Libya and Syria before the attack in Benghazi and the subsequent death of four Americans:

And what is Fox News’ source for this claim, that implies the administration seemed to turn the other way as one terrorist group in Libya fed weapons to another potential threat in Syria? You guessed it. The documentation comes secondhand from a right-wing group named Judicial Watch, which tells us — we have no way to verify this, other than taking their word for it — that the filed substantiating this claim came from the Department of Defense and the State Department via a court order related to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from May 2014. The documents are on Judicial Watch’s website, of course, and the lawsuit is public record, but we have no way of knowing if the items posted on JW’s website are complete and authentic.

As a side note before I get into a couple points on JW’s claims and the documents themselves, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the little journalistic games Fox News plays on a routine basis. A reporter named Catherine Herridge is introduced as a “chief intelligence correspondent” coming to the show “live in D.C.,” as if Herridge had spent the whole day using her journalistic prowess and combing the earth for these documents when, in fact, all she (or a writer or producer) did was go on JW’s website and summarize her version of the findings with as much access to the documents as I have sitting here in my living room.

In any case, I’ll assume that the documents posted on JW’s website are authentic and complete and came straight from the DOD and State Department. Judicial Watch’s main points are that the Obama administration knew back in August 2012 that ISIS, far from the “JV team” as the president previously claimed, planned to establish a caliphate in Iraq and that the administration was aware that weapons were being shipped from Libya to Syria. The first document JW linked to does indeed say that a group that subscribed to “AQ (Al-Queda) ideologies” “claimed ultimate responsibility” for the attack in Benghazi and that the hit was planned 10 days before Sept. 11, 2012. The government file, which was produced on either Sept. 12, 2012, or Sept. 16, 2012 — it makes little difference which date is correct — says nothing about the United States or officials within the administration knowing before Sept. 11, 2012, that the attack was going to occur, as implied by Judicial Watch and presented as more or less fact in Fox News’ report.

The second document from October 2012 just confirms that the U.S. was aware by that time in October that weapons had been shipped from Libya to Syria in late-August of that year, not that the U.S. was aware of this activity all along. Yet, JW seems to make this rather large leap in logic when, further down in its report, the organization claims the U.S. was “monitoring” the shipment of weapons all the while:

Another DIA report, written in August 2012 (the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups …

But I’ll give Judicial Watch a little credit in its carefully worded report; part of the news release at least attempted to imply some kind of coverup in the Obama administration rather than, in Fox’s case, making ball-faced accusations of malfeasance, an attempt that nonetheless unraveled once JW inserted a quote from its president, Tom Fitton:

These documents are jaw-dropping. No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them. If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president. … These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

Judicial Watch’s supposed smoking gun was a report from August 2012 that was seemingly supposed to establish a connection between terrorists in Libya and Syria, but the report, while it does contain a reference to ISIS, possibly exposing Obama’s attempt to downplay the group’s influence in the region, the document says nothing about terrorist groups operating in northern Africa or any connection they might have to insurgents in Syria and Iraq, which belies JW’s and Fox News’ claim that the Obama administration had detailed knowledge about developments in Libya all along.