On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Thursday night, conservative commentator Mark Steyn argued that the Obama’s administration’s reasoning for not staging some kind of military response to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which was that they could not have got there in time, was faulty.
Partial transcript as follows:
STEYN: Well, Benghazi is more important. Benghazi is, not a lot of U.S. ambassadors get killed in the line of duty.
HEWITT: Right.
STEYN: If you discount the poor fellow who was on the plane with General Zia in Pakistan when that mysteriously blew up in mid-flight, you have to go back to Kabul over 30 years ago for the killing of a U.S. ambassador. So it happens extremely rarely. And when it does happen, and the United States Government lies to its own people about the reason why it happened, that’s a serious thing. And I think the lie is the serious business here. When, in free societies, when the government lies to you consciously and deliberately, they’re treating you with contempt. So it’s not really a partisan issue, because if you’re a liberal, and you’re a Democrat, and you’re defending the public statements of the Obama administration in the days and weeks after Benghazi happening, including the President’s quite disgraceful speech to the U.N. General Assembly, when he said that the future shall not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam, in other words, he was so wedded to this fake narrative that he was prepared to offer up the First Amendment and freedom of speech as a sacrifice to it. If you’re a Democrat or you’re a liberal, and you sign onto this, you’re accepting the right of your guys to treat you with contempt, because that’s what they’re doing. When democratic societies, when the leaders of free societies lie to their people, they’re treating their peoples with contempt. They’re treating them as subjects, not citizens.
HEWITT: You know, we had Brian Lamb in studio on Tuesday for three hours, and during the breaks, Duane and I were lobbying him to get C-SPAN3 to commit to carry these gavel to gavel, because I believe there is an intense, immense amount of interest in this story for the reason you just touched on, not just the American ambassador being murdered, but who murdered him, what happened in the cover-up, the fact that brave SEALs did not have aid sent to their side in the intervening hours, and the astonishing wall of silence that has descended inside the Beltway around this, Mark Steyn. It cannot, they’ve persuaded themselves that this isn’t a story, because they don’t like to talk about it. But for those of us who live outside of the Potomac, it’s an enormous story, and our audiences demand that we cover it.
STEYN: Yes, because I think as you say, brave men fought valiantly all through that horrible, long night, and saved dozens of people. But they were waiting for the help that never came, the help that was two hours away, but was never ordered. And the official explanation is that oh, well, we could have sent somebody, but they wouldn’t have got there in time. Well, you know, just to go back to your sporting analogies, a terrorist attack on a U.S. facility is not a cricket match or a soccer match. You don’t know, a soccer game is going to be 90 minutes. You don’t know how long it’s going to last when the attack ends. And even if those, even if they had sent forces and they hadn’t gotten there in time to save the ambassador or to save the other three people who died, they could have got there in time when the people who committed this act were still sifting through the rubble of the U.S. facility. And so they would have caught them instead of these guys being free to wander around, swank around the Maghreb boasting about what they were able to pull off, which is what one hears from Tunisia and all kinds of other places where colleagues and those involved in this attack have been wandering around.
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