After Libyan President Mohamed Magarief told NBC News that the anti-American violence in the Middle East was not a “spontaneous” reaction to an anti-Muhammed film, NBC maintained that the video did spark the attacks, contradicting its own scoop.
Here is NBC News’s lede:
An anti-Islam film that sparked violent protests in many countries had “nothing to do with” a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi earlier this month, Libya’s president told NBC News.
In the very same sentence, they frame Magarief’s assertion as a mere opinion while stating a contrary opinion as a conventionally accepted fact. hat resulted in the murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya. Their water carrying for the Obama administration required them to ignore evidence to the contrary that was literally right in front of them.
In the interview with NBC’s Ann Curry, Magarief said the film had been available on YouTube for months and the “reaction should have been, if it was genuine, should have been six months earlier.”
“It’s a pre-planned act of terrorism,” Magarief said, emphasizing the video had “nothing to do with this attack.”
Whereas the Obama administration ignored or did not take seriously the threats of violence leading up to the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Magarief understood the significance of the date.
“It was postponed until the 11th of September,” Magarief told Curry. “They chose this date, 11th of September to carry a certain message.”
But that still was not enough for NBC News to refrain from writing that the video caused the attacks, which led to the murder of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Even though U.S. intelligence officials heard al-Qaeda groups celebrating the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Libya, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was warned of the attacks, and evidence immediately after the attacks suggested terrorists were behind the attacks, the Obama administration told the world that the anti-Muhammad video caused the violence. Its Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, went on various Sunday political talk shows and said the attacks were merely spontaneous responses to an Internet video.
They did so because Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had campaigned for weeks on the “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” theme, highlighting the president’s supposed strengths on national security and avoiding his economic record. And admitting these foreign policy blunders would have undermined one of Obama’s main selling points on the campaign trail.
They did so to cover up for the State Department, which scrubbed from the Internet a memo it had sent out a week before the attacks saying there were no “credible” information to lead anyone to believe al-Qaeda would attack U.S. interests abroad on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.
And the mainstream media has repeated this spin so frequently and refused to hold the administration to account that the false notion that an internet video caused the wave of violence across the Middle East has become an incontrovertible fact to them — even after Libya’s president tells them otherwise.