Calling George Orwell, Your Memory Hole is Open for Business

It may be that this week's testimony in the House by Benghazi whistleblowers will "blow the lid off" the scandal.   We can already sense the Obama administration's angle that all of this is "old news," when Jay Carney sighs in a White House press briefing and laments that Benghazi was "a long time ago."   And, to a degree, it is.   Anyone with any political sense knew that Obama wanted to bury the leded of the story during the final months of the campaign -- that al Qaeda was alive and well, and hadn't been "decimated" despite his administration's drone program.

Nevertheless, the evidence gets clearer that the White House actively tried to cover up the fact that the the Benghazi embassy attack was a concerted effort (on September 11th, no less) by al Qaeda-connected terrorists, and not a spontaneous demonstration in response to a Youtube video, as the administration first claimed.   Here, for instance, is what we now know were the three versions of the White House's talking points immediately after the attack, which were clearly scrubbed to omit any reference to terrorism.   

Look particularly at the change in the first bullet point from the first to the third versions.   Where Friday morning, 9/14, the State Department was saying that "we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack," by Saturday morning, 9/15, that reference is massaged in the second version to omit reference to al Qaeda, then in the third to omit any reference to Islamic extremists at all:  "There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations."   So they might have been environmentalists or Tea Partiers for all we know.

This is Orwellian/Nixonian cover-up bureacrat-speak at its most finely honed: