Yesterday The New York Times released another Benghazi report, in six parts. David D. Kirkpatrick wrote a book on Benghazi. This six-part Benghazi report consists of excerpts from that work. In it Kirkpatrick tries to revive the Hillary Clinton/Susan Rice narrative. He blames “The Video,” and denies that Al Qaeda operates in Libya. But this new Benghazi report brings back the ghost of another infamous writer for The New York Times: Walter Duranty.

The Benghazi Report: a journalist takes it apart

Aaron Klein heads the Jerusalem bureau for WND. He also got interviews with real terrorists. He wrote these interviews up in a book, Schmoozing with Terrorists. (You can buy it [amazon_link id=”0979045126″ target=”_blank” locale=”US” container=”” container_class=”” ]here[/amazon_link].)

So Aaron Klein knows what he’s talking about. Yesterday he filed this scathing piece that takes the Kirkpatrick Benghazi report apart.

What about that video?

Reads the Times piece: “[O]n Sept. 8, a popular Islamist preacher lit the fuse by screening a clip of the video on the ultraconservative Egyptian satellite channel El Nas. American diplomats in Cairo raised the alarm in Washington about a growing backlash, including calls for a protest outside their embassy.”

However, the Cairo protest on Sept. 11 was announced days in advance as part of a movement to free the so-called “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, held in the U.S. over the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The State Department’s 39-page Accountability Review Board report, or ARB, described a group acting to free Rahman was involved in previous attacks against diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.

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The Times fails to report the anti-U.S. protest movement outside the Cairo embassy was a long-term project about freeing Rahman.

No Al Qaeda in Libya. Really?

Another main contention of the New York Times article on Benghazi is there was “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.”

However, the Times’ next statement in effect contradicts that claim. The Times relates, “The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”

Scores of news media reports documented those “fighters” included al-Qaida groups among their ranks. Many of those “fighters” were widely quoted in news media reports as fighting under the al-Qaida banner.

The Times further claims, “Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests.”

This contention is contradicted by the U.S. government, as WND first reported.

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No pre-planning?

Incredibly, Kirkpatrick wants people to believe those who took part in the Benghazi attack did not plan their attack. By now, everyone knows they did. And that includes the State Department’s own Accountability Review Board.

Thus David Kirkpatrick’s Benghazi report makes three glaring mistakes, or else tells three glaring lies. Aaron Klein shows this.

Two Congressmen speak

Hillary Clinton. Photo: US Department of State

Reps. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and  Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) both denounced the New York Times Benghazi report yesterday. Rep. King said it best: Kirkpatrick relied on identifying the Benghazi attackers with “Ansar al-Sharia,” not something having the name “Al Qaeda.” Says King:

It’s a distinction without a difference.

Why ? Because Ansar al-Sharia is the Al Qaeda chapter in Libya. Kirkpatrick’s Benghazi report tries to deny this. And Peter King called him on it.

Mike Rogers went into greater detail:

There was some level of pre-planning. We know that. There was aspiration to conduct an attack by al-Qaida and their affiliates in Libya. We know that. The individuals on the ground talked about a planned tactical movement on the compound even. … That tells me they didn’t talk to people on the ground who where doing the fighting, shooting and the intelligence-gathering.

Or if he did, he didn’t tell the truth about what they said.

Not the first time with the Times

The David Kirkpatrick Benghazi report recalls two series of reports by the infamous Walter Duranty. In 1932 he won the Pulitzer Prize for thirteen puff pieces on Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. (Nigel Colley reproduces them on his site, starting with this one.) After he got that prize, famine broke out in the Ukraine. Incredibly, Walter Duranty filed more reports trying to deny that anyone was starving to death!

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke the prize they had given Duranty for his earlier thirteen-part series. But in so refusing, even they had to admit Walter Duranty’s reporting “falls seriously short” of what readers have a right to expect from a foreign correspondent. Nigel Colley, not one to put too fine a point on the matter, says this:

The executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, told The Washington Post on October 23 2003, that the newspaper would have no objection if the Pulitzer Prize Board wanted to revoke Mr. Duranty’s award. Mr. Keller called Mr. Duranty’s work “pretty dreadful. … It was a parroting of propaganda.” It will be taken as read that no royalties are due on this un-authorised reproduction of this article  As such they are also perceived, as having no truthful value whatsoever, are only reproduced  for academic and educational purposes, not intended to defraud The New York Times of any morally legitimate royalty revenue and are published without financial gain. In any event, the copyright for the above may well only reside, 70 years after its publication with the heirs of Walter Duranty, and with whom we have no personal animosity whatsoever. Nevertheless, any contention of copyright violation may by taken up under the jurisdiction of English Law. My service address for any legal correspondence is: Nigel Linsan Colley, 1, Crown Street, Newark, Nottinghamshire, England, NG24 4UY. Any prosecution will, you can be assured, be defended in the public domain.

Meaning: Walter Duranty lied through his teeth and repeated Stalin’s party line. Even The New York Times won’t stand by him now.

So why do they stand by David Kirkpatrick and his Benghazi report? Why publish, on their site, content at least as bad as anything Walter Duranty wrote, if not worse?

Why the Benghazi Report?

Why, indeed? An old proverb says:

Seek whom the crime will profit.

And the crime that is the Benghazi report profits two people. It obviously profits Hillary Clinton. By all accounts, she will run for President as a Democrat in 2016. Everyone remembers her intemperate outburst:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

They also remember Susan Rice blaming the video five times.

David Kirkpatrick, the modern Walter Duranty, seeks to support the two possibilities Hillary Clinton laid out:

1. A protest
2. Guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans.

Her words, not ours.

The crime also benefits the White House. Not because so many people suspect Barack Obama is a Muslim. (He is not. Barack Obama is an “Obamist,” building a personality cult with himself at its base.) But because at a critical moment, he refused any aid to the stricken consulate. (And by the way: what happened to 10,000 missiles?)

That’s whom the latest Benghazi Report will benefit.

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