Mother of Benghazi victim: Hillary and Susan Rice told me "nose to nose" that the Mohammed video was to blame

This makes two parents of men killed in Benghazi who’ve claimed that Hillary told them personally that the video was the prime mover in the attack. Tyrone Woods’s father went a step further and alleged that she vowed to have the filmmaker “arrested and prosecuted” — which, courtesy of California authorities, is what ended up happening. (See Rich Lowry’s new piece, “The Benghazi Patsy,” for background.) Why did she think it was some sort of comfort to the bereaved that the attack might have been motivated by the Mohammed movie? She went so far as to mention it in her remarks a few days afterward at the ceremony at Andrews AFB when the victims’ bodies arrived; skip to 16:30 here and watch. With Stevens’s remains right in front of her, she interrupted her praise for his service to note that “rage and violence” had been directed at American embassies “over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Even if that were true, who cares? Why would Mr. Woods or Mrs. Smith give a wet shinola about what motivated a group of degenerates to kill their kids? State’s duty to protect its diplomats doesn’t dissolve depending upon whether an attack was foreseeable — which of course it was in the case of Benghazi, given the consulate’s repeated warnings about a growing jihadi presence in the city. Her whole “3 a.m.” shtick in the 2008 campaign was that she was ready for responsibilities that Obama wasn’t prepared for, yet when a crisis finally landed in her lap here, she couldn’t move fast enough to pass the buck to some random American whose big sin was free speech that was “unhelpful” to the administration’s goals.

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Serious question for Hillary: If, in an alternate universe, the Benghazi attackers really were motivated by outrage over the Mohammed video and not their preexisting jihadist allegiances, would the filmmaker be the “main culprit,” morally or even legally? Should Terry Jones be prosecuted for burning a Koran after jihad-bots inevitably seize it on as a pretext to rampage in Afghanistan or Pakistan? This is no academic question. Matt Welch put together three pages’ worth of quotations this morning from prominent liberals in the aftermath of Benghazi flirting with (or even outright embracing) the idea of censoring material that offends Muslims. Hillary’s own State Department spent tens of thousands of your tax dollars a week later in Pakistan to run TV ads denouncing the video, just in case any of our “allies” there were thinking about making a move on the embassy in Islamabad. Yesterday’s testimony from Greg Hicks was useful in establishing that the Mohammed video was a “non-event” in Libya, but it tells us nothing about what policies Hillary would have endorsed if the “film-driven outrage” theory of the attack had had some merit to it. I want to know. Don’t you?

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