What’s the Real Story? Part 5

This is the concluding essay in a five-part series about the occluded schemes that may lie behind the scrim of the current crisis in the Middle East. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Tying up the Loose Ends

The first four posts in this series created a fictional scenario to explain the otherwise absurd and contradictory reports that have emerged over the past two months about the Islamic Days of Rage and the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.

Some sort of explanatory framework is required, because the events as reported on the news and described in official government press releases make no sense. Their incoherence prompts a look behind the closet door to see what figures may be crouching there.

The outline presented here attempts to explain what happened, while adhering to the tenets of Occam’s Razor — that is, without multiplying entities needlessly. For this reason I chose to discard any grand conspiracy having Barack Hussein Obama as the conspirator-in-chief, since this would have required many additional assumptions — including that the President took enormous political risks over an extended period of time, which is contrary to everything we have learned about Mr. Obama since he was inaugurated. He has shown himself to be indecisive, vacillating, and risk-averse, which excludes him from the center of any cynical scheme to engineer an attack on the Benghazi consulate.

None of this, however, means that my speculative fiction is an accurate representation of what happened. There are undoubtedly better scenarios that could be constructed by people who have access to military and civilian intelligence data.

In concentrating on just a handful of players — President Obama, Secretary Clinton, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Mohammed Morsi, Terry Jones, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — I have neglected many others, such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, the Saudis, the Chinese, the European Union, the major arms manufacturers, and the international oil companies. Each of these players has an agenda that differs from those of the others. Some have interests that largely overlap, while the goals of others are entirely antithetical to one another.

The complexity of these conflicting interests is what makes any coherent scenario-building so difficult. In order to avoid chaos and paint a meaningful picture, we must view the scene through a narrow aperture.

My fiction may be entirely off the mark, and I remain open to other explanations of the same data. However, any useful scenario would need to address several important issues:

• The Mohammed movie: Why would anyone front the money and order the production of such a stupid and crass film, knowing that they would be subject to a worldwide death fatwa afterwards?
  
• The Turkish Consul General: What was he doing at the Benghazi consulate just hours before the attack?
  
• The Blind Sheikh: Why did the demonstration in Cairo begin as a demand for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, and then suddenly morph into a protest about the Mohammed movie?
  
• The Benghazi cover story: Why did the administration stick to the “spontaneous demonstration” cover story, long after even the most friendly media outlets admitted it was ridiculous?
  
• Sam Bacile: Who invented the imaginary Israeli producer of the movie?
  
• The time delay: Why did the movie languish in obscurity until Terry Jones was tipped to it just before September 11?
  
• The leaks: Who was behind all the leaks? A partial list:
  

  1.		The real name of “Sam Bacile”.
  2.		The fact that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula had been a federal informant.
  3.		The memos about deficient security at the consulate in Benghazi.
  4.		The role the CIA played in the Benghazi affair.
  5.		Most importantly, the damning real-time emails sent to the White House about what was happening in Benghazi that night.

My fictional scenario is not an entirely satisfactory explanation for the Benghazi cover story, and it probably also falls short of the mark for other issues not mentioned here, so I’m ready to hear alternative interpretations.

I began compiling data for this post on September 12. The next day, after it was revealed that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was a convicted felon, I told Dymphna that I thought the whole thing was a set-up, and predicted that Mr. Nakoula would turn out to be a federal informant. The following day my suspicions were confirmed.

In the weeks afterwards, as I watched additional information emerge, I kept track of the latest data and matched it against my fictional account, modifying the scenario as needed. But the general outline has remained unchanged, and later revelations seem to support my initial suppositions.

None of this means that any of the intended outcomes envisioned by the major players will materialize as planned. The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley, and there were many intertwined and mutually contradictory schemes at work in the Cairo/Benghazi debacle.

Barack Obama may well be re-elected. Hillary Clinton may not get her shot at the Oval Office. The Muslim Brotherhood may fail to repatriate the Blind Sheikh.

And we may get to keep the free speech clause of the First Amendment for a little while longer.

But that’s not to say that the closet was empty.

Hat tips: C. Cantoni, heroyalwhyness, JD, JP, Steen, and Vlad Tepes.