RUSH: This continuing, enraging story about Benghazi. That alone is reason enough to fire Barack Obama. Those of you in this country who are military families, you have served, you have worn the uniform, you have family members who have worn the uniform, if I were you, I would be outraged. I would be unable to contain myself. I’m already that way. It is stunning what we are continuing to learn. And it is dribbling out.

David Ignatius is now writing columns about it in the Washington Post. Tom Brokaw even talked about it today on the Today Show this morning. It is dribbling out. And whatever happens on Election Day, this is gonna be investigated. This is gonna cause heads to roll. This is inexplicable. What is happening, what did happen is inexcusable. The White House has been lying. The State Department has even been lying a couple of places.

The CIA has been trying to fall on the sword. You go back to the first of Benghazi. White House was insisting for what was it, ten days, that a video was responsible for this; that there was no evidence of a terror attack. All this was, was a spontaneously combustible protest. It was just that YouTube video. The YouTube video got everybody all upset. On Fox News today, Jennifer Griffin is back.

Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin is reporting “that cables from the consulate itself made clear that they expected an attack from local militia groups in the hours before the terrorist attack.” We learned yesterday that the ambassador himself had sent cables in August warning the White House and the State Department and everybody else that Al-Qaeda was massing. Al-Qaeda was assembling. They were rehearsing.

He feared an attack.

He wanted security.

He wanted defense structure.

We learned today from Fox News this morning that the consulate itself sent cables hours before the attack that they expected the attack. The consulate, we know now, many — multiple — times prior to the attack told Washington an attack was coming. They did so as far back as September, up to and including hours prior to it. The consulate also told the State Department that they had reason to believe that their local security was gathering intel for the attack.

Their local security was not trusted, and it turns out local security could not be trusted. So they tried to pass this off to everybody else. They tried to say, “Well, Hillary Clinton took responsibility. The State Department over here or the CIA over there.” What all this adds up to is that this came from the White House. All this adds up to this came from the White House. This came from the president, and the “buck”?

(Clinton impression) “Heh, heh. “The buck never got here!” Bill Clinton always said. You watch. Before this is all said and done, it’s gonna leak. The trail is gonna go right back to the Oval Office and the Situation Room and the president and whoever was in there with him. I don’t know; it’s a crying shame what is happening. Now in the Northeast, we have union crews who are turning away nonunion repair workers coming to help out in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The Las Vegas newspaper, Las Vegas Review-Journal, has a scathing editorial. It’s anti-Obama on Benghazi. “Benghazi Blunder: Obama Unworthy Commander-in-Chief.” CNS News’s Sharyl Attkisson: “CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the US Mission in Benghazi, the Obama [regime] did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG).

“‘The CSG is the one group that’s supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,’ a high-ranking government official told CBS News.” They were not convened. They were not assembled. Their work, their input, was not consulted.

“[A] high-ranking government official told CBS News [Sharyl Attkisson], ‘They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon.'” And you’ve heard about Tyrone Woods begging for help, thinking he had air support when he’s lighting up the mortar rounds with his laser. Every day we learn more and more about this. I hear everybody repeating my line. I like it, too.

“Nobody died at Watergate.”

This is far more than Watergate, and the press in this case is the equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein helping Nixon cover up Watergate.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Mike in Fairfield, California, you’re next. It’s great to have you on Open Line Friday. Hi.

CALLER: Rush, good morning and greetings from a 58-year-old recently unemployed conservative in California. This business about Benghazi has really, really got me set back here. It’s not necessarily… A lot of it is just the ineptitude and untruth coming out of the administration.

RUSH: Look, there’s more than that now. Mike, what we’re learning here is that there’s more than ineptitude. There’s a cover-up now. There may have been ineptitude at the beginning, but I don’t think it was ineptitude. I think it was somebody that didn’t actively want any American show of force in that region for whatever reason, and didn’t believe what he was being told about the mounting threat.

CALLER: I agree, and that leads to my main point about those four Americans being hung out to dry. I stop and I think about all those white crosses on the cliffs over Normandy and the unmarked graves and the islands in the middle of the Pacific and on and on, and how those people defended us and fought for us, knowing that the guy next to him had their back. I’m afraid that the morale of our folks in the military, our heroes, is gonna be hurt. And I don’t know if a change of administration is gonna actually be able to help that if this continues.

RUSH: Well, a change in administration would because it would result in different orders, beliefs, behavior. I don’t have any doubt about that. But this Benghazi story, now. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, a lead newspaper, has just excoriated Obama. They say he’s unqualified, incompetent to be commander-in-chief and president. Folks, what we know today is that we have been lied to and were lied to on purpose.

Nobody was “mistaken.”

They strategically, tactically lied.

Susan Rice, if somebody could get to her today and have her be honest, I guarantee you she is livid. Because she’s gonna be one of the people whose heads roll. She’s gonna be a sacrificial lamb when this is all over, when it starts being investigated. But they lied to us from the get-go, and they planned the lie. They knew the moment this attack was taking place. They knew before the attack that it was going to happen.

They were warned multiple times, and cables were sent from the consulate that day. That’s what we learned this morning from Jennifer Griffin at Fox. A cable was sent that day saying that an attack was being planned, assembled, and put together. Requests for help were made. The ambassador himself sent a cable in August telling everybody in the White House, top level, that this was happening. Al-Qaeda was massing.

And Obama still, to this day, is on the campaign trail using the phrase: “Al-Qaeda’s on the run; Osama bin Laden is dead!” Four Americans are dead. In some instances, they violated orders to help. They were told to stand down, and when you hear that they were “told to stand down,” that’s not the right terminology. They were told not to help. They were told to stay put.

They were told not to offer any defense of the consulate or the ambassador or any of the people there. To say that they were “told to stand down” doesn’t cut it. They were ordered to do nothing! They were ordered not to help! They were ordered not to offer a defense. And, as we know now, Tyrone Woods violated orders and went anyway because that’s the nature of these people.

We know that he identified where the mortar fire was coming from.

We know that he identified it with a laser.

Well, the only reason you do that is because he’s expecting somebody to bomb that target once he points it out to them. That means he’s assuming that he’s got air support. He’s assuming somebody’s up there that’s going to take out that mortar. But all that happened was the terrorists were able to identify where he was. He had, by the very act of identifying where it was and lasering it, giving up his own location.

He was killed with mortar fire from the very installation he thought he was helping to take out. To me, this is unacceptable. I can only imagine what these family members feel like as they’ve learned this along with the rest of us, and I can only imagine what military people in general feel about this. To have our intelligence insulted with the lie that it was a protest that was in response to a video?

None of that was true.

We were strategically, purposefully lied to from the highest levels of the regime.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ed Henry, Fox News, has tweeted a photograph of some signs along the route in Ohio that Obama took to get to a campaign appearance. The signs say:

“Tell the truth about Benghazi!”

“Worse than Watergate!”

“You let them die!”

I’m sorry, does this stuff happen with winning campaigns? I guess it did. I guess they had some Bush stuff in 2004. I don’t want to make too much of it, but, man, it’s out there. The point is, it is out there. This Benghazi stuff is trickling out.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Steven in Daytona Beach as we head back to the phones here on Open Line Friday. Great to have you here, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for having me, first-time caller. I got out of the Army last year. I was in Afghanistan from June of ’08 to September of 2009 with the United States Army, and I worked in intelligence where we watched drone videos for any type of military operation that involved coalition forces. With this Benghazi issue, if the president of the United States, which I know for a fact he’s watching from up to the second to where he’s able to see what’s happening as it’s happening, if he was able to see that —

RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. We don’t know that. We know he knew. We don’t know he was in the Situation Room. We know he was in there for bin Laden, and they put out a Situation photo, Situation Room photo for the hurricane aftermath, Hurricane Sandy, but we don’t know — and I’m serious about that — we don’t know if he cared enough about it to convene. We know that all the agencies knew. We know CIA knew, the State Department knew. We knew that all the terror group people in the White House knew. We knew the top of the chart was informed about it, but I don’t know that they convened in the Situation Room. That’s what I think is yet to leak.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: If he was watching this in the Situation Room and didn’t do anything, that’s where you’re headed with this, right?

CALLER: Right. What I was getting at is, whoever was watching this, and I know somebody from higher level, like you said, is watching this, they would have been able to have an appropriate response militarily in the need of a dire situation, and it looks like that either they were denied or they were just left abandoned or whatever happened. The point is, there is military options to go in an assist with —

RUSH: Steven, they were denied.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: They were denied. They were denied three times. Tyrone Woods asked three times. The consulate asked twice, once in August and once that day. That’s what we learned this morning. A cable was sent from the consulate to Washington: Al-Qaeda is amassing outside. Al-Qaeda is preparing an attack. It was never a protest. It was never a spontaneous bunch of hooligans that got out of control. It was never a video. It was always a terrorist military operation. It was strategized, it was executed, it was watched in real time. Requests for aid were repeatedly denied. And not only were the requests denied, they were ordered to do nothing in terms of offering assistance and help.

This is outrageous. Pick any military operation you can think of and imagine the commander-in-chief ordering forces not to defend other Americans under attack. It doesn’t happen. It did happen here. And the media in this country has helped cover it up for the purpose of aiding and abetting the reelection of the commander-in-chief. They did ask. They pleaded. And, in fact, Mr. Woods, the Navy SEAL who died, thought that he did have air cover, otherwise there’s no way he would have pointed his laser at the mortar because he gave up his own location. He was identifying himself. He would not have painted that target unless he thought somebody was gonna take it out.

There was no fog of war. There was no confusion here. What we are in the middle of is the fog of cover-up. Pure and simple.