Get Out The Tinfoil Hats

I'm not a conspiracy guy. I tend to favor Occam's Razor: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."

That said, however, I have to admit that a couple of theories floating around the Internet concerning the killing of four Americans in the attack on our Benghazi consulate make me wonder just a little bit.

Four Americans were slaughtered under conditions that we still cannot fathom ... Witnesses of the attack on the CIA annex have either disappeared or gone silent. The families of the deceased have received conflicting accounts of how loved ones were murdered... (We also know) that those under assault requested aid; that sending such help was imminently feasible; and that no one yet can explain why such succor was not sent.

In the aftermath, Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton all swore that the attack was prompted by an obscure YouTube video, something we now know is not true. What is true, however, is that almost all of the relevant decision-makers no longer occupy the positions they did before and during the attack.

Hillary “what difference does it make” Clinton retired from the Secretary of State post to congratulations and media frenzy about her likely 2016 presidential campaign. Susan Rice was promoted to National Security advisor... General Carter Ham, in charge of Africa Command, has retired. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has retired. CIA Director David Petraeus has resigned.

Various theories have been trotted out to explain these facts. One holds that the obama administration planned to secretly facilitate the capture of Ambassador Chris Stevens by a group with ties to the Egyptian Brotherhood. This would have permitted then-Egyptian President Morsi to broker a trade: the 'Blind Sheik' (held by the U.S.) for Ambassador Stevens. Morsi would have fulfilled a pledge he made to secure the Blind Sheik's release, thereby strengthening his position in Egypt. In turn, obama would have pulled off an 'October Surprise' to improve his re-election chances.

While at first glance that seems far-fetched, it does provide answers for the following questions.

•  Why did State repeatedly deny requests for more security in Benghazi, despite increasingly dire predictions? Instead, State completely stripped security from Stevens. No credible explanation has been offered for the removal of security by the White House or the State Department.

•  Who arranged Stevens' meeting with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akinin in Benghazi, not Tripoli, so late in the evening?

•  Why on 9/11 -- of all dates -- was there no special security posture ordered in diplomatic installations around the Middle East?

•  Why did so many people in the administration publicly lie about the nature of the attack when it was clear from the onset that it was an organized attack by terrorists?

It also explains why the military was repeatedly told to stand down, and why the heroic actions of former SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods have gone unappreciated by the obama administration.

A second theory posits that the State Department had secretly armed the Libyan insurgents who overthrew Gaddhafi. Once it became apparent that some of the “insurgents” the obama administration had armed were, in fact, dangerous radicals with ties to al-Qaeda, a covert operation was launched to regain possession of those weapons.

(Ambassador Chris) Stevens’ mission in Benghazi ... was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”

This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda...

This theory has been bolstered by a recent statement from one of the lawyers representing individuals with inside knowledge of the Benghazi attack.

A lawyer representing one of the whistleblowers with knowledge of the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi last September says 400 surface-to-air missiles were "diverted to Libya" during the attack and fell into "the hands of some very ugly people."

Saying his information "comes from a former intelligence official who stayed in constant contact with people in the special ops and intelligence community," diGenova said the U.S. intelligence community is terrified the missiles might be used to shoot down airliners — and that fear, in part, fueled the closing of embassies in the Middle East last week.

"They were afraid that there was going to be a missile attack on one of the embassies," he said...

"Remember, you can take a shoulder-held missile and shoot it into an embassy. Not just into the sky.

Given who the lawyer represents - Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi attacks; and Mark Thompson, a former Marine who serves as Deputy Coordinator for Operations in the State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau - his statement has some credence.

Knowing the players involved, it also makes the following statement quite believable.

The attorneys say Hicks' and Thompson's superiors subjected them to an intimidation campaign after then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's Accountability Review Board ignored their accounts of the Benghazi attack.

To me, the biggest drawback to either theory is that they both require a degree of competence from the obama administration that hasn't been apparent to date. I'm not saying that barry and his cohorts aren't sleazy enough to participate in such shenanigans -- quite the contrary -- but I have serious doubts about their ability to pull it off. After all, the operation and subsequent coverup would involve so many people that leaks would be inevitable.

No, I'm back to Occam's Razor...