Jack Cashill devotes his May 7 WorldNetDaily column to depicting filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula as a scapegoat for Benghazi, letting Nakoula complain that leaked information about his criminal record endangered his life:
The release of this information put a major target on Nakoula’s back and that of his family. At the time, given the White House’s widely echoed blame-the-video narrative, Nakoula believed himself responsible for the death of the four Americans in Benghazi.
[…]
“I felt I had blood on my hands,” Nakoula told me in a phone interview Monday. “I felt like I deserved my punishment.”The only “danger” Nakoula posed was as a target of Islamic wrath or that of his cohorts in the check-kiting scheme.
[…]
Among the very real death threats Nakoula faced was one from a Pakistani cabinet minister who put a $100,000 bounty on Nakoula’s head.
The Justice Department responded to those foreign threats against an American national by recommending a two-year prison term for the American.
It could have been worse. Egyptian courts sentenced Nakoula to death for his role in the video.When, some months after his arrest, I tracked Nakoula down to the Federal Correctional Institution–La Tuna at the westernmost tip of West Texas, I was the first person in the media to contact him.
When I called him on Monday, he was still confined to a halfway house in Orange County, Calif., nearly six months after he was supposed to have been freed.
“Why did you punish me again?” he asks angrily of the Justice Department. “Why? It was not in original judgment.”
Needless to say, Cashill ignores some inconvenient facts about Nakoula and his film. First, as we’ve noted, Nakoula deceived the actors in what became “The Innocence of Muslims” about the nature of the film. One actress told the Hollywood Reporter that the original script the actors followed was much different from the finished product, in which the actors’ voices were redubbed to make it an anti-Muslim film. That, in turn, put the actors’ live in danger, fearing reprisals for their parts in a film they were deceived about.
Second, Nakoulas film did, in fact, spark riots in the Mideast and elsewhere (just not Benghazi). The Week reported that protests occurred in more than 20 countries, killing at least 10 people.
Does Nakoula feel like he has blood on his hands for the people who did die in rioting over his sleazy, deceptive film? Cashill seems not to have asked him about that, nor did he ask about the lies he told his actors about the film’s intent.
That’s not the only narrative WND promoted about Nakoula. Erik Rush gets it wrong from a completely different viewpoint in his May 7 column, claiming Nakoula made the film as a government agent:
Finally, there is the shadowy background of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, producer of “The Innocence of Muslims” (the film that was purported to have touched off the widespread Muslim unrest of Sept. 11, 2012). The Shoebat Foundation and other media have alleged that Nakoula was actually an informant for the U.S. government dating back to the Clinton years. Did he produce “Innocence” at the behest of his government handlers for the express purpose of reinforcing White House propaganda? At this juncture, it’s certainly a reasonable question.
The rest of Rush’s column is his typical increasingly unhinged Obama derangement, demanding that the president be brought up on treason charges.