Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
“Why do people claim that the Benghazi scandal is phony?” asked Dana Milbank. To see why, just check with the conspiracy theorists who are now desperately trying to keep the scandal alive. At a conservative conference on Benghazi this week, Cliff Kincaid, the director of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media, said the Obama administration was trying to cover up the fact that CIA operatives in Libya were secretly arming al Qaida terrorist groups. “This administration has a policy of supporting al Qaida, the same people behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Kincaid said. A former CIA officer, Clare Lopez, agreed that the administration had secretly decided “to help the forces of Islam, of al Qaida.” Back on Earth, there are legitimate questions about whether the State Department could have prevented the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. But that’s not what interests Republican partisans. They’d rather swap nutty fantasies about President Obama’s terrorist sympathies, while searching for some way to damage Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances. Outside the fever swamps, no one is listening.
