Benghazi: Will it be Obama’s Watergate?

The deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya may not have cost President Obama re-election, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post, but it will surely cast a dark shadow over his second term. In the days after the Sept. 11 attack that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, Obama administration officials—including U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the president himself—misled Americans by insisting that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi had grown out of a “spontaneous” demonstration over an anti-Islam video. This, we know now, was a “monstrous lie,” designed to keep Obama’s anti-terrorism credentials intact during the final phase of a close election. Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified before Congress last week that intelligence officials knew from the start that the attack was the work of Ansar al-Sharia, a local terrorist group affiliated with al Qaida—yet somehow, the White House’s talking points were edited to blame the attack on unspecified “extremists.”

Good news! said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com.This non-scandal’s big mystery has been solved. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said this week that the public talking points on Benghazi were edited by the intelligence community, not the White House. A reference to “al Qaida” was changed to “extremists” so as not to tip off a specific terrorist group that the CIA had sources in Benghazi and was on its trail. Not that it matters. The Benghazi conspiracy theory has been absurd from the start, since it’s premised on the notion that President Obama’s re-election somehow depended on the public believing “it was ‘extremists’ who killed our diplomats, not ‘terrorists.’” There’s only one explanation for how deranged the Right has become over what it is portraying as “possibly the greatest crime in the history of the U.S. government,” said Paul Waldman in Prospect.org. “Scandal envy.” Republicans are furious that Obama has yet to be tarnished by a major scandal like Iran-Contra or Watergate, and “Benghazi-gate” is their desperate attempt to rectify the situation, “even if there’s no there there.”

The scandal is quite real, said Victor Hanson in NationalReview.com. The biggest question is why our government rebuffed Stevens’s request for more security before the attack, and failed to provide military assistance during it, leading to the “preventable” murder of four brave Americans. As for why the White House might want to downplay the terrorism angle, said Peter Brookes in the New York Post, it’s pretty obvious. The full truth would have undermined Obama’s claim to have al Qaida “‘on the run,’” and shattered the notion that we’re “on the verge of a new and improved Middle East and North Africa, the result of Team Obama’s deft diplomacy.”

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The full truth about the attack is still unknown, said Erik Wemple in WashingtonPost.com. My CIA sources say there is no evidence that al Qaida was directly involved in the attack; instead, some of the attackers may have been “supporters” of radical Islam, with “tenuous links” to a local terrorist group affiliated with al Qaida. “Supporters” or “terrorists,” “involvement” or “links”—much of this debate hinges on subtle matters of semantics. “Something obviously went wrong in Benghazi,” said Andrew Rosenthal in The New York Times, and Republicans are right to demand answers. But “missteps don’t always add up to a scandal; and confusion after the fact doesn’t necessarily constitute a cover-up.”