Benghazi: Is the White House conducting a cover-up?

Democrats are pretending it’s all a “political witch hunt,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But the House Oversight Committee’s hearings last week into the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, shed more light on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, than the Obama administration has in the five weeks since it happened. We now know without question that the attack did not escalate from a protest over an anti-Islamic YouTube video, as the administration initially claimed. Intelligence officials knew within 24 hours that it was a terrorist attack, but administration officials stuck with the YouTube story for days. More troubling still: Security officer Eric A. Nordstrom testified last week that he and other officials had been deeply concerned about the growing risks from Islamic radicals in Libya, and repeatedly asked the State Department to bring in U.S. soldiers with real firepower. He was twice turned down. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died as a result of that negligence, said Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard. They were killed in a well-planned al Qaida attack timed for 9/11 that our government should have anticipated. Clearly, President Obama and others are lying to the American people about what really happened in Benghazi, and why it happened—making this “a scandal of the first order.”

The Obama administration was certainly guilty of “some confused assessments and even more confused rhetoric” in the days following the attack, said The Washington Post. But Republican claims of a “deliberate cover-up” are “overblown.” Yes, the administration was “slow to publicly recognize what had happened”—but the hearings found no evidence of an effort to deceive the public. Clearly, though, the attacks were “preceded by terrible decisions about security.” Even though extremist militants were known to be operating in the Benghazi area, only a handful of hired Libyans and security contractors were protecting the consulate. Inexplicably, a 16-member security team of U.S. soldiers had been sent home in August. That requires further explanation—“and it’s what Congress should hold the administration accountable for.”

Benghazi was “a tragedy, not a scandal,” said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com. The U.S. has 275 embassies and consulates abroad, and it’s absurd to expect the president to be involved in the security arrangements for each one of them. “That’s one of the reasons the State Department exists.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped forward this week to say that the responsibility for keeping diplomats safe lies with her, and not the president. “The president and vice president wouldn’t be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals,” Clinton said. And while Foggy Bottom bears ultimate responsibility for the inadequate security in Benghazi, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com, the GOP deserves its share of the blame too. House Republicans cut the Obama administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in 2011, and $331 million this year. It takes “a set of onions” to cut funding for diplomatic security—and then exploit a tragedy to score points in the midst of a presidential campaign.

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Still, it’s undeniable that the White House botched its handling of Benghazi from the outset, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Perhaps the administration was unnerved by al Qaida’s involvement, which suggests that Obama’s assistance to the rebels who toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi “helped create a power vacuum in which terrorists can operate with impunity.” Bingo, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com. It’s been obvious for months that Libya is a “non-functioning state with a dire al Qaida problem.” Obama, meanwhile, has been pretending that “al Qaida is kaput,” while Libya’s revolution was a brilliant foreign policy success. Hillary Clinton can try and take the blame for this mess if she likes, but “the buck stops at the White House.”

Given how close we are to Nov. 6, said Alex Koppelman in NewYorker.com, it’s inevitable that Benghazi would become “a political battle,” instead of a serious review of how to improve security for the U.S. Foreign Service. This is what happens in Washington whenever there’s a scandal or policy failure: “The opposition party prosecutes and grandstands; the president’s party deflects, covers, and complains.” It would be naïve to expect anything else. “Still, considering the lives lost, and those still at risk, it would have been nice to see something different for a change.”