Benghazi Report Revives Troubling Questions
By: Michael Barone
/ Townhall Columnist
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
That was
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's angry response to a question
about the State Department's account of the attack on the Benghazi
consulate where Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans
were murdered on Sept. 11, 2012.
Her response was cheered by leftist commentators on MSNBC. Righteous indignation is so attractive.
But
of course it makes a difference. Hillary Clinton is leading in polls
for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and general election.
It's always legitimate to examine the performance of a front-runner for
the presidency. And of the president himself.
You can find such
an examination in the Interim Progress Report that five House Republican
committee chairmen released last Wednesday.
Democrats complain
that this is a partisan effort. Sure, but Democrats are free to present
their own view of the facts. My sense is that they would rather squelch
critical examination of Benghazi and the Obama administration's
response, as they did with the help of most of the press during the 2012
presidential campaign.
The interim report sets out copious
evidence of the rash of security threats in Libya during 2012. There
were more than 200 "security incidents" between June 2011 and July 2012
in Libya, 50 of them in Benghazi, it reports.
Britain and
international agencies withdrew personnel from Benghazi. The United
States reduced security forces despite a plea for increases from
then-Ambassador Gene Cretz in March 2012.
"In a cable signed by
Secretary Clinton in April 2012," the Interim Report reads, "the State
Department settled on a plan to scale back security assets in the U.S.
Mission in Libya, including Benghazi."
Later requests from Stevens after he replaced Cretz in May were also denied.
That
contradicts Clinton's testimony before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee in January 2013. She said the cable traffic never made its way
to her.
If so, why was her name appended to a response? Maybe
there's an explanation in the internal processes of the State
Department. And, it should be said, high officials often make decisions
that with hindsight seem obvious mistakes. But she has given us just an
exclamation, not an explanation.
And, as the Interim Report goes
on to explain, the accounts given by the Obama administration at the
time were misleading -- deliberately so.
It noted that State
immediately reported the attack to the White House Situation Room and
two hours later noted an al-Qaida affiliate's claim of responsibility.
There was no mention of a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video.
Yet
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and press secretary Jay Carney spoke
repeatedly for days later of a video and a protest. Clinton assured one
victim's family member that the video-maker was being prosecuted.
In
the meantime, a CIA draft of talking points for the House intelligence
committee was edited at the behest of State Department officials.
Omitted were references to previous Benghazi attacks, the al-Qaida
affiliate in Benghazi and intelligence estimates of threats in Libya.
Also struck, the Interim Report says, were "any and all suggestions that
the State Department had been previously warned of threats in the
region."
These changes were made, the chairmen conclude, not to
protect classified information -- reviews of the draft were circulated
on unsecure email systems -- and not to protect the investigation by the
FBI.
"This process to alter the talking points," concludes the
Interim Report, "can only be construed as a deliberate effort to mislead
the American people."
The resulting talking points were
delivered to Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for her five
Sunday talk show appearances on Sept. 16, in which she denounced the
"hateful video."
Who might have ordered this "deliberate effort"?
The Interim Report mentions Barack Obama only twice as recipient of
letters of inquiry, but this comment seems aimed clearly at him and his
first secretary of state.
We know that Obama was informed of the
attack while it was occurring, that he ordered Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta to respond to it (as he was already doing) and did not confer
later with officials that evening. The next morning he jetted off to Las
Vegas for a campaign event.
Benghazi threatened to undermine a
central element of Obama's appeal, that his presidency would reduce the
threat of Islamist terrorism. He managed to obfuscate that during the
rest of the campaign.
But maybe not forever.
