In case you didn't notice, the House Intelligence Committee released it's official report on it's investigation into the September 11, 2012 attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi. The report does quell a lot of rumors about the attacks. However, the report also states 3 important things that don't exactly put all questions to rest- 1 being about preparedness before the attack, and the other 2 being about the administration's actions after the attack:
Before: "The Committee, however, received evidence that the State Department security personnel, resources and equipment were unable to counter the terrorist threat that day and required CIA assistance"
You can spin this left or right depending on your views, but what is says unequivocally is that at some point decisions were made that rendered the diplomatic facility in Benghazi unable to withstand an attack of any size. Someone somewhere failed to foresee the unintended consequences of those decisions, and lives were lost because of it. To this day, NO ONE has been held accountable for this.
After: "The early intelligence assessments and the Administration's initial public narrative on the causes and motivations for the attacks were not fully accurate. There was a stream of contradictory evidence that came in after the attacks."
"The process used to generate the talking points HPSCI asked for- and which were used for Ambassador Rice's public appearances- was flawed. HPSCI asked for those talking points solely to aid Members' ability to communicate publicly using the best available intelligence at the time, and mistakes were made in the process of how those talking points were developed."
The left will spin this as a simple clerical error, and the right will claim it's "proof" of deliberate concealment of the facts. Neither of those can be proved. What can be proved is that in the midst of an ongoing investigation, in the first days and weeks after, when no answers were yet clear, inaccurate information was given to the American public. Whether by accident or design, this is a fact.
Now, the Obama Administration is quite famous for refusing to comment on ongoing investigations, and most of the time their stated reasoning is that they just don't want to comment one way or the other before all of the facts are known. That's actually good policy, when it's done because of it's merits and not used as a political shield. However, in the case of Benghazi, the Administration began to make bold assertions about only one possible cause, even though they clearly had contradictory evidence coming in every day. Rather than give all possible causes and decline to declare any of them to be "the" cause, they picked one- the Youtube video- and ran with it until enough evidence became available to the public that they had to backtrack. Why break suddenly with a longstanding policy in this particular case, with so many unanswered questions swirling and so much contradictory evidence being assessed?
As you know, all of this took place in the run up to an election 6 weeks away, while the President was campaigning on Al Qaeda being "on the run." Even if you accept the Administration's arguments about "core" Al Qeada being "decimated, I think we can all agree that this kind of attack being so close to an election would hurt any incumbent President, regardless of party, unless they could find a way to effectively explain it away and duck the public's blame. No one can prove that the talking points were DELIBERATELY designed to avoid political fallout, but it can be, and has been proved that the Obama Administration chose to comment on an ongoing investigation, under the aforementioned circumstances, even though they've made it a policy throughout their tenure NOT to do exactly that. Was it deliberate? Maybe. Was it politically motivated? Perhaps. Was it a bad decision? Damn right. Had they chosen to simply wait to comment on the people involved and their motivations until after all of the facts had come out, they would have looked much less guilty of something nefarious, if at all.
As I said, the report puts a lot of rumors to rest. What it does not do is prove one way or the other whether the decisions made in the immediate aftermath were designed to avoid a political disaster for the President. As is the case with any scandal, the public knows what happened on September 11, 2012, but they are more concerned with whether or not a cover up took place. They can accept that mistakes were made, but if they can't trust that the government did not withhold information in order to avoid political backlash, they get angry and they express that anger at the ballot box. I see no proof of cover up in this report, nor do I see proof that it didn't happen.
Consider the facts, consider the circumstances and consider what your own common sense tells you to be true. Don't take my word for anything. You decide what you think happened. That is how it should always be.
God Bless.
