View From The Left: Arguing about Benghazi was waste of time

View From The Left: Arguing about Benghazi was waste of time

By David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post. With editorial comments

The Senate Intelligence Committee made headlines last week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that.

The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.

[not true, he is assuming you are uninformed]

The GOP’s Benghazi obsession was the weird backdrop for foreign-policy debate through much of last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham used it as a pretext for blocking administration nominations. Rep. Darrell Issa used the issue to impugn the integrity and independence of a review conducted by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and former ambassador Tom Pickering.

[Another untruth - examine the public comments by the two mention and you will not find one word to support the assertion]

Driving the Republican jihad was a claim, first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to “stand down,” perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a cover-up.

[The report did not clear the stand down issue (Google the subject).  Further, note the inflammatory use of "Republican jihad "- gives you clear insight into the bias behind the article]

The Senate Intelligence Committee report addressed this inflammatory charge head-on: “The committee explored claims that there was a ‘stand down’ order given to the security team at the annex. Although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly to the mission compound, the committee found no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction by the chief of (the CIA) base or any other party.” [Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya, testified that a small Special Forces team was set to go to the rescue of the consulate, but was ordered twice to "stand down." This contradicts the assertion by the Pentagon no "stand down" orders were issued. Who issued the stand-down order? Why?]

The Senate panel also rejected the insinuation, made repeatedly by Republicans, that the Obama administration failed to scramble available military assets that could have defended the Benghazi annex and saved the lives of the four American victims. “There were no U.S. military resources in position to intervene in short order in Benghazi,” the report says flatly. “The committee has reviewed the allegations that U.S. personnel ... prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated.”

[See above note]

These are bipartisan findings, mind you, endorsed by the panel’s Republican members as well as Democrats. GOP members offered some zingers in their additional minority views, but the Democrats rightly credited their colleagues for standing up to the right-wing spin machine: “We worked together on a bipartisan basis to dispel the many factual inaccuracies and conspiracy theories related to the Benghazi attacks.”

[The committee determined that the U.S. military command in Africa didn’t know about the CIA annex and that the Pentagon didn’t have the resources in place to defend the diplomatic compound in an emergency.  “The attacks were preventable, based on extensive intelligence reporting on the terrorist activity in Libya — to include prior threats and attacks against Western targets — and given the known security shortfalls at the U.S. Mission,” the panel said in a statement.]

The Obama administration’s supposed cover-up on Benghazi became a crusade for leading Republicans. A low point came when Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Reform issued a report last September questioning “the independence and integrity of the review” by the Mullen-Pickering group. These were extraordinary charges to make against a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former ambassador to six countries – especially since Issa didn’t present any conclusive evidence to back up his allegations.

[The bipartisan report lays out more than a dozen findings regarding the assaults on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, on a diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in the Libyan city of Benghazi. It says the State Department failed to increase security at its diplomatic mission despite warnings and faults intelligence agencies for not sharing information about the existence of the CIA outpost with the U.S. military.]

The Republican tirades about Benghazi were unfortunate not just because they were based on erroneous speculation but because they distracted policymakers from the real challenge of framing coherent policy in the Middle East. Sometimes, it seemed as if Benghazi finger-pointing was the only issue that leading Republicans cared about. In fact, the Senate committee’s report echoes many of the themes of the earlier report by the Accountability Review Board, which noted “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.” Warnings about deteriorating conditions in Benghazi were ignored; proposals to add additional security there were rejected; even as evidence mounted of al-Qaeda’s growing power in Benghazi, the State Department failed to respond adequately.
[In his own words, Ignatius refutes his own argument - this is an absence of leadership and competence at the top]

The Senate report makes clear that some important security mistakes were made by ambassador Christopher Stevens, the courageous but sometimes incautious diplomat who was among those who died in the attack.

Perhaps the silliest aspect of the Benghazi affair was the focus on the errant “talking points” prepared for Congress, which cited incorrect intelligence about “spontaneous demonstrations” in Benghazi that wasn’t corrected by the CIA until a week after the points were delivered on Sunday talk shows by Susan Rice, then-U.N. ambassador. Rice is still under a cloud because she repeated the CIA’s “points” prepared at Congress’ insistence.

[Gregory Hicks, then the deputy chief of mission in Libya, told the House Oversight Committee that he'd told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the attack that it was being carried out by terrorists, so his "jaw dropped" when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on TV blaming protests against a YouTube video that offended Muslims.]

Next time, the Senate report notes, the intelligence community should just tell Congress what facts are unclassified – and let the legislators do the talking.

[Not a bad idea.  "In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the [Intelligence Community] received numerous reports, both classified and unclassified, which provided contradictory accounts that there were demonstrations at the Temporary Mission Facility. In some cases, these intelligence reports-which were disseminated widely in the Intelligence Community--contained references to press reports on protests that were simply copied into intelligence products.]

This is what political hacks pretending to journalist do.  They take source information and produce plausible lies.  Beware of these beast!