Whitewashing Benghazi | The American Spectator
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Were he alive today, Richard Nixon would have to doff his hat to Barack Obama. Compared with how the Obama administration has swept under the rug the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, Nixon’s attempt to cover up the Watergate burglary was rank amateurism. To be fair, Nixon’s team of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean were not in the same league as Obama’s, which includes not only his cabinet but most of the national media and much of Congress.
If a president were intent on covering something up—something big, such as an illegal gun walking operation to Mexico or a dereliction of duty that gets Americans killed at a diplomatic outpost in the Middle East—he would have to operate on as grand a scale as Obama has. He would have to insist that the events were caused not by what the facts showed, but something cut from whole cloth. He and his administration’s functionaries would have to hide documents and shut people up to thwart congressional oversight. And, most importantly, he’d have to have the unquestioning support of loyal minions who would lie and mislead on his behalf, or—like Susan McDougal apparently did for Bill Clinton in the Whitewater scandal—even go to jail to protect him.
The Benghazi veneer is difficult to penetrate. What began as a claim that the attack was a spontaneous response to an obscure video evolved into a centerpiece of the 2012 election and a major scandal for Obama’s administration. A poll conducted last fall showed that 62 percent of likely voters—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—believe a dedicated congressional committee should be formed to investigate the attack. Americans want to know why this happened and who, really, was behind it. They also want to know how it could have happened. A year and a half after the assault, answers are still less than forthcoming. Hearings have been conducted, testimony has been given, reports have been produced and distributed, documents have been declassified, articles and blog posts have been written, books have been published—hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of material. Yet last December, after what he called “months of reporting,” David Kirkpatrick, chief of the New York Times’s bureau in Cairo, tentatively concluded in an article that the “attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs,” that there is “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.” In other words, we’re back in the Rose Garden again, where President Obama spoke on the morning of September 12, 2012. We’re still watching Susan Rice on the Sunday shows. We’re right where we started.
Things might even be worse than that.
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