Indeed, the West Wing, the State Department and the CIA are now busy pointing fingers at one another and attempting to shift the blame. President Obama would have us forget the whole thing, which he labels a "sideshow," in keeping with the attempt by White House spokesman Jay Carney to relegate the affair to ancient history, i.e. "Let's be clear, Benghazi happened a long time ago." In fact, there is enough blame to go around for everyone.
In defense of Nuland, Brooks today tells us:
"Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.
The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.
. . . .
We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security."
The article by Schmitt, Cooper and Schmidt (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/world/africa/attack-in-libya-was-major-blow-to-cia-efforts.html), to which Brooks refers, told us back on September 23, 2012:
"'It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,' said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. 'We got our eyes poked out.'
The C.I.A.’s surveillance targets in Benghazi and eastern Libya include Ansar al-Sharia, a militia that some have blamed for the attack, as well as suspected members of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb."
Note that the damage to CIA operations in Libya contradicted the Obama administration's pre-election narrative, i.e. that US involvement in bringing down the Qaddafi regime, which had been demeaned by some as "leadership from behind," had in fact been a smashing success and that al-Qaeda, with the death of bin Laden, had been dealt a mortal blow.
Brooks's conclusion regarding this disaster:
"Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.
Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus."
First, I don't know Ms. Nuland. More to the point, I am not blaming her. I don't even blame Susan Rice, an Obama devotee, who thought she was doing her job.
As far as I am concerned, there are two primary aspects to the Benghazi debacle. First, a US ambassador in the Middle East was murdered, and the Obama administration never lifted a finger to protect him while the assault was underway. Even if the US presence in Benghazi primarily involved intelligence gathering, the murder of a US ambassador, the American retreat from the city with its tail between its legs, and the failure to carry out retribution against those who perpetrated the attack, have dealt US overseas prestige a stinging blow.
The second failure involves a concerted effort by the Obama administration, going right up to the top, to misinform the American electorate. Let's ignore the shameful way in which the talking points were redacted at the expense of the truth. Suffice it to say, we witnessed the over-zealous efforts of persons, many of them youngsters, whose expertise involves public relations and who know nothing - and consequently care nothing - about actual events on the ground. In short, these people were doing what they do best, i.e. spinning a nasty set of circumstances.
Instead, let's focus on what Hillary Clinton had to say. Hillary toed the Obama administration's line and tied the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi to an absurd film concerning Mohamed. One day after the attack, she stated (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/new-york-times-editorial-republicans.html), "we are working to determine the precise motivations and methods of those who carried out this assault" and then linked the attack to "inflammatory material posted on the Internet." Months later, of course, Hillary would infamously declare:
"With all due respect, the fact is we have four dead Americans. Whether it was because of a protest or because guys outside for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans. What difference at this point does it make?"
President Obama? In an appearance on the "Daily Show" with Jon Stewart on October 18, 2012, Obama declared:
"When a tragic event like this happens on the other side of the world, immediately a whole bunch of intelligence starts coming in and people try to piece together exactly what happened. And what I have always tried to do is to make sure we just get all the facts, figure out what went wrong, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. And we’re still in that process now. But everything we get, every piece of information we get — as we got it — we laid it out for the American people."
Needless to say, "every piece of information" was not laid out for the American people. In fact, no information was subsequently laid out for examination.
Or stated otherwise, Hillary and Obama told bald-faced lies.
Is it a "scandal" when an American ambassador is murdered and no one comes to his aid, and when America's secretary of state and president cover up the facts? I think so, but then, heck, maybe at my age, I'm no longer attuned to our brave new world.
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