Maureen Dowd, the consistently hyperbolic and partisan liberal columnist, said “the administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi . . . was unworthy of the greatest power on earth”. That’s right, before and during.
This is very odd. The very worst that anyone in the Obama administration would be guilty of before and during is negligence. Even that has not been demonstrated. It is possible that the administration did everything that could reasonably be expected, given the information available at the time. The biggest question mark is the one that Dowd has curiously ignored: what happened afterwards? It is not possible to believe that this administration – that any American administration – deliberately exposed embassy personnel to terrorist attack. But it most certainly is possible to believe that an American administration would deliberately cover up its failings, most especially in the run up to the president’s re-election.
The attack in Benghazi took place at the height of the presidential election campaign. The president had been running on a platform that claimed he had crippled al Qaeda and killed Osama bin Laden. While the latter claim is demonstrably true, the former is a matter of interpretation. The president did not want his claim to be made to seem foolish just weeks before America decided whether or not to retain his services.
In the hours and days that followed the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues the administration prepared talking points which avoided describing the attack as being a terrorist incident, included no reference to al Qaeda or its Libyan affiliates, and stressed that the incident was a spontaneous response to a movie made by an American film-maker attacking the prophet Mohammed. In fact, the incident seems to have been a long-planned attack, designed to take place on the anniversary of 9/11. Al Qaeda’s Libyan affiliate carried it out, and the movie seems to be an irrelevance, quite unknown to those who planned the attack.
The questions are who wrote the talking points and why were there 12 versions? To what extent was the wording influenced by election concerns and is there anything included known at the time to be untrue, or anything known to be true which was missed out?
The administration claims that the talking points were prepared by “the intelligence community”. Maybe, but there certainly seems to have been input from the State Department, which is somewhat more political than the CIA. State seems to have been concerned with defending its own reputation, which it felt was being unfairly trashed by the CIA.
It seems that all 12 versions of the talking points included a reference to the demonstration about the movie. That seems to be a genuine mistake by the CIA. But deleting references to al Qaeda is a more marginal call. Perhaps this was justified because the matter was uncertain, but it was certainly very convenient to the administration.
Much remains uncertain, and the House has a duty to investigate a suspicion of misconduct. Of that which is certain, perhaps the fact that journalists like Dowd have turned on the president is the most significant. Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and overreach by the Justice Department in secretly obtaining phone records from Associated Press may have created a tipping point in the media.
Quentin Langley is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire Business School as well as a freelance columnist published in the UK and all parts of the US. He blogs on social media and crisis communications at brandjacknews.com
Filed under: U.S. Politics
