Not much, actually. President Obama has been re-elected to continue mishandling the war on terrorism and allow the Muslim Brotherhood to spread. Hillary Clinton was allowed to exit from the State Department gracefully and set herself up to run for president in 2016.
Even though both blamed a video to orchestrate a cover-up.
The Administration willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a political demonstration caused by a YouTube video. U.S. officials on the ground reported – and video evidence confirms – that demonstrations outside the Benghazi Mission did not occur and that the incident began with an armed attack on the facility. Senior Administration officials knowingly minimized the role played by al-Qa’ida-affiliated entities and other associated groups in the attacks, and decided to exclude from the discussion the previous attempts by extremists to attack U.S. persons or facilities in Libya.
That’s one of the nuggets of the report. There are several more at the link. Like this.
Administration officials crafted and continued to rely on incomplete and misleading talking points. Specifically, after a White House Deputies Meeting on Saturday, September 15, 2012, the Administration altered the talking points to remove references to the likely participation of Islamic extremists in the attacks. The Administration also removed references to the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya, including information about at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi. Senior State Department officials requested – and the White House approved – that the details of the threats, specifics of the previous attacks, and previous warnings be removed to insulate the Department from criticism that it ignored the threat environment in Benghazi.
And this.
Evidence rebuts Administration claims that the talking points were modified to protect classified information or to protect an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Email exchanges during the interagency process do not reveal any concern with protecting classified information. Additionally, the Bureau itself approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested. Thus, the claim that the State Department’s edits were made solely to protect that investigation is not credible.
But we can do all the Scooby sleuthing we want. The State Department failed to secure the compound in Benghazi, for reasons still unknown. Was it indifference, incompetence, or malice? We don’t know and Hillary is one of the world’s cover-up experts so we’ll probably never know. The Obama administration covered up the terrorist murders of four Americans, and the media willfully aided that cover-up. Clinton’s Accountability Review Board was an exercise in deflecting the issue until after the election, and it succeeded. The talking points caused just enough media noise to keep the heat off. The nation was rope-a-doped and Obama won.
This scandal should have been bigger than Watergate. It had a body count and a clear motive, to preserve the president’s line that “al Qaeda is on the run.” It may also have been used to cover up the administration’s arming the rebels in Syria. But the media doesn’t care and never will, and the votes of low-information voters count just as much as anyone else’s.
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