Meanwhile, for Democrats, the controversy became a sign of how Republicans operate in bad faith — ginning up controversy, and duping their supporters, for political advantage. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. In addition, the White House and the investigating panel are at loggerheads as to whether President Obama should have to answer questions already submitted by the panel for the president's consideration.
The fact that the Democrats have released their own report, while sitting on the same panel as Republicans, serves to heighten the partisanship of the inquiry, yet they said they were left with no choice, accusing Republicans of leading "one of the longest and most partisan congressional investigations in history.
The dueling Benghazi reports could have political repercussions for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, and the Benghazi investigation has already uncovered her use of a private email server to conduct government business, now the subject of an FBI investigation. The Democrats' report states that the cause of the attacks "remains unclear to this day," quoting testimony by David Petraeus, in which the former CIA director says, "To be candid with you, I am not sure that the amount of scrutiny spent on this has been in the least bit worth it.
Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.
My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. But you know what? We change lives. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. And we can prove it.
Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription. If you have questions about your account, please contact customer service or call us at This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out. It wasn't an embassy or even an official consulate; it was so off-book that the Libyan government was never officially notified of its existence. This put the mission outside the normal State Department procedures used to allocate security funding and personnel.
The "talking points" in question are the official administration talking points, from just after the attack, on how to describe what had happened. Susan Rice, then the US ambassador to the UN, used these talking points when she appeared on Sunday talk shows that week.
Rice claimed, in her appearances, that the attack had grown out of a spontaneous protest against the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims. She didn't make this up; it was the CIA's assessment at the time. But this claim turned out to be wrong. While some of the attackers really were incensed by the film, closed circuit footage from the diplomatic building showed that there was no protest.
In the subsequent "talking points" controversy, Republicans accused the White House of making up the "spontaneous protest" claim in order to cover up their failure or downplay the role of terrorism.
They also accused the administration of inappropriately manipulating the talking points during internal discussions. Congressional Republicans spent countless hours looking into the talking points. Detailed dissections of the talking points , like this one from the Weekly Standard 's Steven Hayes, appeared all over right-wing media.
But the CIA did in fact believe, in those first few days, that the attack had grown from a protest against the anti-Islam film. Now, the CIA assessment was badly flawed. The House Select Committee report documented a number of errors in it: for example, it cited a news article from September 4 as evidence of a protest happening on September While the talking points Susan Rice used were incorrect, this was an honest CIA error made in the first days after the incident, and not a deliberate White House cover-up.
There is no evidence of inappropriate White House tampering. Former CIA Director David Petraeus said in Senate testimony on November 16, , "They went through the normal process that talking points — unclassified public talking points — go through. Still, the incident made Rice so controversial that she was forced to withdraw her name from consideration to become secretary of state.
Continued Republican interest in the talking points also seems to have played a role in Boehner's decision to create the select committee in May — the body that uncovered, somewhat accidentally, the Clinton email scandal. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings L and Republican Rep.
Darrell Issa R at a hearing on Benghazi. Nine different bodies have investigated Benghazi: the State Department's Accountability Review Board and eight separate congressional committees or staff reports.
With the select committee's reports in, all of them have now completed investigations. Each has identified problems with the way the incident was handled, but none have uncovered real evidence of an administration cover-up or failure to properly respond to the attacks. This song is pretty ridiculous, but it's emblematic of the way that Benghazi has become a kind of folk obsession among the conservative rank-and-file.
You can buy Benghazi T-shirts , throw pillows , and mugs. This now-infamous acrostic tweet may best capture the Benghazi hysteria:. Republicans' interest in Benghazi isn't just cynical politics although there is for sure some of that. Conservatives have long seen Obama as a feckless, incompetent liar — the idea that he failed to prevent a terrorist attack, then covered it up, fits with their preexisting beliefs.
The fact that independent reporting vindicated the administration didn't help, as conservatives see the mainstream media as hopelessly in the tank for the president. So long as conservative leaders argued there's a scandal here, some Republicans kept believing that more investigations were necessary. Hence the select committee. Individual Republicans also had incentives to pursue this. Benghazi became such a huge issue among the conservative base that pushing the issue, at least in theory, should translate into more fundraising dollars and more support from the base in Republicans' reelection bid.
Conversely, any Republican who tried to downplay Benghazi risked a conservative backlash. So even skeptical Republicans had an incentive to endorse more investigations into Benghazi. But there is no hiding the fact that this is also about transparent partisan politics. Republicans have ignored repeated investigations debunking their allegations and have consistently tried to tie the incident to Obama and Clinton personally.
But when packaged as a complete volume, the report delivers on its promise to analyze the entire debacle so the risk of a future disaster is reduced. On the question of how Clinton and the Obama administration reacted, we see more than enough evidence to reaffirm our opinion that the secretary of state failed a crucial chance to show decisive, principled leadership.
The crux of it is that during and well after the chaos of the attacks on the State Department's outpost and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi, Clinton and the Obama administration promoted a false narrative for public consumption: that the violence came from a spontaneous outburst of mob anger.
Although Clinton confided to her daughter, Chelsea, in an email that night that an al-Qaida faction was responsible, for two weeks she let fester the story that mob action, not a planned assault her department might have anticipated, killed her employees. The supposition Clinton and others held to was that the attacks were related in nature to political protests the same day outside the U.
Embassy in Cairo. Those demonstrators were angry about an anti-Islam video. With the Benghazi attacks still unfolding, Clinton released the administration's only statement on the evening of Sept. It was a planned attack — not a protest. How Republicans blew it on Benghazi. What she told Kandil was true, the report confirms: The Americans came under sudden attack at their compound by a force of about 70 heavily armed men.
The only warning: the sudden disappearance of a Libyan police vehicle. Attackers approached the building, invaded and set fire to it. Stevens and Smith died in the fire.
0コメント