The Obama administration may be guilty of some muddled assessments and conflicting communications in the days following the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, but Republican claims of a deliberate cover-up are ridiculously overblown and amount to nothing more than shamelessly opportunistic political grandstanding.
Despite President Obama’s clear reference to a terrorist attack in his much-scrutinized Rose Garden statement the next day, the administration was slow in publicly laying out the all the facts, but the House Oversight Committee’s hearings last week into the attack found no evidence of any effort to deceive the American people. There is no disputing that, despite awareness of militant extremists operating in the area, the consulate was insufficiently protected by local security contractors at the time of the attack, a security team of sixteen U.S. soldiers having been pulled from the consulate just weeks before in August. It’s this failure to properly assess the situation and respond accordingly that requires further explanation and accountability.
However, the United States has 275 embassies and consulates around the world, and it’s patently absurd to expect the president to be personally involved in the security arrangements for each one of them, even those that might be perceived as being at greater risk than others. Such things are the job of the Department of State. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stepped forward to say that if there is blame to be assessed, it should be shouldered by her, the responsibility of keeping our diplomats safe lying with her department, and not with the president. Still, considering the lives lost and the implications for the safety of our other diplomats abroad, I’m less interested in pointing fingers or parsing President Obama’s statements right now than in Congress and the State Department undertaking an impartial and serious review of how the security of our embassies and consulates can be improved.
But if we are casting about for others to blame, then the Republican Party deserves its share, too. House Republicans spitefully cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in 2011, and $331 million in 2012. President Obama might have been too much of a gentleman to mention this pertinent fact during the debates, but I am not running for re-election and have no such impediment: Republicans have some humungous balls to cut funding for diplomatic security and then exploit a tragedy resulting from weakened security to score points in an election.
In today’s bitterly contentious political climate it’s inevitable that the attack in Benghazi would be seized upon as a weapon for those who would stoop to using anything, however ill-formed, spurious or shameless, to oust Barack Obama from the White House. The Republican Party’s propaganda arm, the Fox News Channel, has been bludgeoning viewers around the clock with their predictably conspiratorial take on the Benghazi story in order to fire up the faithful for the election now just days away. But if you're wondering why this story has been getting such relentless coverage while the recent revelations about George W. Bush’s repeated and willful neglect of the CIA’s increasingly urgent warnings in advance of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans on our own soil went completely ignored on Fox, well, you have some serious catching up to do.