Greetings Cornerites … nice to be back after a short mental health break (mainly spent on a field trip with 10-year-old hockey studs).
At FoxBiz last night, Lou Dobbs invited John Bolton and me to weigh in on the latest Benghazi news — Susan Rice’s disastrous meeting with GOP Senators McCain, Graham and Ayotte, against the continuing tragicomic backdrop of Obama administration fumbling: the acting CIA director first blaming the FBI for removing references to al Qaeda and terrorism from Rice’s talking points; then retracting that claim, acknowledging that it was the CIA that excised these key points, but being unwilling or unable to explain how and why.
Between Rice’s quest to succeed Hillary Clinton at the State Department and finger-pointing between the intelligence community and the White House, it would be easy to get lost in the sideshows. As I tried to stress again last night, the central issue in probing the Benghazi massacre is President Obama’s dereliction of duty during a seven-and-a-half hour siege in which, as commander-in-chief, he failed to take adequate action to protect Americans under attack. Rice did not lie to the country for her own benefit. The CIA did not author a misleading account of what happened for its own benefit. The obvious beneficiary of these shenanigans was Barack Obama — whose Libya policy of empowering Islamists created the conditions for the killing of four Americans, and whose reelection campaign was based on the fiction that al Qaeda had been defeated by his killing of bin Laden.
When it comes to Benghazi, the cover-up is not worse than the crime. The main issues remain: Obama’s overall policy of promoting anti-Western Islamists under the guise of “democracy” (i.e., his four years of “spring fever”); Obama’s specific abdication of duty while Americans were under attack; and the matter of what the administration was up to in Benghazi — were Libyans being detained there? was the administration engaged in an Iran-Contra style operation to arm the Islamsit-dominated Syrian opposition?
The Rice/CIA Follies may be a route to the truth, but Congress must not let it become a distraction from the truth.