Hillary Clinton’s now infamous second question that followed, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans?”: “What difference at this point does it make?” is rightly quoted as a reflection of the callousness toward finding out the truth about the death of four Americans. But the first question in some ways is even worse. By the time Secretary Clinton posed that either/or question in January, she had known for months from both intelligence reports and from the administration and State Department efforts to massage those reports, and from the efforts of diplomat Gregory Hicks and others to set the story straight, that the murders were preplanned assaults by an al-Qaeda affiliate. She knew that the attack was neither a “protest” nor “guys out for a walk” — but was still peddling scenarios that were simply untrue and designed to mislead.