Freezer-TPF- wrote:It seems to me that calling something an attempted cover-up is a giant assumption right off the bat. A mixture of fog of war and dealing with competing/conflicting intelligence and witness accounts in an ongoing investigation appears to be a simpler and more razor-friendly explanation.
Perhaps so. Though most of the evidence coming from the intelligence community would seem to lend very little credence to the administration's rather protracted narrative of mob-violence (do we even know precisely where the mob-violence narrative actually came from?).
But the president cannot have it both ways; in the most recent debate he implied that his "acts of terror" remark in his Rose Garden speech the day after the attack was specifically referring to the attack in Benghazi. But that does not seem congruent with Obama's appearance on Letterman's show a week later, when he was asked by the host if the attack was an act of war, and he responded,
"Here's what happened. You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here … a shadowy character who has an extremely offensive video directed at Mohammed and Islam … so this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world." Or why it wasn't until the Director of National Intelligence testified on the matter during a Senate hearing that the administration actually began to acknowledge it was a terrorist attack, rather than continuing to try to blame it on a non-existant mob responding to an internet video that few people in Libya had likely ever even seen.
As I said earlier, blaming the "foggy" intelligence community seems rather odd in light of the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The outcome of which was a commitment by the intelligence community to give policymakers the benefit of the range of views within the community and to attach confidence levels to assessments. Which makes it odder still to presume that policymakers were simply passive clients of their intelligence officers. So it stretches all credulity to believe that no one challenged the video-inspired, spontaneous-event narrative with information like that reportedly revealed to Congress by Ambassador Pat Kennedy soon after the attack: that it was a complex and synchronized assault.
Be that as it may, it certainly could have been outright incompetence (though that was an admission Obama was clearly unwilling to concede in the last debate). But it also could have been an incompetant attempt at covering up any perceived foreign policy shortcomings at the height of a highly competitive election season. The truth of the matter remains to be seen, so it will likely remain an ongoing issue during the next debate on foreign policy and beyond.
This is practically watergate! No wonder Obama was so worried.
