Opinion The Benghazi Deniers

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

At last we have a Benghazi scandal that Democrats are willing to acknowledge — House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to form a select committee to investigate the administration’s handling of the 2012 terror attack in Libya.

This has been the occasion for outrage that Democrats haven’t been able to summon for any aspect of Benghazi to this point, including the lax security at the compound despite repeated warnings and prior attacks on Western interests.


The Democrats and their allies are in the grips of Benghazi denial. They think the Republican notion of a scandal is a complete hoax. Yes, a mistake was made here or there, but otherwise, nothing to see here.

The deniers evidently believe:

An administration should be able to make erroneous statements about a terror attack that killed a U.S. ambassador in the weeks before a presidential election and expect everyone to accept its good intentions afterward.

An administration should be able to withhold a bombshell White House email from congressional investigators and expect everyone to greet its long-delayed release with a yawn.

An administration should be able to send out its press secretary to abase himself with absurd denials of the obvious and expect everyone to consider its credibility solidly intact.

No opposition party would ever accept these propositions, and of course Republicans (and a few intrepid reporters and organizations) haven’t. We presumably would never have learned of the email from White House national security official Ben Rhodes to then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice prior to her notorious Sunday show appearances if the Benghazi “obsessives” at Judicial Watch hadn’t zealously pursued records through a lawsuit.

It has long been the contention of Rice’s defenders that she was merely tripped up by bad intelligence. It is true that the Central Intelligence Agency wrongly maintained initially that the Benghazi attack grew out of a protest. Yet, there wasn’t any doubt from the outset that it was a terrorist attack.

In his April testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, former deputy director of the CIA Michael Morell emphasized, “The critically important point is that the analysts considered this a terrorist attack from the very beginning. They were not slow coming to this judgment.”

But Rice took her cue from Rhodes, who didn’t mention terrorism in his general discussion of the situation in the Middle East, or in his specific suggested answer to a hypothetical question about Benghazi. It was all about the video, and “people who harm Americans” and “challenges,” including “difficult challenges.”

Morell told the House Intelligence Committee that in the agency’s analysis, “There was no mention of the video defaming the Prophet Muhammad as a motivation for the attacks in Benghazi. In fact, there was no mention of the video at all.” Rice’s viewers nonetheless heard of little else.

The administration’s apologists claim that President Obama immediately called Benghazi a terror attack in a statement in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12, the day after the assault. He did indeed refer to “acts of terror,” although vaguely. In an interview the same day with CBS, he was asked: Was Benghazi the result of a “mob action,” or was it something more serious? “I don’t want to jump the gun on this,” the president said.

He obviously wouldn’t have said he didn’t want to jump the gun if he had already jumped it. Besides, if the president of the United States was willing to say it was a terrorist attack from the very beginning, why was one of his national security officials stuffing his ambassador to the United Nations with pablum in an email just a few days later?

Blaming the video allowed the administration to put the most anodyne possible interpretation on Benghazi, while staying in its ideological comfort zone.

If the video had incited the attack, it meant that extremists both at home and overseas were to blame and that the administration could adopt a defensive posture about our country and its alleged Islamophobia. Parts of the media eagerly picked up this narrative. Time magazine ran an evenhanded cover story lambasting people who make obnoxious YouTube videos and people who kill ambassadors. “These hatemongers,” according to Time, “form a global industry of outrage, working feverishly to give and take offense.”

If the White House didn’t consider the Rhodes email damaging, surely it would have released it long ago. It then would have spared Jay Carney the exertions involved in maintaining that the email isn’t rightly considered a Benghazi email, even though it was part of Rice’s preparation to go on shows where everyone knew she would be asked repeatedly about … Benghazi.

The other notable Benghazi defense from the past week is the “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” version of the standard “old news” deflection. Asked about the editing of the initial Benghazi talking points by Fox News’ Bret Baier on “Special Report,” former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor explained helpfully, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”

What’s the statute of limitations on misleading the public about a terror attack , dawg?

Obviously, not every scandal is Watergate, and it’s foolish for Republicans to invoke it here. No Republican should be fundraising over the deaths of four Americans. And if Republicans expect the select committee to be a political boon, they will be disappointed, since Benghazi will never be top of mind for swing voters.

If the hour is late for the formation of the select committee, the Rhodes email and last week’s testimony of retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Lovell — disputed by other military officials — that the administration should have tried to mobilize military assets the night of the attack suggests there is work still to be done.

If there is indeed nothing left to learn, then the White House and Democrats can cooperate with the select committee without fear and watch it hang itself. Instead, every indication is that they will stall, mock and disrupt. Because there’s nothing to see here.