Blake Hounshell is deputy editor of Politico Magazine.

On a sleepy holiday weekend, the New York Times revived a debate that most of us thought was over: Did the Obama administration mislead Americans about what happened in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012? Was it really a spontaneous response to an anti-Islam video, as officials first claimed, or was it a planned al Qaeda attack?

Launched with the kind of tender loving care and year-end timing that says “Pulitzer bait,” the Times published a 7,000-word report spread over three full newspaper pages by Middle East correspondent David Kirkpatrick that aimed to settle once and for all the big lingering questions about the assault, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The key paragraph:


Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

“Months of investigation.” “No evidence.” A swipe at Congress. These are the kinds of authoritative statements you make when you’re pretty darn sure of your reporting.

No matter—several of those members of Congress fired back Sunday, doubling down on their version of the story. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who heads the House Oversight Committee, had this to say on NBC’s Meet the Press: "It was never about a video. … There was a group that was involved that was affiliated with al Qaeda. It is not about al Qaeda as the only terrorist organization.” (Issa traveled to Libya in September as part of his investigation into the attack, but has said little about his trip.) Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, also disputed the Times story. Rogers said his committee’s “exhaustive investigation” contradicted the Times account, and suggested that Kirkpatrick “didn't talk to the people on the ground who were doing the fighting and shooting and the intelligence gathering.”

Conservative outlets soon jumped in too. The Weekly Standard, in a posting linked on Twitter by GOP strategist Karl Rove, accused the Times of “whitewash[ing]” the Benghazi attack. Powerline, a popular conservative blog, slammed it as a “ revisionist account.” The author, retired lawyer Paul Mirengoff, writes: “Whatever else the Times story demonstrates, I believe it shows that this story won’t go away as long as Hillary Clinton aspires to be president.”

Leaving aside Mirengoff’s dubious speculation about collusion between the Times and the latent Hillary Clinton campaign, he does make one good point: This story isn’t going anywhere. And here are six reasons why:

Political opportunism. Republicans see a chance to damage Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attack, ahead of a feared waltz into the White House in 2016. No doubt they’ll keep trying. But so far, nothing has emerged to tar her with anything other than paying insufficient attention to security in Libya, and she survived a Capitol Hill grilling on this more or less unscathed. None of which has deterred the critics one bit: Some Benghazi obsessives gleefully pointed to polls this spring and summer showing a decline in Clinton’s approval ratings. There’s no proof, though, that Benghazi had anything to do with it—and it seems unlikely that voters will factor a 5-year-old incident into their decision come November 2016. More plausible is the explanation offered by Democratic pollster Peter Hart: “Pure and simple, she’s gone from being the nonpartisan secretary of state to potentially a partisan Democratic nominee for president.” Ideology. Beyond politics, many on the right were and are deeply offended by the initial claims, offered up by officials like former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and now backed up by the Times story, that a video mocking the Prophet Mohamed helped trigger the attack on the Benghazi mission. To these critics, this explanation is tantamount to saying America asked for it—and the administration’s repeated denunciations of the video rankle. It’s a gripe that no amount of evidence will assuage. People don’t agree on what al Qaeda is. There’s a long-running debate among experts about whether al Qaeda is more of a centralized, top-down organization, a network of affiliates with varying ties to a core leadership or the vanguard of a broader movement better described as “Sunni jihadism.” As Clint Watts, a counterterrorism analyst formerly with the FBI, writes: “There are lots of militant groups around the world which host members that fought in Iraq or Afghanistan or support jihadi ideology. But that doesn’t mean they are all part of al Qaeda.” For instance, is Ansar al-Sharia, an extremist group that everyone agrees had a presence at the Benghazi attack site, an al Qaeda affiliate? Some, including Issa and Rogers, say it is; others insist it isn’t. To make matters more confusing, there are at least two Ansar al-Sharia groups in Libya—one in Benghazi and one in Derna, a city to the east—and dozens of other extremist groups. What about Abu Khattala, the U.S. government’s lead suspect and the central figure of the Times story? He evidently shares a jihadist outlook—but Kirkpatrick found no ties between Abu Khattala and al Qaeda. The journalism’s been all over the map. The volume of reporting on Benghazi is enormous—and that means alternate explanations are available to those seeking one. And not just on Fox News: According to previous Times reporting, for example, U.S. officials believed members of the Jamal network, named for Egyptian militant Mohamed al-Jamal (also known as Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad) and known to have al Qaeda ties, had participated in the Benghazi attack. But when the State Department formally designated the network a terrorist group in October 2013, it made no mention of Benghazi—and Kirkpatrick doesn’t mention Jamal in his story. That may be because the connection is murky: When Egyptian authorities captured him and several others in December 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Aside from a possible indirect connection through Mr. Ahmad, U.S. officials have said they can’t confirm connections between the five men detained in the raid and the Benghazi attacks.” Even so, the mere fact that people with al Qaeda ties were present wouldn’t prove that al Qaeda planned the assault. A matter of interpretation. Perhaps the most suggestive evidence tying the Benghazi attacks to al Qaeda is an intercepted phone call first reported by Eli Lake of the Daily Beast. Lake’s sources saw the gloating call as evidence that the assault was a planned terrorist attack, but the Times is dimissive. Writes Kirkpatrick: “The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack to a friend in another African country who had ties to members of Al Qaeda, according to several officials briefed on the call. But when the friend heard the attacker’s boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault.” Analysts tend to work in shades of gray, not black and white—leaving ample room for individual officials to view the same evidence differently. How are readers to judge whose anonymous sources have it right? You can’t prove a negative. The Times clearly sought to put a stamp of finality on the Benghazi debate. But if the goal was to prove that al Qaeda wasn’t involved, basic logic suggests this was a tall order. As the astronomer Carl Sagan once put it, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (a quote, incidentally, favored by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the context of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction). Even if the Times is right, and even if the U.S. intelligence community formally dismisses the idea that al Qaeda planned the attack, there will always be some who wonder if we simply haven’t looked hard enough.

And on the debate will go. Vast amounts of ink have already been spilled about the Benghazi tragedy, and vast amounts will doubtless be spilled in the weeks and months ahead. What we’re not likely to argue much about: Libya itself, a deeply troubled country that Americans once thought was important enough to liberate—and then, scarred by a mysterious attack, left to its fate.

