Benghazi: Closer to the Truth

We asked on 9.16 if Benghazi was Obama’s 9.11. Today, we offer the following  

Quotation without Comment

 From FOX News’ James Rosen, carried in the Wall Street Journal:

William Safire, the late New York Times columnist. . .once defined coverup broadly to include "any plan to avoid detection of wrongdoing . . . an act to conceal a mistake." . .

"Everyone had the same intelligence," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Fox News last week. But that . . . appears untrue. How information immediately made known to an assistant secretary of state could somehow be withheld for eight days from the secretary of state herself—and from our U.N. ambassador, from the director of national intelligence, from the analytic corps at the Central Intelligence Agency, from the president's chief spokesman, and from the president himself—now forms the central question in the Benghazi affair.

In Tuesday night's debate with Mitt Romney, President Obama claimed to have "told" the American people that Benghazi was a terror attack the very next day, Sept. 12, when speaking from the Rose Garden. The assertion was untrue, despite moderator Candy Crowley's ruling to the contrary. The president had only spoken generally of terror attacks, and Benghazi would have been understood to fall under that umbrella only if it had been acknowledged as a terror attack.

On Sept. 12, that was not the administration's line. Not until his afternoon appearance on "The View" on Sept. 25—the "two weeks" of delay that Mr. Romney alluded to in the debate—did the president offer Americans an explanation of Benghazi that made no reference to a protest over a video. The YouTube connection had figured prominently in his Benghazi pronouncements as late as Mr. Obama's Sept. 20 appearance on Univision, and even in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 25.

"The business of intelligence has become politicized," says an intelligence source with knowledge of the Benghazi episode, "regardless of which party is in charge." This is an enduring legacy of Vietnam and Watergate. Now, as then, American voters horrified by loss of life in a time of war will cast ballots without having all the facts that might inform their choice.