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Benghazi

Another report finds no wrongdoing

The September 2012 attack on the United States’ diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, a Foreign Service officer and two Central Intelligence Agency contractors. Since then, there have been countless accusations of Obama administration incompetence, malfeasance and lying surrounding the incident.

But even some of President Obama’s fiercest critics – House Republicans – cannot find evidence of administration wrongdoing. Nonetheless, they seem intent to string out this faux controversy, probably until 2016. The country would be better served if they did not. There are plenty of legitimate issues and policies to argue about, many of which could produce more positive results. It is time to recognize Benghazi for what it was – a tragedy for four families, but not a political scandal.

The House Intelligence Committee investigated the Benghazi attack for two years and issued its report Friday. It said, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, that the “Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military responded properly, and that Obama administration ‘talking points’ were flawed, but didn’t find that administration officials attempted to mislead the public.” It did say statements by officials, including then ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, were proved wrong. But it attributed those inaccuracies to bad intelligence rather than any attempt to spin the situation.

The idea that the attack grew out of a protest, for example, was incorrect. But as the House report acknowledged, it came from an early CIA assessment. Reports of the protest, which Rice repeated, also came from the Defense Department and the National Security Agency. It was intelligence analysts, the report says, not political appointees who got it wrong.

The committee’s report also said a CIA response team had not been ordered to “stand down” and that the CIA received all the military support available. It found that there was no missed opportunity to carry out a military rescue operation. Part of the confusion – and the conspiracy theories that followed – centered on who exactly attacked the compound. The committee’s report says intelligence on that “was and remains conflicting” and that “significant intelligence gaps regarding the identities, affiliations and motivations of the attackers remain.” The Associated Press says the report describes them as “a mix of extremists and hangers on.”

There were mistakes, of course. The report said the compound was not well-protected and the State Department knew if could not be defended from a well-armed attack. In the clear light of hindsight, that seems self-evident. It is also tautological to point out that intelligence before the attack was weak. And at some point, it is time to move on. The House committee’s report released Friday is the seventh such investigation into the Benghazi attack. The six previous ones were conducted by congressional committees and a State Department panel. The eighth is being conducted by yet another House committee.

Enough is enough. It clear that the point of all this has long since been not to find the facts about what happened in Benghazi, but to keep digging until something is found that incriminates or embarrasses Obama.

But with seven investigations complete and another under way, the same picture keeps emerging. It is not one of administration criminality or cowardice. There was no conspiracy to hide official misdeeds, mistakes or incompetence. What happened in Benghazi was fundamentally simple. The United States had a bad day in a notoriously dangerous part of the world – and four Americans died bravely doing their job.

That is bad enough. Congress should not make it worse by treating their death as a political prop.



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