The Ghosts--or Spooks--of Benghazi

Predator Drone.

I frankly have not been closely following the Benghazi attack story, because I thought nothing was likely to come of it.

But it does look as though Obama’s early attempts to blame the State Department and the intelligence community are coming home to haunt him. Someone’s been releasing a lot of information in the background. The kind we did not get on Watergate for many months.

You don’t want to scapegoat spies, especially not as a group. They have their techniques.

We have now heard that the administration had intelligence within hours, by email, that it was a terrorist attack.

We have now heard that the administration was able to see events in Benghazi as they unfolded, and had special forces and helicopters located one hour away, but did nothing to save the diplomats. And the two security personnel died six and a half hours into the attack.

We have now heard that Hillary Clinton ordered more security for Benghazi before the attack, but the request was denied. By whom? Who outranks the Secretary of State? Only two people…

Remarkable level of detail there… all coming out in what seems like daily drips, well-calculated to keep the matter in the news, and with the apparent guilt of the administration building day by day…?

For me, at least, it also now comes together into a plausible picture, a plausible narrative, that makes me believe that something really is amiss. It sounds as though Obama made a series of bad decisions for political reasons. He knew from the beginning, I imagine, what was happening in Benghazi, but did not want to risk sending help because

1. It would magnify the incident, indicating that al Qaeda was still very much alive, erasing Obama’s trump card on foreign affairs in the election;

2. It risked scaring a war-weary nation with the thought of a new foreign intervention;

3. It would have discredited the sunny interpretation of the “Arab Spring,” also damaging Obama’s reputation in foreign affairs;

4. It would have been an admission of his own previous error in not sending better security to Benghazi.

So he took the easy route of doing nothing and just hoping it would turn out okay.

When it did not, the urge to deny and cover up was made greater by the knowledge that he could have saved these people. That he was in a real sense personally responsible for the deaths. Hence the public insistence for two weeks, in the face of all the evidence, even when the claim seemed totally implausible, that this was a spontaneous demonstration. Hence his oddly extreme declaration of moral outrage at the second debate about any suggestion that he did not do everything he could to protect his diplomats, as if trying to pre-emptively shut down the issue.

It all sounds right—and paints an internally consistent picture of an immature, self-centred chief executive. Someone who is not good at accepting responsibility for his own action.

And the worst is the horrid possibility that Obama and his office knew what was happening, could have sent help, and did not. This image is a violation of the American mythos. The cavalry did not arrive.

If true, this alone is a compelling reason, leaving aside the economic record, why Obama should not be re-elected.