ABC reports the story of what happened in Benghazi the night that our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered. There are two very troubling aspects of this story that reflect poorly on the Obama administration and on Mr. Obama himself.
The first is that for two weeks after this attack the administration, including Mr. Obama, made a concerted effort to conceal the actual nature of the attack, misleading the American public into thinking that it was a spontaneous raid by an enraged mob which was protesting an anti-Muslim video.
Why the administration repeatedly tried to establish this narrative is unclear, but perhaps they realized that if the attack were seen as a terrorist assault it would show Mr. Obama's foreign policy of rapprochement with Muslims abroad to be pretty much a futile, failed effort. Whatever the case, the administration knew within 24 hours what had happened and that it wasn't the work of an offended mob. It was a planned terrorist atrocity. The administration knew this and continued nevertheless to mislead the American people about it.
The second scandalous aspect of this awful episode is that the ambassador and others in Libya had several times requested more security for themselves and other diplomatic personnel. They had intelligence that their lives were in serious danger but each request for more protection was refused by a State Department official named Charlene Lamb who testified to Congress that she thought the ambassador had sufficient security.
This whole tragic debacle has about it the odor of incompetence, poor judgment, and cynical political calculation for which both the President and his Secretary of State should be held accountable.
