Not long after he was shit-canned for having an affair, former DCI David Petraeus explained to Congress that the Intelligence Community deliberately omitted any public reference to any terrorist organizations that might have been involved in the Benghazi attack because they were protecting sources and methods.
The recently resigned spy chief explained that references to terrorist groups suspected of carrying out the violence were removed from the public explanation of what caused the attack so as not to tip off the groups that the U.S. intelligence community was on their trail. …
“There was an interagency process to draft it, not a political process,” Schiff said. “They came up with the best assessment without compromising classified information or source or methods. So changes were made to protect classified information.”
The Republicans conveniently ignore this central fact over and over again. “You lied to us!” they scream and pout, without acknowledging that there was a reason, and the reason was that the Intelligence Community did not want the culprits to know what we knew about them.
I don’t think rational people could anticipate that anyone would care whether our ambassador and three other people were killed by a mob of angry protesters or a pre-planned attack by militants. In either case, it was obvious that security was inadequate. In either case, it was clear that we needed to be more concerned about rabidly anti-American sentiment on the Libyan street.
And a lot of blame was available to spread around. On the Republicans’ part, they had made steep cuts to the State Department’s budget for security.
For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012.
(Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.
Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.
This lack of funding doesn’t absolve the people at the State Department in charge of embassy and consulate security of responsibility for what happened in Benghazi, but it does help us understand the constraints they were trying to overcome. In any case, four people lost their jobs after it was determined that they didn’t show enough “pro-active leadership.” We could argue that Republicans like Paul Ryan didn’t show enough pro-active leadership when they continued to hammer away at the budget for diplomatic security year after year without stopping to think that it could get some of our people killed. I mean, isn’t that just a fair and balanced way of looking at things?
But our side didn’t leap to assign blame to Paul Ryan for the tragedy in Benghazi, even though he was then a candidate for vice-president. It was the Republicans who decided to politicize the issue over the basically irrelevant issues of whether the attack was spontaneous or pre-planned, and whether a YouTube video incited people or it was our mere presence in Libya that angered them. Why are these distinctions so important?
For me, the only thing that is of any concern at all is that the Intelligence Community decided to withhold some of what they knew and thereby misled the public. They say it was to protect sources and methods. Cynics say it was to protect the president’s reelection prospects. The truth is that normal decent people could not anticipate that the Republicans would so shamelessly politicize the issue and therefore had no reason to create some kind of false narrative about issues that no sane person would think important.
Just try to imagine if the president had decided to react to the death of our ambassador by blaming it on Paul Ryan’s budget cuts. Imagine if he had basically dropped most of his other campaign talking points just to hammer Ryan every day for getting our people killed with his shitty priorities. He didn’t do that.
Please, proceed, Darrell Issa.
