Thread: A Deadly Mix in Benghazi -

Latest article from NYT. It looks to me that they are getting ready to kick off Hillary's 2014 run and they are trying to dispute the facts on Benghazi. JMO

A Deadly Mix in Benghazi

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
December 28, 2013

Benghazi, Libya

ABOYISH-LOOKING AMERICAN DIPLOMAT was meeting for the first time with the Islamist leaders of eastern Libya’s most formidable militias.

It was Sept. 9, 2012. Gathered on folding chairs in a banquet hall by the Mediterranean, the Libyans warned of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi. One militia leader, with a long beard and mismatched military fatigues, mentioned time in exile in Afghanistan. An American guard discreetly touched his gun.

“Since Benghazi isn’t safe, it is better for you to leave now,” Mohamed al-Gharabi, the leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, later recalled telling the Americans. “I specifically told the Americans myself that we hoped that they would leave Benghazi as soon as possible.”

Yet as the militiamen snacked on Twinkie-style cakes with their American guests, they also gushed about their gratitude for President Obama’s support in their uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They emphasized that they wanted to build a partnership with the United States, especially in the form of more investment. They specifically asked for Benghazi outlets of McDonald’s and KFC.

The diplomat, David McFarland, a former congressional aide who had never before met with a Libyan militia leader, left feeling agitated, according to colleagues. But the meeting did not shake his faith in the prospects for deeper involvement in Libya. Two days later, he summarized the meeting in a cable to Washington, describing a mixed message from the militia leaders.

Despite “growing problems with security,” he wrote, the fighters wanted the United States to become more engaged “by ‘pressuring’ American businesses to invest in Benghazi.”

The cable, dated Sept. 11, 2012, was sent over the name of Mr. McFarland’s boss, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Later that day, Mr. Stevens was dead, killed with three other Americans in Benghazi in the most significant attack on United States property in 11 years, since Sept. 11, 2001.

The cable was a last token of months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi, many fostered by shadows of the earlier Sept. 11 attack. The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.

The attack also suggests that, as the threats from local militants around the region have multiplied, an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.

In this case, a central figure in the attack was an eccentric, malcontent militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala, according to numerous Libyans present at the time. American officials briefed on the American criminal investigation into the killings call him a prime suspect. Mr. Abu Khattala declared openly and often that he placed the United States not far behind Colonel Qaddafi on his list of infidel enemies. But he had no known affiliations with terrorist groups, and he had escaped scrutiny from the 20-person C.I.A. station in Benghazi that was set up to monitor the local situation.

Mr. Abu Khattala, who denies participating in the attack, was firmly embedded in the network of Benghazi militias before and afterward. Many other Islamist leaders consider him an erratic extremist. But he was never more than a step removed from the most influential commanders who dominated Benghazi and who befriended the Americans. They were his neighbors, his fellow inmates and his comrades on the front lines in the fight against Colonel Qaddafi.
To this day, some militia leaders offer alibis for Mr. Abu Khattala. All resist quiet American pressure to turn him over to face prosecution. Last spring, one of Libya’s most influential militia leaders sought to make him a kind of local judge.

Fifteen months after Mr. Stevens’s death, the question of responsibility remains a searing issue in Washington, framed by two contradictory story lines.

One has it that the video, which was posted on YouTube, inspired spontaneous street protests that got out of hand. This version, based on early intelligence reports, was initially offered publicly by Susan E. Rice, who is now Mr. Obama’s national security adviser.

The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The investigation by The Times shows that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.

Mr. Abu Khattala had become well known in Benghazi for his role in the killing of a rebel general, and then for declaring that his fellow Islamists were insufficiently committed to theocracy. He made no secret of his readiness to use violence against Western interests. One of his allies, the leader of Benghazi’s most overtly anti-Western militia, Ansar al-Shariah, boasted a few months before the attack that his fighters could “flatten” the American Mission. Surveillance of the American compound appears to have been underway at least 12 hours before the assault started.
The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

THE C.I.A. ANNEX

A 20-person team from the Central Intelligence Agency is in the compound known as the Annex, about a half-mile from the mission, where the security officers Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty are later killed.

The Benghazi-based C.I.A. team had briefed Mr. McFarland and Mr. Stevens as recently as the day before the attack. But the American intelligence efforts in Libya concentrated on the agendas of the biggest militia leaders and the handful of Libyans with suspected ties to Al Qaeda, several officials who received the briefings said. Like virtually all briefings over that period, the one that day made no mention of Mr. Abu Khattala, Ansar al-Shariah or the video ridiculing Islam, eve
n though Egyptian satellite television networks popular in Benghazi were already spewing outrage against it.
Members of the local militia groups that the Americans called on for help proved unreliable, even hostile. The fixation on Al Qaeda might have distracted experts from more imminent threats. Those now look like intelligence failures.
More broadly, Mr. Stevens, like his bosses in Washington, believed that the United States could turn a critical mass of the fighters it helped oust Colonel Qaddafi into reliable friends. He died trying.



CHAPTER 2

A Rising Militia Leader

TALL AND PAUNCHY with a gaptoothed smile and a graying beard that forked at his chest, Mr. Abu Khattala grew up in el-Leithi, the Benghazi neighborhood named for the River of Oblivion in Greek mythology and known for a high concentration of militant Islamists. He spent most of his adult life in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, jailed for his Islamist extremism.

At 42, he has never completed high school or married. He earns a modest living as a construction contractor in blue Dickies coveralls, and lives with his mother in a house decorated with a vase of plastic roses in its living room.
In several hours of interviews, including ones conducted in the days before he became a prime suspect in the assault, Mr. Abu Khattala said he had no connections to Al Qaeda. But he never hid his admiration for its vision.

“The enmity between the American government and the peoples of the world is an old case,” he said. “Why is the United States always trying to use force to implement its agendas?”



Muslims and Christians, he later argued, were fighting an inexorable war. “The problem is in the nature of religions,” he said. “There is always hostility between the religions.”

Unlike other Libyans, Mr. Abu Khattala expressed no gratitude for the American role in the NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Qaddafi. If NATO had not intervened, “God would have helped us,” he said, insisting, “We know the United States was working with both sides” and considering “splitting up the country.”

Mr. Abu Khattala was a loner and a contrarian, even among fellow Islamists. A self-described jihadi commander who spent years in prison with Mr. Abu Khattala called him unstable. “If all the Libyan people said, ‘We don’t want the Americans,’ Abu Khattala will say, ‘Bring back the Americans!' ” the commander said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, a member of Parliament from Benghazi close to many hard-line Islamists, who spent 22 years in Abu Salim, said, “Even in prison, he was always alone.”

He added: “He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit. I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?”

But when the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi broke out in Benghazi, Mr. Abu Khattala’s years in Abu Salim became an attractive credential. Young men raced to find tough-talking sheikhs they could follow into battle.

“Teenagers came running around him just like they came running around me,” said Abdel Bassett Shihaibi, 44, who fought in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. “ ‘Sheikh, sheikh, did you know Al Qaeda? Did you know Osama bin Laden? How do we fight?’ ” Mr. Shihaibi recalled their asking.

Mr. Abu Khattala “seemed like a tough guy” and “very disciplined,” one teenage Islamist fighter recounted.
Mr. Abu Khattala formed his own militia of perhaps two dozen fighters, naming it Obeida Ibn Al Jarra for an early Islamic general. And he stood out for his fearlessness in the early days of the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi in the spring of 2011, helping to defend the rebel-held city of Ajdabiya just as the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries were weighing steps to support the rebels.

But Mr. Abu Khattala became notorious across Benghazi when a group of Islamist militia leaders decided to “arrest” Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, the main commander of the rebel movement, now backed by NATO.

General Younes had been Colonel Qaddafi’s interior minister before he defected to join the uprising, and he was viewed in the West as a crucial professional leader for a motley movement known to include extremists. But he had also led crackdowns against Islamists, and they suspected him of a double-cross.

After Islamists sent a team to take the general to an impromptu judicial inquiry in July 2011, his captors held him overnight in the headquarters of Mr. Abu Khattala’s brigade. The bodies of General Younes and two of his aides were found on a roadside the next day, riddled with bullets.

There is no evidence that Mr. Abu Khattala himself pulled the trigger. But because the death occurred while the general was in his brigade “he became a boogeyman” across Benghazi, said Mr. Gharabi, the leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade. “People started to fear him.”

Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to enjoy his infamy, doing little to dispel the rumors about him. When the Islamist-dominated militias reorganized into a centralized coalition, he rejected it because it supported the secular, Western-backed provisional government instead of demanding a theocracy. He pulled back from the front.
“He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel,” said Fawzi Bukatef, leader of the broader rebel coalition.
But Mr. Abu Khattala was not alone in his hard-line views.

In the spring of 2012, eight months after Colonel Qaddafi’s death, Western diplomats were focused on Libya’s first parliamentary election, a crucial test of the country’s hopes of a transition to democracy.

But some in Benghazi had other ideas, and put them on parade.

On a June afternoon, Mr. Abu Khattala joined a column of as many as 200 pickup trucks mounted with artillery as they drove through downtown Benghazi under the black flags of militant Islam.

Some trucks came from outside Benghazi. Others bore the markings of the city’s major militias, the groups ostensibly allied with the government and effectively in control of the city. Among them were February 17, Libya Shield and the Supreme Security Committee.

Participants described the parade as a demonstration of their opposition to democracy, calling it a violation of their vision of Islamic law. The event was also the public debut of Ansar al-Shariah, a group of as many as 200 militants who, like Mr. Abu Khattala, had broken away from the other militias in protest of their support for elections.

Western diplomats who watched said they were stunned by the scale and weaponry of the display.

“It was like they were coming down out of the mountains,” said a Western diplomat who watched the parade, “except that they were not. They were already there.”

CHAPTER 3

The Ambassador

AMBASSADOR STEVENS ALWAYS SAW THE BEST IN LIBYA. He had gladly accepted the role of American liaison to the rebels at the start of the uprising. And in April 2011 he chose to sail into Benghazi on a Greek cargo ship instead of taking the easier land route from Egypt, just to savor the romance of his arrival in a free Libya.



J. Christopher Stevens talking to journalists in Benghazi in April 2011. (Bryan Denton for The New York Times)

An experienced Arabist with previous postings in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, Mr. Stevens, then 52, was among the most influential voices in American policy toward Libya. He helped shape the Obama administration’s conviction that it could work with the rebels, even those previously hostile to the West, to build a friendly, democratic government.

The rebels, including the Islamists, were eager to befriend the American envoy. Colonel Qaddafi “was saying the West was supporting these ‘Al Qaeda’ terrorists,” said Ashraf Ben Ismail, a wealthy businessman, so he invited Mr. Stevens and several Islamist brigade leaders to a meeting in his spacious salon to dispel those fears. All attested to their support for building a modern, democratic Libya. (The more hard-line Islamist rebels declined to attend.)

Still, Mr. Stevens and other Americans also knew that Benghazi had a history of violence against Western diplomats.
In 1967, a United States Consulate there was ransacked and burned by a mob angry about American support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war. In 2006, a mob burned down the Italian Consulate because a cabinet minister in Rome had worn a T-shirt mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

By the summer of 2012, a new pattern of hit-and-run attacks against Western interests was emerging. There were three separate attacks in Benghazi involving small explosives that locals used for fishing, two on the American compound and a third near a United Nations convoy.

Mohammed Ali al-Zahawi, the leader of Ansar al-Shariah, told The Washington Post that he disapproved of attacking Western diplomats, but he added, “If it had been our attack on the U.S. Consulate, we would have flattened it.”

After a rocket-propelled grenade seriously wounded a guard in the British ambassador’s convoy, the British began limiting their presence in Benghazi to day trips, depositing their vehicles and weapons inside the American compound at night before flying back to Tripoli, the capital.

But the Americans remained optimistic. Taking stock of the deteriorating security situation on Aug. 8, 2012, a cable titled “The Guns of August” and signed by Mr. Stevens struck an understanding tone about the absence of effective policing.

It noted that Libyans were wary about the imposition of a strong security apparatus so soon after they expunged Colonel Qaddafi’s. “A diverse group of independent actors” — including criminals and “former regime elements” as well as “Islamist extremists” — was exploiting the vacuum, the cable said. But it found no signs of an organized campaign against the West.

SEPT. 11, 2012

9:42P.M.

At the time of the attack, Mr. Stevens, Mr. Smith and an armed American diplomatic security officer are in the main villa. Three other armed American officers are behind the villa, and one is in an office monitoring security cameras. Three armed Libyan militia fighters and five unarmed Libyan guards are also in the mission.



“What we are going through — and what people here are resolved to get through — is a confluence rather than a conspiracy,” the cable concluded.

The Americans had another reason to feel secure: the team of at least 20 people from the Central Intelligence Agency operating out of an unmarked Benghazi compound known as “the Annex” that was about a half-mile southeast of the mission.

Some were highly skilled commandos. “I knew the backup guys at the Annex, who were quite heavily trained and equipped,” said an Obama administration official who visited in the months before the attack.

In addition to buying up weapons spilled out during the revolt, the team was assigned to gather intelligence about anti-Western terrorists and the big militia leaders. But there were hundreds of small brigades, affiliations were fluid and overlapping, and the agents often found themselves turning to Mr. Stevens for advice because he seemed to know the militia leaders better than any other American expert.

Despite his expertise and the C.I.A.'s presence, though, “there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests,” a State Department investigation into the mission attack later concluded.
The C.I.A. kept its closest watch on people who had known ties to terrorist networks abroad, especially those connected to Al Qaeda. Intelligence briefings for diplomats often mentioned Sufian bin Qumu, a former driver for a company run by Bin Laden.

Mr. Qumu had been apprehended in Pakistan in 2001 and detained for six years at Guantánamo Bay before returning home to Derna, a coastal city near Benghazi that was known for a high concentration of Islamist extremists.
But neither Mr. Qumu nor anyone else in Derna appears to have played a significant role in the attack on the American Mission, officials briefed on the investigation and the intelligence said.

“We heard a lot about Sufian bin Qumu,” said one American diplomat in Libya at the time. “I don’t know if we ever heard anything about Ansar al-Shariah.”

SEPT. 11, 2012

6:45A.M.

Guards at the diplomatic mission see a man in a police uniform taking photographs with a cellphone from an unfinished building across the street.



The more moderate leaders of the big militias developed close ties to the Westerners.

At least one Islamist militia leader liked to play basketball at the British compound. Mr. Bukatef of the February 17 Brigade was a fluent English speaker who visited the American compound in Benghazi so often that “it was like he was my best friend,” one diplomat joked.

“We thought we were sufficiently close to them,” said one Western diplomat who was in Benghazi not long before the attack. “We all thought that if anything threatening was happening, that they would tip us off.”

A State Department review later found “a tendency on the part of policy, security and other U.S. government officials to rely heavily on the probability of warning intelligence.” It called the Benghazi attack “a stark reminder” of the dangers that entailed.


3 More Chapters at the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013...azi/#/?chapt=0

NY Times’ whitewash of Benghazi attack aids Hillary Clinton in 2016

By Ben Wolfgang
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The Washington Times
Sunday, December 29, 2013

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  ** FILE ** Secretary of State Hillary Rodham testifies on Capitol Hill ..
  
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One of the biggest hurdles in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential path to the White House may have become easier to clear.

An extensive report Sunday in The New York Times casts doubt on Republican claims that al Qaeda played a key role in last year’s deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The article lends badly needed credence to the White House version of events and might remove some of the blame from the former secretary of state’s shoulders as she gears up for a 2016 presidential run.

A top House Republican went so far Sunday as to suggest that there may be a coordinated effort to help Mrs. Clinton — who is widely thought to be seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and leads her Republican counterparts in most polls — escape the shadow of Benghazi.

“I find the timing odd,” Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said of The New York Times piece and its political ramifications during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Although he wouldn’t go much further, Mr. Rogers said, “I find it interesting that there is this rollout of stories” related to Benghazi.

The New York Times report says al Qaeda did not infiltrate Benghazi and backed up the initial White House claim that the event largely was spontaneous, wasn’t planned by al Qaeda’s central leaders and was fueled at least in part by outrage over anti-Islamic videos produced in the U.S.

The piece makes clear that the facts on the ground in Benghazi were murkier than what has been portrayed by both sides, and that neither Republicans’ nor the administration’s account is entirely accurate.

Democrats quickly used the report to dispute Mr. Rogers, Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and others who have cited Benghazi as evidence that President Obama has not dismantled al Qaeda to the degree he claimed en route to winning re-election last year.

“I hope Chairman Issa and others have learned a lesson from this. Chairman Issa and members of that committee crusaded for over a year on what was really a fairy tale, claiming that the administration knew all along al Qaeda was involved and wouldn’t admit it,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, Texas Democrat and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. Mr. Castro appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

As secretary of state at the time of the assault that claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, Mrs. Clinton has been a key target of Republicans who accuse the administration of failing to secure American assets and personnel in Benghazi and willfully hiding the truth for their own political benefit.

The reporting, to some degree, could shield Mrs. Clinton from charges that she participated in what critics have called a cover-up.

While not targeting Mrs. Clinton by name, Republicans on Sunday said parts of the article conflict directly with information in other reports and the sworn testimony of Americans on the ground in Benghazi.

“People from this administration, career professionals, have said under oath there was no evidence of any kind of reaction to a video and, in fact, this was a planned attack that came quickly. That’s the evidence we have,” Mr. Issa said on “Meet the Press,” referring to testimony from U.S. diplomats who described the anti-Islamic video as a nonevent in Libya at the time.

Other Republicans also disputed the notion that al Qaeda wasn’t involved. They noted that terrorist groups with clear connections to al Qaeda took part in the assault.

Even some lawmakers sympathetic to the administration say it’s misleading to suggest that al Qaedahad nothing to do with the incident.

“Intelligence indicates al Qaeda was involved,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff, California Democrat and a member of the House intelligence committee.

Despite the latest report, Mr. Schiff said, he does not believe the State Department and Mrs. Clintonspecifically are entirely absolved.

“I don’t think The New York Times report is designed to exonerate the security lapses within the State Department that left our people vulnerable,” he said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...=all#pagebreak

I wonder if the NYT helped address the envelopes.

Holiday card: Get ready for Hillary Clinton!

Betsy Rothstein
5:07 PM 12/26/2013

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This holiday card was delivered to a previous resident at The Mirror‘s home address.

The card is free of tinsel and colorful Christmas balls. Instead it’s more generic, with red birds, white snowflakes and a blue background. Gee, what could that possibly mean?

Inside it reads:

This year we have more than one million reasons to be thankful. All because of you. Warmest wishes from the ready for Hillary team. Ready for Hillary 2016.

And on the back: “Paid for by Ready for Hillary PAC. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Just in case you thought she wasn’t running.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/26/ho...llary-clinton/

PRUDEN: Betrayal that whitewash won’t cover

By Wesley Pruden
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The Washington Times
Monday, December 30, 2013

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walks past the Presidential seal

Transparency, the current vogue word for truth-telling, is usually a good thing, unless you’re trying to fool all the people some of the time, like spending 7,000 words to resurrect a fairy tale in Benghazi, all to give a helping hand to a lady in distress.

The New York Times understands that Hillary Clinton is likely to be the only credible hope the Democrats have for 2016 and that she already needs lots of remedial help. The Times huffed and puffed to deliver an excuse for betrayal in Benghazi, meant to second Mrs. Clinton’s famous alibi for her tortured misfeasance as secretary of state — “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

The right response might have made a lot of difference to an American ambassador who lay dead, slain at the hands of Islamic terrorists, and three other Americans who had to give up their lives because nobody at the White House could be bothered to ride to the rescue. President Obama and his frightened and timid acolytes, including Mrs. Clinton, insisted that this was not Islamic terror or the perfidy of al Qaeda, but merely the reaction of innocent Muslims offended by a video posted onYouTube mocking the religion of the Prophet Muhammad.

Even after the White House dispatched Susan Rice, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to push the confection about the video as revealed truth, almost nobody believed it. The White House couldn’t even find anybody else who would say he believed it.

David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of The New York Times, grunted, burped and produced a tiny mouse of special pleading, an account with nothing new of much importance, except a few colorful facts of the sort that were once the popcorn of news magazine journalism. He describes, for example, the vase in the living room of the mother of one of the suspects in the Benghazi attack. Vases are no doubt important, but mostly to interior decorators. This account, so transparent to anyone who reads it even with casual attention, seems hardly worth the effort of a good reporter who was willing to take certain risks to himself.

It’s important to Hillary and her presidential campaign, now in its early planning, to repeat the con that al Qaeda was not in any way involved, because Mr. Obama was supposed to have killed al Qaeda graveyard dead when he dispatched Navy SEALs to terminate Osama bin Ladenwith extreme prejudice.

The length and timing of the account naturally whetted appetites for more in Washington, where the art of the reading of the entrails of exotic animals in search of hidden meanings has been raised to science. But why was such work, once accomplished, relegated to publication, front-page placement or not, in the deadest news week of the year? This is the week when news editors usually must be satisfied with a factory fire in Lower Volta or a flood in Upper Slobbovia to fill their pages. The Benghazi whitewash, such as it was, appeared unexpectedly and disappeared just as quickly. The Drudge Report, read in every newsroom as an invaluable tip sheet, treated it as a top story on Sunday morning, when it was fodder for the Sunday morning talk shows, and on Monday the story was gone, replaced by stories about two men planning their same-sex wedding on a float in the Rose Bowl parade, a Florida woman arrested for beating up her boyfriend because he wouldn’t take her to bed for a cuddle, and a Louisville man who disturbed the peace in a bingo parlor by dropping his pants and racing through the hall shouting, “Bingo!”

Hearts among Hillary’s campaigners no doubt quickened when they saw the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, but the story is hardly likely to change anybody’s game. The early word is that Congress was not impressed, and not just the usual Republican suspects. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, complimented The Times for adding “valuable insights” (unidentified), but observed that The Times’ account was “heavily reliant obviously on people … who had reason to provide the story that they did.”

Benghazi remains the most toxic example of feckless incompetence and criminal impotence in the face of crisis that will be the legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. Hillary Clinton was part of that, and she shares the legacy of Benghazi that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Ours, too, alas.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...sh-wont-cover/

SEE ALSO: Intel community: NY Times wrong, al Qaeda links in Benghazi are clear