This story first surfaced last weekend but, in case you missed it, former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was more or less vindicated after the New York Times completed a lengthy investigation of the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi.
According to initial reports, including those made by Susan Rice, the attack was a reaction to an anti-Muslim video created by Islamophobes in America.
When this became less clear in the following days as conflicting reports emerged, Republicans used the confusion to paint a picture of the Obama administration attempting to cover up an attack led by Al Qaeda. You know, because he’s a “terrorist sympathizer” who refused (not really) to call it terrorism.
The Times found that what Susan Rice initially reported was, in fact, accurate. The attack was a reaction to “The Innocence of Muslims.” Furthermore, The Times found that the supposed connection to Al Qaeda was, from my perspective, laughable.
But the Republican arguments appear to conflate purely local extremist organizations like Ansar al-Shariah with Al Qaeda’s international terrorist network. The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack to a friend in another African country who had ties to members of Al Qaeda, according to several officials briefed on the call. But when the friend heard the attacker’s boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault.
I know a guy who knows a guy.
John McCain and Lindsey Graham should be ashamed, but that would require having shame to begin with.
Virtually every conspiracy theory and wild accusation made by Republicans ever since that fateful night when former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney stood in front of America and used the attack as a campaign prop has been based on conjecture.
And not to let them off the hook — this is the kind of investigation 60 Minutes should have done. Instead they spent a year dealing with a fraud who told them a tall tale of scaling 12-foot walls and wrestling evildoers with his bare hands.
With few exceptions, the establishment media dropped the ball in 2013.
Senators Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey, Graham, and John McCain hold a press conference on Benghazi Dec 21, 2012 (AP Photo/Ann Heisenfelt)