Cover-ups are always bad.
But, this one is a doozy.
Spinning Benghazi
Alex Koppelman - New Yorker magazine
It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every
scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack
on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were
killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception.
For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a
Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.
On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed
the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points
about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons
a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s
striking to see the twelve different iterations
that the talking points went through before they were released to
Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in
Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’
criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over
the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from
something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.
From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points
contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously
inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.”
That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the
Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State
Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was
not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything
else about the changes that were made is problematic. The initial draft
revealed by Karl mentions “at least five other attacks against foreign
interests in Benghazi” before the one in which four Americans were
killed. That’s not in the final version. Nor is this: “[W]e do know that
Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”
That was replaced by the more tepid “There are indications that
extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” (Even if we
accept the argument that State wanted to be sure that extremists
were involved, and that they could be linked to Al Qaeda, before saying
so with any level of certainty—which is reasonable and supported by
evidence from Karl’s reporting—that doesn’t fully explain these changes
away.)
The rest of the story: