JAMES S. ROBBINS: Benghazi coverup sought Obama reelection

The Benghazi scandal is growing uncontrollably. Every day brings shocking revelations. Faced with mounting evidence of executive misconduct, the White House, Congressional Democrats and their suddenly dwindling allies in the media have settled on a story line: Benghazi is “all about politics.”

Well, yes it has always been about politics. The entire affair was about keeping Benghazi from ending Barack Obama’s chances for re-election. It was “all about politics” when smoke was still rising from the Benghazi consulate.

Mr. Obama led in the polls seven weeks out from the election, but his numbers were getting softer. This was before the drubbing he suffered at the hands of Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate, before the polling surge that gave Romney supporters a glimmer of hope. As it was, Mr. Obama finished in November with the weakest re-election in U.S. presidential history, shedding both electoral and popular votes from his 2008 total.

Foreign policy was a bright spot for Mr. Obama, or so the campaign argued. Osama bin Laden was dead, the war on terror was over, and that seemed to be enough. Pay no attention to the rest of the miserable Obama foreign policy record, the utter lack of substantive achievement, the declining global regard form America. Stick to the one accomplishment Mr. Obama had the least to do with.

Benghazi socked the campaign with a blizzard of inconvenient truths. Benghazi was an al Qaeda-linked attack when al Qaeda was supposed to be largely destroyed. It was planned in advance but either not detected, not stopped, or both. State Department officials on the ground requested extra security before the fact, and were ignored. The Libyan militia hired to guard the consulate had terrorist ties. The attack took place on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks when everyone should have been on alert. U.S. forces on hand that might have been used to help defend the Benghazi consulate or intimidate the attackers were either told to stand down, never stood up, not available or never thought of, depending on which story you believe. And four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The entire episode was a bloody failure that cast serious, legitimate doubts on Mr. Obama’s leadership and judgment.

At least Benghazi would have done that, had the story been presented truthfully. Instead, the Obama campaign – that is, the administration — went into overdrive both to conceal the facts and fabricate a new story.

Attention is focused on the now-discredited White House talking points because they represent the smoking gun. The most condemning factor is not the critical details about the attack that were omitted, but the part of the narrative that was completely invented, namely the lie that the attack was a spontaneous mob action protesting an inflammatory Youtube video.

This alone proves there was a coverup. This was a deliberate lie concocted to deceive the American people and preserve the myth of Mr. Obama’s national security prowess. There is no other explanation, since the mob action did not happen. It was cut from whole cloth.

Once the story was fabricated, the coverup was implemented. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice repeated the “spontaneous mob uprising” lie on five consecutive Sunday news shows. Mr. Obama refused to call the attack terrorism even though the Intelligence Community had been saying it was from the first moments of the attack. Administration functionaries from top to bottom held onto the false story as long as they could, even as foreign news reports from the scene and eyewitness accounts steadily undermined the White House line. Anyone in the government suffering attacks of conscience was intimidated into silence.

The truth has been long in coming, but the severity of the scandal is directly proportional to the scope and duration of the lying. In her testimony before Congress in January, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked rhetorically whether the attack was “because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans.” Yet she knew then, as the entire U.S. leadership had known months earlier, that neither of these scenarios were true. It was a planned, coordinated, sophisticated, al Qaeda-linked, terrorist victory.

“What difference at this point does it make?” Mrs. Clinton famously said. The difference is, the American people deserve to know the truth. Not just about Benghazi, but about the shameful behavior of top administration officials in the attack’s wake. They deserve to know who concocted the lies about Benghazi, and for what reason. They deserve straight answers to what happened before, during and after the attack on the consulate. They deserve to be free of Obama administration parsing, dodging, shifting, stammering and stonewalling. In the end, the truth counts for something. Yes, this is all about politics, the deadly and shameful politics of Barack Obama’s reelection, and the coordinated falsehoods the government told the American people to keep him in the race.

James S. Robbins is Deputy Editor of Rare