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Saturday, November 03, 2012

Straw Man

David Ignatius says the incomplete White House timeline of Benghazi shows there was no conspiracy by the federal government to abandon the diplomatic outposts?

While there were multiple errors that led to the final tragedy, there’s no evidence that the White House or CIA leadership deliberately delayed or impeded rescue efforts.

Oh good grief. There's no evidence that anybody in the White House did anything deliberately. I suspect military assets moved automatically to save time in case they were ordered into action. Rescue efforts by the military weren't delayed or impeded--they weren't ordered in the first place.

The issues are abandoning our people and incompetence. Remember, we abandoned far more than those who died. But the CIA reaction forces and Libyan allies were able to get 30 or so of our people out. But their success does not erase the fact the the White House was apparently prepared to let the whole lot of them die rather than issue orders to do something.

But this spin refuting a conspiracy is exactly what I warned about in this post:

Benghazi is bad, but don't rescue the Obama administration by making reckless charges of "treason" that can't be substantiated. This risks going into "truther" or "birther" territory and tainting the real charges of failure.

It is no surprise that an administration that just doesn't truly believe we are at war refused to react like a leadership team at war. The result was that we handed our enemies a victory.