Oren Dorell has a story that's on the USA Times website today. The story is purportedly about Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell testimony in the House (which, yes, is apparently still doing hearings on Benghazi). The real point of the story, however, appears to be to repeat discredited GOP talking points.
The problem starts with the headline - General - Military should've tried to rescue Benghazi Americans. Reading the story itself, you'll see that the military did take action - it tried everything it could do. For a headline to suggest that more could have been done, and that perhaps Americans died for lack of effort by the military, is stunningly irresponsible.
General Lovell's testimony deserves attention - but it's the statements of supposedly objective journalist that are the most striking. For example, the story first recounts General Lovell's testimony that military personnel knew that the attack on the embassy was a hostile action, and not a protest gone awry. Dorell then writes that this "contradicts the story that the Obama administration gave in the early days." Of course, rather than quoting the administration story, Dorell gives his own version:"the attack was a protest against an anti-Islam video that turned violent."
Did the Obama administration say that? Susan Rice said that following an initial apparently spontaneous protest, there was an assault on the embassy. Lovell's testimony - that this was a hostile action - mirrors what Rice actually said, which was there was an assault on the embassy.
General Lovell's claim that the military knew this was a hostile action is undercut by the testimony of.... General Lovell. Later in the same piece, he is quoted saying "As the attack was ongoing, it was unclear whether it was an attempted kidnapping, rescue, recovery, protracted hostile engagement or any or all of the above." So despite General Lovell himself testifying that they really had no idea what was going on, Dorell is comfortable saying that his testimony contradicts the Obama administration's initial assessment (left out of the story is that this assessment was based on CIA intelligence - no one in the Obama administration made it up out of thin air, like certain WMDs near Tikrit. But I digress).
So after blaring a headline that suggests the military did nothing, you'd expect some damning evidence of negligence by the military. Buried towards the end, however, the story admits the opposite is actually true. The Joint Chiefs agree with the Secretary of State that "the interagency response was timely and appropriate, but there simply was not enough time, given the speed of the attacks, for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference."
All sizzle, no steak.
And at the very end of the column is this interesting tidbit: "On Tuesday, a conservative watchdog group released an e-mail showing that White House aide Ben Rhodes wanted to blame the 2012 assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on a protest that never happened there." That sentence can be read two ways - the most natural of which is that Ben Rhodes was urging the administration to lie to the American people by consciously blaming the attack on protests he knew at the time were not real. The column omits that the email was circulating talking points created in the immediate aftermath of the attack, by the intelligence community itself. How casually journalists repeat Republican propaganda!
Let's look at that nefarious email full of talking points for the Sunday shows. Anything about getting Obama reelected by covering up an attack by terrorists? Or about making sure Clinton looked good for an election four years away?
"We are not aware of any actionanable intelligence indicating that an attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi was planned or imminent. The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex."
Well, that's a let down. And hey, the talking points do talk about one "protest" - at the US Embassy in Cairo, which most assuredly happened. And as for Benghazi, no,there were not demonstrations. But the NY Times did the most exhaustive investigation of any newspaper into that day's events. What did they find?
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.In the immediate aftermath of an attack that took place half the world away, the talking points, based on the then-best assessment of the intelligence community, were not 100% accurate. Overall, though, they've held up remarkably well. Much better than, say, the constantly repeated and completely discredited story of a cover up for the sake of Obama 2012 or Clinton 2016.
One group of individuals has been lying repeatedly and incessantly about the events that day, for no purpose but their own political gain. But it's not and never was the White House. USA Today not only failed to shine a light on the real bad guys here, it went to bat for them.