What questions were specifically left unanswered?
Well, the biggest ones in my mind have to do with the roles of the DOD and CIA. The report was commissioned by State and deals almost entirely with State. So by avoiding all of that, it avoids the most important questions — who did what and when to help, or deny help to, our people taking fire on the ground in Benghazi?
She went through all of that at the hearing? She went into a detailed breakdown of what happened leading up to and during the attacks and answered numerous questions regarding this, including who did what to help when. Can you point to any specific questions asked during the hearing that she failed to answer satisfactorily?
As far as I can tell, both Obama and Clinton have repeatedly taken responsibility? Clinton did so again today.
Well, Secretary Clinton certainly mouthed the words. She’s willing to say that she’s responsible, but she’s not willing to accept any accountability. As she emphasized, in the State Department’s “accountability” report, “accountability” didn’t float as high as the Secretary’s level.
This is sort of like saying the CEO of a large, multinational corporation is personally responsible for the actions of every single one of his or her thousands of employees, should be fully aware of all their roles, responsibilities and activities, and if one of those employees—no matter how junior or how far removed from the CEO’s primary concerns and responsibilities—does something wrong, the CEO is ultimately responsible for that and should be held accountable. If it’s the sort of mistake that hurts business, then yeah, the CEO will experience some fall out because of the damage it does to business and will be the one ultimately responsible for driving process improvements that prevent that sort of mistake from happening again, but no one would insinuate that the CEO was in the wrong for not personally managing and being aware in minutiae of everything that everyone underneath him or her does.
This is the fundamental problem with the argument that Clinton hasn’t accepted responsibility. Do you think she should be aware in great detail of what the approximately 50,000 people who work for the State Department do or don’t do on a daily basis and be held directly accountable any time one of them does their job incorrectly? If she did attempt to micromanage 50,000 people, she wouldn’t be very effective at anything. That’s why you delegate things—including big things, like security, to people who are experts in that area—and why when things go wrong within areas where you have delegated responsibility, the people held accountable when things go wrong are the people who were given the responsibility to handle and be accountable for those things.
This is basic management. If Clinton were sitting on her thumbs and not working to help drive improvements in what was clearly a problem area, it would be one thing. But she’s not. Being accountable when you are at her level of management means your name and face are the one attached to the problem and you are the one ultimately responsible for fixing the problem…which is exactly what she has attempted to do.
If the argument is that she should resign because of the deaths that resulted from security problems, there have been a number of state department deaths over the years which, ultimately, came down to inadequate security, including a number of different incidents while George W. Bush was in office, and no one demanded Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell’s resignations because people in the State Department died under their leadership.
Even if they knew that the video was not to blame, do you think it would have been wise for them to contradict the CIA talking points or to encourage anyone in the State Department to contradict the CIA talking points?
Oh, is this the new standard? It was a lie, but what difference does that make? Petraeus testified that he didn’t know who took references to terrorism out of the CIA’s paper. I think it’s pretty clear that the administration was far more concerned about not contradicting its “We have Al-Qaeda on the run!” talking points rather than worried about contradicting the talking points attributed to the CIA.
This doesn’t make any sense. You can compare Susan Rice’s statements regarding the Benghazi attack to the CIA talking points given to her that morning, and you will find they are virtually identical. The simplest and most likely explanation—Occam’s Razor—is that Susan Rice followed the talking points she was given by the government agency whose job it is to provide intelligence and information because that was the best information she had available to her.
It is an enormous stretch to assume that Susan Rice followed the CIA talking points NOT because they were the best information she had available to her, but because it was part of some vast conspiracy on the part of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to cover up overwhelming evidence of their mutual incompetence. Even to make this argument, you have to believe the following absurdities: 1) that it is within the purview of either Obama or Clinton’s jobs to handle personally the minutiae of security detail at every single one of the consulates and embassies around the world, 2) that it is within the purview of either Obama or Clinton’s jobs to handle personally the actions of every single person who works under them in any capacity, and 3) that it is wise or a recommended practice for representatives of the State Department to publicly contradict and interfere with an ongoing CIA investigation because they think some of the details might be suspect, even knowing that the CIA has and will continue to leave out information in reports if releasing that information to the public might hinder their ability to do their jobs.
If your starting place is “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are incompetent and undeserving of their positions,” then you’re willing to ignore facts and reality and invent conspiracies in order to create a scenario where your assumption might be plausible. You arrived at your conclusion before you had any evidence, though, which isn’t a logical way to proceed with anything, except maybe a witch hunt.