Let’s see. The United States suffered a deadly terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, in which a sitting US Ambassador was murdered. Elsewhere, black Islamist flags were hoisted over four American embassies, following security breaches. The Obama administration lied about the cause and nature of the attack in Benghazi, misled the public about threats leading up to the massacre, and attempted to gloss over the outrageously lax security at the diplomatic outpost prior to the raid. They’ve dissembled and ducked tough questions, instructing journalists to stop asking about details of the massacre, and hiding behind an “ongoing FBI investigation,” even though the FBI still — almost two-and-a-half weeks later — has not managed to gain access to the “crime” scene, which remains unsecured. At what point does this fiasco become a national scandal? For a sense of how shambolic the situation in Libya continues to be, read this New York Times piece, which reports that (a) we’re now evacuating more diplomats for their safety (just in the nick of time), and (b) federal investigators have been reduced to interviewing witnesses in parked cars 400 miles away from the burned-out consulate, due to security concerns:
Sixteen days after the death of four Americans in an attack on a United States diplomatic mission here, fears about the near-total lack of security have kept F.B.I. agents from visiting the scene of the killings and forced them to try to piece together the complicated crime from Tripoli, more than 400 miles away. Investigators are so worried about the tenuous security, people involved in the investigation say, that they have been unwilling to risk taking some potential Libyan witnesses into the American Embassy in Tripoli. Instead, the investigators have resorted to the awkward solution of questioning some witnesses in cars outside the embassy, which is operating under emergency staffing and was evacuated of even more diplomats on Thursday because of a heightened security alert. “It’s a cavalcade of obstacles right now,” said a senior American law enforcement official who is receiving regular updates on the Benghazi investigation and who described the crime scene, which has been trampled on, looted and burned, as so badly “degraded” that even once F.B.I. agents do eventually gain access “it’ll be very difficult to see what evidence can be attributed to the bad guys.”
Post Continues on townhall.com