Eye on the Hill

Although many media outlets buried the Benghazi story last fall lest it interfere with the reelection prospects of the awesome Barack Obama, they’ve noticed now that the administration was clearly lying about the root cause of the attack and serious journalists would have been on the story right away. What happened wasn’t a demonstration over that silly video that got out of hand, it was determined Islamist militants targeting a U.S. facility with heavy weapons, and senior executive branch people knew it all along. So are we done?

Not remotely. What has yet to be dealt with in any serious way is what the president knew and when he knew it. During the election, on Oct. 26, Obama told an interviewer “ the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to.” Yet we now know that there was no effort to deploy forces to stop the attack on the consulate and, indeed, Special Forces were ordered to stand down.

So the questions are: What order, exactly, did the President give and when and to whom? What did they then do or not do to implement the order? and What did the President do after giving that order?

As far as we can tell, the answer to question three is that he went to sleep, wasn’t kept informed and the next day flew off to a fundraiser. Which is a shocking response indeed, if true, and a scandalous lie if false. It hasn’t yet become a major issue because the question hasn’t yet been forcefully asked. But it will be.

And then, of course, we’re going to work back to questions two and one. It’s not over. Not by a long shot.