It couldn’t be more obvious that the true motive here is to either build a case for impeachment or to further damage Obama’s would-be successor, Hillary Clinton. Probably both. If the GOP’s Benghazi conspiracy theorists were legitimately making an honest effort to ascertain what went wrong, rather than to exploit the deaths of four Americans in order to operate a publicly-funded smear campaign, I might be inclined to support that effort. But that’s not what’s happening. This is a political witch hunt, pure and simple. And as with the conspicuous lack of outrage over the 13 embassy attacks during the Bush years, the GOP’s Benghazi-obsessed screechers never once showed similar investigative zeal in the years following another attack against America that’s been weirdly overlooked in the context of this discussion: September 11, 2001, eleven years earlier to the day.
Indeed, there are legitimate and numerous instances where the Bush administration failed to act in accordance with CIA warnings and subsequently attempted to cover up not only its inaction but also aspects of the aftermath — with zero outrage or obsessive hobby-horsing from Fox News or the congressional Republicans. Instead it was all met with the usual refrain: don’t try to undermine the commander-in-chief while troops are in harm’s way, you unpatriotic, terrorist-loving, America-hater.
Author and Vanity Fair editor Kurt Eichenwald reported back in 2012 that the infamous August 6, 2001 president’s daily brief (PDB) wasn’t the first time the administration had been warned of a large-scale attack being prepared by Osama Bin Laden and his co-conspirators, and yet there’s no indication President Bush took any significant or even cursory action to disrupt the plot. I hasten to note, however, this isn’t to suggest Bush was to blame for the attacks nor is it an endorsement the absurd theory that he deliberately allowed the attacks to occur. This is simply to illustrate a very dichotomous reaction from the GOP.
–From the beginning, Richard Clarke, a holdover Clinton administration counter-terrorism adviser, tried to repeatedly warn then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about an impending Bin Laden attack. Clarke warned of “an immediate and serious threat to the United States” at the hands of Bin Laden.
