Issue link: https://newsleader.uberflip.com/i/130753
Sarasota News Leader May 17, 2013 OPINION Page 66 "And the question that we would ask is: How ment's response to the attack was profoundly thin does the ice have to get before someone lacking; U.S. intelligence agencies provided no tactical warning of the impending attack; falls through?" and no individual U.S. official could be held Congressional Democrats saw the testimony personally responsible for the consequences as a partisan attack. Rep. Elijah Cummings of the attack. (D-SC), the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Commit- In the wake of Sept. 11, 2012, President Obama tee, denounced the committee's hearings as focused his attention on re-election, not on politically biased. The hearings' aim, he said, the murders in Benghazi. The latter would have required him to take action. Even the was to hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of runTao requires something from each of us: Phining for president in 2016. losophers contemplate; leaders lead. The State Department withheld the requested From his point of view, doing nothing was the security enhancements because it wished to expedient path. It was the path of his Tao; the maintain the level of diplomatic security in murders were just an unfortunate and unpreLibya at an "artificially low" level, according dictable hit-and-run accident, an unhappy to internal State Department memoranda, as event along the path back to the White House. reported by The Hill on Oct. 10, 2012. Honest Muslims, his U.N. ambassador counThis type of reasoning is known as false cause fallacy: Only U.S. diplomatic posts exposed to a high level of terrorist threat receive security enhancements. If U.S. diplomatic posts in Libya do not receive security enhancements, then they are not exposed to a high level of terrorist threat. seled, were provoked beyond the limit of all reasonable endurance by a vile hate film (that no one in Libya had ever seen) and they gave full vent to their anger. In the unclassified version of its report, the Department of State's Accountability Review Board, in part, concluded that the attack was not carried out by protesters, as Ambassador Rice had insisted; the Special Mission security posture in Benghazi was inadequate as the result of systemic failures created by two bureaus of the Department of State, as well as by U.S. Embassy Tripoli; the Libyan Govern- The president did nothing — again. And after all, as White House Press Secretary Jim Carney said on May 1, 2013, "Benghazi happened a long time ago." Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon and Syria's use of chemical weapons against its civilian population stirred him to do nothing. He did win re-election. Good for him. It is doubtful, however, that the record of his performance in the field of foreign relations will appear even as a footnote in the next edition of Profiles in Courage. %