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It also might have been smart for Rice to have taken the trouble to learn what U.S. officials were doing in Benghazi. Did she know that, as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has revealed, that the word "consulate" in the draft "talking points" was carefully changed to "mission."
A prospective Secretary of State should know the difference. A "mission" is a group of officials abroad normally headed by a diplomat while a consulate is headed by a consul who normally handles commercial interests, serves the needs of citizens abroad and issues visas.
The difference between consulate and mission is more than semantic. Consulates, understandably, perform consular duties. Missions can do whatever. As my former CIA analyst colleague, Melvin A. Goodman, pointed out in "The Why Behind the Benghazi Attack," the hidden reality in Benghazi was not the alleged deception by Rice or the inadequate security measures.
The key secret was that the U.S. government had transformed the Benghazi "mission" into an operational CIA base spying on and seeking to neutralize extremist militias operating in eastern Libya. Thus, the "mission" was an inviting target for attack. In a limited sense, one could say the primary security failure was in not adequately anticipating this risk.
The more significant point is that, because of the anger resulting from U.S. policy in the area and the CIA role in implementing it, there is great doubt that "missions" like the one in Benghazi can ever be protected from the kind of organized assault launched on Sept. 11, 2012. And that probably includes gigantic, fortified installations like the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Kabul.
A month before the U.S. presidential election, House Government Affairs Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, conducted a public hearing, in an attempt to prove that with adequate security measures the attack on the Benghazi "mission" could have been thwarted and American lives saved.
Issa's star witness, State Department Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, joined others in bemoaning State's refusal to provide additional security (partly due to congressional refusal to appropriate all the requested funds).
But Nordstrom shot a wide hole in the notion that more security could have saved the day. A 14-year veteran of State's Diplomatic Security Service, Nordstrom said the kind of attack mounted in Benghazi could not have been prevented.
"Having an extra foot of wall, or an extra half-dozen guards or agents would not have enabled us to respond to that kind of assault," Nordstrom said. "The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service." [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Real Blame for Deaths in Libya."]
Whether media pundits are conscious of this or not, the interminable focus on what Susan Rice said and when she said it, as well as the inadequate security, divert attention from what the CIA was doing in Benghazi. No Establishment figure or media pundit wants to focus on that. And, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, recently conceded, no politician wants to risk appearing reluctant to support covert action against "terrorism."
But a source with excellent access, so to speak, to former CIA Director David Petraeus, his biographer/mistress Paula Broadwell, said publicly on Oct. 26 that CIA was interrogating prisoners in Benghazi and that this may have been the reason the CIA base was so brutally attacked. More bizarre still, her comments were corroborated by Fox News!
If Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were genuinely interested in what happened in Benghazi and why, would they not wish to look into that?
A C-Minus on Substance
President Obama has defended Rice against those who would "besmirch" her reputation, saying she "has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill, professionalism, and toughness, and grace."
Obama also said she had "nothing to do with Benghazi." However, this does not appear to be entirely accurate. It is an open secret that Susan Rice, together with Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, now ensconced at Obama's National Security Council, were big promoters of the so-called "responsibility to protect" and thus acted as prime movers behind the U.S. excellent adventure in Libya.
The charitable explanation is that last year, with a thoroughly naà ¯ve "Gaddafi-bad-guys-vs.-maybe-good-guys" approach, blissfully unaware of which elements they might be "protecting" or "liberating" in Benghazi, and with little planning regarding who might replace Gaddafi, they made their mark on Libya.
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