Washington Post’s Jeniffer Rubin reports: Staffers on the Senate Homeland Security Committee have begun investigating the Benghazi Attack, although no public hearings have yet been held. A committee spokesperson told me, “Last week, the committee requested documents from State, DNI, and DOD.”
A senior aide close to the investigation tells me that committee chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and others are coming to believe that “what happened in Benghazi involved multiple failures — not just by a single department or agency of our government, but by a number different parts of our government — before, during, and after the attack.” The source describes an administration-wide breakdown: “These include potential failures of intelligence, failures of process, and failures of policy. This attack unfortunately happened during an intensely political and partisan moment in the life of our country — at the height of a presidential campaign — but it’s important for the sake of our national security for everyone to step back, set aside partisan politics, and set up a process to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.”
That said, the democratic process also should allow voters the opportunity to assess the president’s performance and hear his responses to questions about what he knew and when he knew it. The process of public accountability, which falls largely to the media, has also been a “failure,” fueled either by sloth or partisan sympathy for the president. As a result, voters will have to make their choice on Nov. 6 knowing only that many things went very wrong in an administration that had the benefit, yet didn’t learn the lessons, of the 1990s and Sept. 11, 2001. If not deceit, we are looking at an administration that failed in what President Obama has described as his most important duty — “to keep the American people safe.”
Read more: Washington Post
