My Benghazi Question

I think that all this Benghazi nonsense is just that; nonsense, political posturing and hot air. The exhibition discredits Congress more than it does the Obama administration.

That being said, to some degree Obama’s people walked into this mess by being politicians and using more words in their “talking points” than were needed. Instead of saying “we have no indication that it was a terrorist attack,” which sounded like and was interpreted as a denial, simply say, “we don’t know the cause and are investigating.”

If a reporter goads you by asking, “Was it a terrorist attack?,” merely repeat your original statement that “we do not presently know the cause.”

There is a certain arrogance in trying to avoid saying that one does not know an answer, and that leads politicians into talking around the answer rather than simply giving the answer. Almost never does that really turn out well, and this is a case of that arrogance backfiring rather badly. You spend all that time carefully tailoring “talking points” to assure that you are going to sound good, and the result is this.

In my opinion, this "Benghazi-gate" affair is about nothing more than the typical political habit of talking with a greater concern for sounding good than for being informative.

The one point in all of this that bothers me, and that no one else seems to be paying any attention to, is the interaction between the State Department and the CIA in the Benghazi mission. It appears that the only person stationed in that mission who was not a member of the CIA, or a private contractor working for the CIA, was Ambassador Stevens, and I for one would like to know what he was doing there. Why was he with the CIA and why he was assigned to what appears to have been a CIA operation?