The GOP in their Benghazi witch hunt have besides fallaciously claiming that the Obama Administration has provided conflicting stories about what happened has also tried to blame the President for inadequate security prior to the attack-thereby causing it.
No doubt, as Scott Monje argues the entire quest to find scapegoats after tragedies like this is counterproductive and wrongheaded. However as they keep beating this dead horse we need to be clear in quantifying what in fact did-and didn't happen.
Security had been through the years privatized. Meanwhile government funding for the department was cut-thanks to the GOP:
"While State’s reliance on private security rose, Congress began cutting the department’s security budget (which comes under two accounts, either Worldwide Security Protection or Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance). Relative to the department’s requests, Congress cut $129 million for fiscal year 2011 and $341 million for fiscal year 2012. House Republicans were the driving force behind the cuts and had proposed deeper cuts ($131 million for FY 2011 and $520 million for FY 2012) than those that eventually came out of the conference committees. (For fiscal year 2013, the House has proposed cutting the request by $316 million and the Senate by $70 million.) For a suggestion of the base-line funding behind these appropriations, recall that Robert Gates, when he was secretary of defense, repeatedly lamented the inadequate funding of the State Department. Remember as well that a 1985 recommendation by the Advisory Panel on Overseas Security to replace or renovate 126 high-risk posts within seven years has yet to be fully implemented."
http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2012/10/30/security-in-benghazi/
Again, there has been too much of the blame game played already, as he argues. These kind of disasters are not well made for the kind of facile politicization that the GOP loves:
"In the case of Benghazi, the full story is still not known—and it may never be—yet many people have made up their minds that they already “know” what happened. More fundamentally, people assume that “someone,” especially the CIA, must have known what was happening at the time and is not telling. The fact is, however, analysts are still piecing together the evidence. They certainly did not know the full story as it was happening, and it takes a considerable amount of time after the fact to reconstruct the most likely version of what probably happened."
"The most important thing to remember is that confusion is common in sudden, large, unexpected events, whether they be surprise attacks or natural disasters. The first reports from the scene are often incorrect because the early evidence is fragmentary, contradictory, and sometimes erroneous."
"Afterward, when we already have a good idea of what happened, we can look at the same reports and say, “Obviously, these clues, and not those, were the ones they should have been focusing on.” At the time, however, that judgment is not so easily made. Moreover, early analysis will be influenced by the existing theories or preconceived notions of the analysts; sometimes those theories will be correct, or close enough not to matter, but in other cases they will be out of date or even completely wrong. Either way, that initial analysis will then set the framework for the next wave of analysis and evaluation. If the initial assessment is off, the accumulation of information will eventually bring analysts around to the right direction, but that correction may be delayed to the extent that the incoming flow of information continues to be slow, partial, and contradictory. Information of that sort can be subconsciously dismissed or interpreted to fit into existing frameworks for a considerable period of time."
"Analysis is also subject to political cross-pressures. Analysts fear they will be held accountable for mistakes, so their preference is to wait, to take the time necessary to be sure. Because they want to avoid outright errors, and because the situation is by its very nature vague, confusing, and imprecise, their reports will also tend to be hedged, vague, and imprecise—much to the vexation of political leaders. Political leaders and intelligence analysts often have different understandings of the nature of intelligence. Political leaders want to receive precisely the opposite of what analysts want to give. They want details, and they want them to be clear, definitive, unambiguous, and correct. They want the entire story immediately, and they do not want to hear that the story has evolved since they first heard it. Leaders have invested enormous quantities of tax dollars into intelligence budgets, and they are responsible for making consequential decisions based on intelligence; when the crunch time comes, they do not want to hear that the benefits they expected when they made those investments are not really possible. Adding further to the tension between the two groups is the natural preference of intelligence professionals to keep as much information secret as possible versus the temptation of politicians to use that information to bolster public positions and arguments."
"The election season only adds to the political pressures already at work. Politicians tend to believe members of their own party and suspect those of the other party. If the administration is not forthcoming with details, the opposition will accuse it of a cover-up. On the other hand, if it is forthcoming, the opposition may accuse it of playing politics with national security by divulging classified information. Factions within an administration (or bureaucrats who fear they will be blamed for something) may release selective bits of information either to reinforce or to undermine a particular version of events. Each side will jump to the conclusion that the clues that support its interpretation are obviously the correct and important ones and then proceed from that assumption.
At the same time, people engaged in political arguments over controversial events often simplify and distort those facts that are known (or are believed to be known), making each position simpler, but also more internally consistent and more different from the contending argument than the facts may warrant. Thus, in the Benghazi case, the two interpretations become caricatured as either a totally spontaneous event inspired by outrage over an Internet video or a terrorist attack planned long in advance by a known al-Qa’ida-affiliated organization that was untouched by emotion and uninfluenced by the video. The variants are treated as mutually exclusive, although there is no reason that parts of each cannot be true and it is unlikely that either is fully correct as is. Much of this political positioning occurs at the psychological level, before the conscious angling for advantage even begins.:
http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2012/11/23/confusion-in-benghazi/
In truth the desire for scapegoats is simpleminded. You can't expect that these sorts of events can be wholly edited out of existence:
"Complaints that the department did not fulfill the embassy’s requests for security are a valid cause for investigation, although in my view that investigation should focus on improving capabilities and procedures rather than scoring points of finding scapegoats. For Benghazi, Nordstrom had requested three to five DS agents, and by coincidence five were there at the time of the attack. The complaints refer primarily to the removal of the MSD teams and the 16-member SST; the embassy hoped to have them replaced or have their terms extended. These men were stationed in Tripoli, not Benghazi, although a few might have accompanied the ambassador during his stay there. A previous extension request for the SST had been granted, but the last one was not. In turning the request down, Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb cited the ongoing training of local bodyguards."
"The wisdom of denying the requests can certainly be disputed, especially given the sensitive and unsettled condition of Libya, but as a general rule we cannot expect such requests to simply be granted whenever they are made. All missions see the urgency of their own needs most clearly, but people at the center have the unenviable task of making decisions about resources and priorities."
"Under Secretary Patrick F. Kennedy has argued that these decisions involve dialog, negotiation, between the overseas post and headquarters. The errors are always obvious when the decision goes badly, but they are only obvious after the fact. In this case, it is not at all clear that a different decision would have changed the outcome. According to Nordstrom’s written testimony, no force level under consideration would have been adequate to the attack, which was unprecedented in its nature. By definition it is no longer unprecedented, but given funding limits, it is still unlikely that this attack will set the security standard for other posts in the future. Future needs will be addressed by future negotiations between overseas posts and headquarters against a background of competing needs and available resources, and sometimes the solution won’t work out."
So there's no gain in playing political gotcha, here. If anything, the have brought far less light-though considerably more heat-than would have otherwise been the case. McCain and other GOPers who missed last week's briefing by Petraeus show that getting the facts is not their overriding priority.
Indeed, Darrell Issa and his Republican friends in the House did a lot of harm but little good in their recent show trials actually exposing Libyans helping us in Libya to great danger and blowing the CIA's cover.
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