The Patriot Post® · Senate Report: Benghazi Attack Was Preventable

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released its 85-page report determining that the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, could have been prevented. The report calls into question the State Department’s handling of security in the months leading up to the attack and its subsequent failure to adequately investigate what went wrong. The report also documents numerous events that should have prompted State to increase security at the facility, including two prior attacks in 2012, the deteriorating security situation in the area, the presence of at least 10 al-Qaida training camps in Benghazi, and the fact that several other nations had closed their own diplomatic facilities earlier in the year for security reasons.

The report doesn’t break a lot of new ground because the details of the attack have been known for some time. But the fact that it was crafted with bipartisan support raises the hope that Senate Democrats will concede to a more thorough investigation instead of falling for Barack Obama’s lame excuse that Benghazi is a “phony scandal” ginned up by Republicans. The State Department and the White House have done everything in their power to keep the Benghazi attack out of the national conversation, stonewalling investigations and concocting the campaign lie that the attack was a spontaneous protest of an obscure YouTube video despite knowing within minutes that it was a deliberate terrorist attack.

Though the report does not reveal just who came up with that sorry protest story in the weeks leading up to the 2012 presidential election, it does put to rest any notion that Benghazi was anything short of a coordinated, planned terrorist attack. Now, congressional leaders should continue to push for the truth behind the post-attack politicizing of the narrative, because we’ll never get it from the Obama White House. Holding a person or persons accountable and not just faceless bureaucracies is paramount. Then again, in the immortal words of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “What difference … does it make?”