There’s no mystery about why Hillary Rodham Clinton spends so much time on airplanes to dreary places that everybody else avoids like the plague (or the stomach flu). The climate anywhere is better than in the comfortable ineptitude of Foggy Bottom.
The report of an independent panel inquiring into what happened in Benghazi blames the State Department bureaucracy essentially for not having a clue about what was going on in Libya. A panel of diplomats would never say anything like that, but the message written between the lines is plain and clear.
The panel blames intelligence officers — i.e., the CIA— for relying too much on “specific warnings” of imminent attacks, waiting for the details of the enemy’s game plan, and ignoring what should have been telegraphed from the seat of their pants. Everyone in Libya knew that the militias were all over the eastern part of the country, having already shot up a British diplomat’s motorcade and set off a bomb outside the American mission in Benghazi. The evildoers were looking for evil to do. The Americans were the obvious targets.
A lot of people at Foggy Bottom were apparently busy with morning and afternoon siestas. The panel specifically blames the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau and the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau for failing to pay attention to what was going on around them:
More.
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