Let Benghazi's Chips Fall
(Since the Attorney Generalwon't appoint a Special Prosecutor) The House should appoint a Select Committee.
Updated May 9, 2013, 8:09 p.m. ET
Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia has written House Speaker John Boehner, requesting the creation of a bipartisan Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi terror debacle. It is an excellent idea. A Select Committee is the only means available now for the U.S. political system to extricate itself from the labyrinth called Benghazi.
There have been two fulcrum events in the accounting of what happened in Benghazi. The first was U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's September 16 declarations on TV that Benghazi was part of the Islamic world's violent, spontaneous reaction to the incendiary California YouTube video.
That assertion, soon revised to acknowledge that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, set in motion a tug of war between some Congressional Republicans and the Obama Administration, with a press corps mostly uninterested in pursuing the story.
The second fulcrum event is the testimony this week by Gregory Hicks, the Tripoli embassy's No. 2 at the time of the assault. The Hicks testimony left no doubt that Benghazi was an attack by organized terrorists. In the course of that long night, Mr. Hicks or his aides discussed what was happening with the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany. A lot of public officials were in the loop, and in real time.
The distance and discrepancy between what Mr. Hicks was telling these officials across the U.S. government that night and what Ambassador Rice told the American people five days later is vast. That distance needs to be explained, and the loop closed for the sake of public accountability.
There are strong reasons for doing so, starting with the murdered U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Across this country's history, the murder of an American ambassador, the nation's representative, has been taken as not merely a tragedy but an attack on U.S. interests that demands an official accounting to the American people.
Nothing about Benghazi, including the Accountability Review Board report, has reflected that U.S. tradition. It has instead represented the more recent impulse in our politics to sweep uncomfortable events out of the news, move forward in the Twitter news cycle, or grind it down into no more than partisan pettiness.
Has partisanship been in play here? Yes, as always in Washington. But the terrorist assault on a U.S. mission abroad deserves not to be quashed by partisanship.
It may be that a bipartisan Select Committee would validate the Obama Administration's version of events. So be it. And if so, the Administration officials on duty then should not fear it. But after the Hicks testimony, the idea that the American political system should move on from the murder of a U.S. ambassador in a distant land doesn't sit right.
Mr. Boehner said on Thursday that the Administration should release its email communications on Benghazi, but it won't do so unless they are subpoenaed. Frank Wolf, one of the House's most senior Members, has it right. Benghazi's explanation deserves the best effort elected officials can give it, and the right vehicle is a Select Committee with subpoena power and deposition authority.
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