Don’t forget about Benghazi

Voters had plenty of reasons to distrust Washington’s executive branch before the IRS and Department of Justice scandals exploded Monday. Many of those reasons are related to September’s Benghazi debacle, which finally started receiving the scrutiny it deserved last week, from both Congress and the national press.

So as lawmakers trip over each other to lambaste the Internal Revenue Service’s brazen intimidation of conservative groups and Attorney General Eric Holder’s secret snooping of the press, they can’t forget that Benghazi cries out for additional investigation.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats still insist that Benghazi is a partisan matter, driven by Fox News and Republicans who want to damage the president and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a presumed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. Last week’s testimony from whistle-blowers, who offered wrenching accounts of the terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the diplomatic post in Libya, proved otherwise. And how can anyone believe the administration’s assessment of the battle after Friday’s news that its talking points on the killings were revised so many times that facts became outright lies?

Events preceding and following the Sept. 11, 2012, attack have become clear. We know Americans on the ground in Benghazi, worried for their safety, wanted more U.S. security but were denied. We know the administration was aware that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida were active in Benghazi. We know that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice fibbed her way through the Sunday talk show circuit when she said the attack was a spontaneous demonstration against a YouTube video that insulted Muslims. And we know that President Barack Obama initially refused to call the strike a terrorist attack, then claimed that he had called it a terrorist attack all along — an assertion that earned him four out of four Pinocchios on Tuesday from Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, a ranking reserved only for complete whoppers.

There is no question that Mr. Obama and his administration set out to deceive the public on the nature of the attack to prevent damage to his re-election campaign. But at this point, what’s far more important than the before and the after is what happened during the Benghazi attack. Why weren’t U.S. military forces or those of our allies scrambled immediately to help the Americans under attack? Why was there so little support in one of the Middle East’s most volatile places? And was the president aware that our diplomats, his direct representatives on foreign soil, had been all but abandoned? The answers to these questions have ramifications for U.S. foreign policy and the safety of Americans everywhere.

Benghazi should be at the front of the line for federal inquiry. The abuses of authority within IRS and Justice Department are indictments of revenge-driven politics at all levels of government, but these agencies didn’t get anyone killed. It’s up to the House of Representatives to send out subpoenas and get to the bottom of Benghazi, once and for all.