Four months ago today, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. And although so much time has passed between then and now--and although Obama promised many times in many ways that we were going to figure out what happened there--investigators are still having trouble accessing facts about the attack.
According to Eli Lake, this is largely because Obama turned this into a criminal investigation, thus forcing our intelligence community to rely (and wait on) "local and national police in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt" for results.
While some counterterrorism officials are providing Obama an out by reminding the public that counterterrorism investigations take time, Lake points out that this was not a complicated attack--neither in its planning or execution. Getting to the bottom of it is not like retracing the threads that led to September 11, 2001.
Moreover, with each passing day, carrying out a criminal investigation in Benghazi is becoming increasingly difficult. Individual police officers are being attacked and some have been abducted and not seen again.
It seems we are not going to make progress until the Obama administration conforms this investigation to what we've known to be true all along--the attack on the Benghazi consulate was an act of terrorism.
We must treat it as such.
Big Peace
