Late Friday afternoon, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee quietly released the results of its two-year investigation into the Benghazi tragedy. As the Associated Press reports it:
Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people."
That's pretty much a slam-dunk refutation of the entire Benghazi conspiracy theory so avidly argued by many conservatives, and again, it comes from the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee. Similar press accounts of the committee findings were filed by NPR, the Washington Post, The Hill, NBC, etc. The whole right-wing Benghazi narrative is exposed for what it always was, which is nonsense.
Of course, no media outlet has been more fixated on Benghazi than Fox News. Here's the story and headline on the Fox home page, in such tiny text it had to be highlighted so you can find it:
is what's really astonishing. To read the Fox story, the House Intelligence Committee confirmed rather than refuted the over-the-top allegations that Fox has been peddling for so long. Someone reading that Fox story and only that Fox story would not have the slightest idea that in fact the House intelligence panel had thoroughly rejected almost every aspect of the Fox version of Benghazi.
"A leading Republican wants to expand the House investigation into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack by adding a Senate probe, as a new House Intelligence Committee report Friday concluded that the initial CIA assessment found no demonstrations prior to the assault and a primary purpose of the CIA operation in eastern Libya was to track the movement of weapons to Syria."
It's one of the more awesome examples of diversion and denial that I have ever seen. The Fox philosophy seems to be that they have lied so often to their viewers on this story that hey, what's one more, right? The alternate universe must not be compromised by reality no matter what.
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