Five House Com­mit­tee Chair­men last week released an “Inter­im Progress Report”  on their joint inves­ti­ga­tion into last September’s ter­ror­ist attack on a US diplo­mat­ic facil­i­ty in Beng­hazi, Libya. The report, giv­en lit­tle atten­tion by most major media out­lets, was imme­di­ate­ly denounced by Demo­c­ra­t­ic Mem­bers of those 5 com­mit­tees as a “par­ti­san staff report” that vio­lat­ed “reg­u­lar order.”

They’re right both about the report’s par­ti­san tenor and its depar­ture from reg­u­lar order. The pro­ce­dure for fil­ing com­mit­tee reports is almost as old as Con­gress itself. That process is well-defined and includes, where appro­pri­ate, a sec­tion for the minor­i­ty to state its views. There is noth­ing of the sort in this “inter­im report.” It reads more like an indict­ment than a judg­ment. It presents only one side of the story.

That one side of the sto­ry, how­ev­er, includes a chronol­o­gy that is care­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed and well-sourced. The com­mit­tees were giv­en access to diplo­mat­ic cables, inter­nal emails and oth­er mate­r­i­al that enabled staff to present a detailed account of the events of last Sep­tem­ber 11. That chronol­o­gy shows unam­bigu­ous­ly that the Admin­is­tra­tion knew from the start that the events in Beng­hazi, unlike demon­stra­tions that occurred dur­ing rough­ly the same time in Cairo, had noth­ing to do with a YouTube video that offend­ed many Muslims.

The report cites two “Ops Alerts” that the State Depart­ment Oper­a­tions Cen­ter sent to the White House Sit­u­a­tion Room. The first, trans­mit­ted short­ly after the attacks began, alert­ed the White House that the Beng­hazi facil­i­ty was under attack and that “approx­i­mate­ly 20 armed peo­ple fired shots; explo­sions have been heard as well” (p. 21 of Inter­im Progress Report). Two hours lat­er, Wash­ing­ton was informed that an al-Qai­da-linked group – Ansar al-Sharia — had claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty for the attack. There was no men­tion in either alert of demon­stra­tions or YouTube videos.

That direct­ly con­tra­dicts the sto­ry that the Admin­is­tra­tion pre­sent­ed at the time. US Ambas­sador to the UN Susan Rice pre­sent­ed the government’s offi­cial account in her appear­ances last Sep­tem­ber 16 on 5 Sun­day talk shows. Rely­ing on White House-approved talk­ing points, Rice said that the events in Beng­hazi were a reac­tion to a “hate­ful video,” and added that “we do not have infor­ma­tion at present that leads us to con­clude that this was pre­med­i­tat­ed or pre­planned” (p. 22).

In fact, the Admin­is­tra­tion already knew that the attacks had noth­ing to do with a “hate­ful video” and that they were indeed “pre­med­i­tat­ed.” Ear­li­er that same day, Libyan Nation­al Con­gress Pres­i­dent Mohamad Mag­a­rif had char­ac­ter­ized the attack as crim­i­nal and pre­planned. His state­ments tracked with a report, also filed pri­or to the Rice TV appear­ances, from a senior US offi­cial on the ground in Libya con­firm­ing that there had been no protests in Beng­hazi pri­or to the attack. (p. 22)

The gap between what the White House knew at the time and the talk­ing points it approved is inar­guable. The Admin­is­tra­tion lat­er attrib­uted this gap to faulty intel­li­gence. The report dis­cred­its this claim.

The ini­tial draft of the talk­ing points was pre­pared by the CIA and approved by David Petraeus, who was then its Direc­tor. Those talk­ing points did not attribute the attacks to the YouTube video. Instead they cit­ed indi­ca­tions that Islam­ic extrem­ists par­tic­i­pat­ed in the events in Beng­hazi, not­ed the poten­tial involve­ment of Ansar-al-Sharia, and chron­i­cled five pre­vi­ous attacks against West­ern facil­i­ties in Beng­hazi that had occurred in the months lead­ing up to the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks (p. 23).

Those talk­ing points were sub­stan­tial­ly revised pri­or to Ambas­sador Rice’s appear­ance. The report describes how those revi­sions were made. It start­ed when the CIA draft talk­ing points were cir­cu­lat­ed to oth­er agen­cies for their review and com­ment. The State Depart­ment expressed “seri­ous con­cerns” about the talk­ing points, say­ing that they might pro­voke crit­i­cisms of the agency for ignor­ing pri­or CIA warn­ings of a poten­tial ter­ror­ist attack in Beng­hazi [p. 23].

At this point, the White House inter­vened. On the day before Ambas­sador Rice’s TV appear­ances, it con­vened a “Deputies Meet­ing,” involv­ing senior intel­li­gence, State Depart­ment and high-lev­el White House offi­cials. Dur­ing my tenure at the White House dur­ing the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in any num­ber of such meet­ings. Their pur­pose is to resolve dif­fer­ences among the President’s advis­ers. In this case, the dis­pute was between the President’s intel­li­gence advis­ers at the CIA and his diplo­mat­ic advis­ers at the State Department.

The meet­ing, in which both agen­cies, as well as White House staff, par­tic­i­pat­ed, resolved the dif­fer­ences in favor of the State Depart­ment. Ambas­sador Rice would use the revised talk­ing points the fol­low­ing morn­ing. Those revised talk­ing points, the report notes, “struck any and all sug­ges­tions that the State Depart­ment had been pre­vi­ous­ly warned of threats in the region, that there had been pre­vi­ous attacks in Beng­hazi by al-Qai­da-linked groups in Beng­hazi and east­ern Libya, and that extrem­ists linked to al-Qai­da may have par­tic­i­pat­ed in the attack on the Beng­hazi Mis­sion.” (pp 23–24).

Thus was born the Administration’s ini­tial expla­na­tion of what hap­pened in Beng­hazi. As that expla­na­tion unrav­eled in the ensu­ing weeks, the Admin­is­tra­tion first blamed faulty intel­li­gence, then claimed that it had to pro­tect sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from pub­lic dis­clo­sure [p. 24].

The report gives the lie to both asser­tions. The expla­na­tion of the Administration’s shift­ing accounts is much sim­pler: pol­i­tics. The attack occurred on the anniver­sary of the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks and just 10 weeks before the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. The Pres­i­dent had repeat­ed­ly claimed that by killing bin Laden, he had put al-Qai­da “on the run.”  Acknowl­edg­ing that an al-Qai­da-affil­i­at­ed group had killed our Ambas­sador and oth­er Amer­i­cans would have been an embar­rass­ing polit­i­cal admis­sion. So the White House sup­pressed, for as long as they could, those unpleas­ant facts.

So what? In my opin­ion, the Administration’s actions, though hard­ly exem­plary, were jus­ti­fi­able. The Pres­i­dent was under no oblig­a­tion to bare his polit­i­cal throat to Mitt Rom­ney at such a crit­i­cal time dur­ing the cam­paign sea­son. The truth emerged soon enough and the vot­ers clear­ly did not think it impor­tant enough to deny the Pres­i­dent a sec­ond term.

There is one thing in the chronol­o­gy that trou­bles me. And that is the President’s own response to news of the attack. Those attacks began at 9:40 pm in Beng­hazi (3:40 pm, Wash­ing­ton, DC time, p. 14). The Pen­ta­gon was noti­fied of the attack at 4:30 pm. Sec­re­tary Panet­ta per­son­al­ly briefed the Pres­i­dent a half hour lat­er at a White House meet­ing that had pre­vi­ous­ly been sched­uled.

It was 11:00 pm in Beng­hazi when that meet­ing began. Dur­ing its course, a secu­ri­ty team that had arrived from a near­by “Annex” evac­u­at­ed the sur­vivors from the con­sulate, sus­tain­ing heavy fire along the way. They were unable to locate Ambas­sador Stevens who, it lat­er was learned, died of smoke inhala­tion in the burn­ing build­ing. An unarmed sur­veil­lance air­craft arrived to mon­i­tor the events of the next sev­er­al hours (p. 15).

Those hours proved bru­tal and dead­ly. Well-armed com­man­does attacked the Annex at around 5:30 am (11:30 pm, Wash­ing­ton time), killing two Amer­i­cans and seri­ous­ly wound­ing two oth­ers (p. 15). The 31 sur­vivors were safe­ly evac­u­at­ed at 6:05 am (short­ly after mid­night in Wash­ing­ton, p. 15).

This hero­ic and bloody bat­tle occurred dur­ing the evening (Wash­ing­ton time) of Sep­tem­ber 11. The White House has sup­plied no evi­dence that the Pres­i­dent was kept apprised of the events as they occurred. More telling­ly, he can­celled the intel­li­gence brief­ing that had been sched­uled for the fol­low­ing morn­ing.  To his cred­it, he went to Fog­gy Bot­tom to com­fort State Depart­ment per­son­nel on the morn­ing of Sep­tem­ber 12. But his intel­li­gence brief­ing was nev­er held. Instead, the Pres­i­dent left for a cam­paign event in Las Vegas.

Every Pres­i­dent has his own lead­er­ship style. Pres­i­dent Bush began his day with a 7 am intel­li­gence brief­ing, whether he was at the White House, on vaca­tion, or on trav­el. He was obsessed with the safe­ty of Amer­i­cans in harm’s way. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma takes a dif­fer­ent approach, pre­fer­ring writ­ten reports to per­son­al brief­in­gs. He is cer­tain­ly enti­tled to that preference.

But all that should change, it seems to me, when US civil­ians are under ter­ror­ist fire. The Pres­i­dent knew before din­ner time that our diplo­mat­ic facil­i­ty was under assault and that our ambas­sador was unac­count­ed for. Yet he didn’t con­vene a meet­ing in the Sit­u­a­tion Room, as he had done to track the killing of Osama bin Laden. And while he made it clear that his “num­ber one pri­or­i­ty [was]making sure that peo­ple were safe,”  there’s no evi­dence that he altered his sched­ule that night to find out whether they were indeed kept safe. Some, sad­ly, were not.

Not every­one shares my sen­si­bil­i­ties. Some on the right are hor­ri­fied by the Administration’s response to the Beng­hazi attack, believ­ing that it con­sti­tutes a Water­gate-style cov­er-up. Those on the left are more inclined to regard out­rage about what hap­pened in Beng­hazi as a right-wing fetish.

I’m some­where between. The Admin­is­tra­tion unde­ni­ably shad­ed the truth in its evolv­ing expla­na­tion of what it knew and when it knew it, but that hard­ly con­sti­tutes obstruc­tion of jus­tice. And though polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions made pre­var­i­ca­tion under­stand­able, mis­lead­ing Con­gress and the pub­lic war­rants crit­i­cism, and not just from the President’s usu­al detractors.

What I don’t under­stand is the President’s appar­ent incu­rios­i­ty about the fate of Amer­i­can civil­ians under fire in a dis­tant and dan­ger­ous place. He learned of their plight around 5 pm. They were trans­port­ed out of harm’s way short­ly after mid­night. Why did he not con­vene his senior mil­i­tary, State Depart­ment and White House advis­ers in the Sit­u­a­tion Room to mon­i­tor events dur­ing that time? Why did he not insist on an in-per­son debrief­ing ear­ly the fol­low­ing morning?

That is what Pres­i­dents are sup­posed to do. Even with elec­tions approaching.