Obama: Benghazi disaster due to State Department 'sloppiness'
Well, that's one way to describe the murder of 4 American diplomats. Not precisely the word that most of us would use...come to think of it, it's not the word a president responsible for protecting Americans should ever use.
Ed Morrissey says it's the "understatement of the year." Can't argue with that.
Via Hot Air, here's the exchange between David Gregory and Obama on Meet the Press:
GREGORY: Let me ask you about a couple of foreign policy notes. After the attack in Benghazi, is there a need for more accountability so that this doesn't happen again? And do you know who was behind the attack at this point?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Two points. Number one, I think that Tom Pickering and Mike Mullen who headed up the- the review board did a very thorough job in identifying what were some severe problems in diplomatic security. And they provided us with a series of recommendations. Many of them were already starting to be implemented. Secretary Clinton has indicated that she is going to implement all of them.
What I've- my message to the State Department has been very simple. And that is we're going to solve this. We're not going to be defensive about it. We're not going to pretend that this was not a problem. This was a huge problem. And we're going to implement every single recommendation that's been put forward.
Some individuals have been held accountable inside of the State Department and what I've said is that we are going to fix this to make sure that this does not happen again, because these are folks that I send into the field. We understand that there are dangers involved but, you know, when you read the report and it confirms what we had already seen, you know, based on some of our internal reviews; there was just some sloppiness, not intentional, in terms of how we secure embassies in areas where you essentially don't have governments that have a lot of capacity to protect those embassies. So we're doing a thorough-going review. Not only will we implement all the recommendations that were made, but we'll try to do more than that. You know, with respect to who carried it out, that's an ongoing investigation. The FBI has sent individuals to Libya repeatedly. We have some very good leads, but this is not something that, you know, I'm going to be at liberty to talk about right now.
Obama's referencing the idea that "some individuals" have been held accountable is false. The senior level State Department security employee who quit is still on the payroll, obviously waiting for things to blow over at which point he can resume his career.
This investigation has been botched from the beginning and the commission's findings whitewash the matter by refusing to assign any responsibility for the failure of security to either the president or secretary of state. Apparently, the two principles are at the mercy of their underlings and were kept so much out of the loop that one can wonder what exactly their job is when it comes to security of our embassies.