CYA*

I repeat what I said yesterday:  “The editing of the Benghazi talking points strikes me as unworthy of a news story on an inside page.”  But if you want to understand what happened, here  is as clear an account as I have seen, extracted from the emails the White House made public yesterday:

It is not clear who wrote this, but it was sent to Ambassador Susan Rice at the US mission to the UN on September 15 at 1:23 pm, apparently along with the approved talking points for her to use the next day.  By way of explication, the SVTS is a classified videoconference, Morell was deputy director of the CIA, Rhodes and McDonough were top White House aides.  They deferred to Sullivan at the State Department.

Morell’s “heavy editing hand” shows clearly on the marked up document:

It is clear from the other emails that Tori Nuland at State had objected to some of the items excised, but it is also clear that CIA carried the bulk of the drafting and excising responsibility.  This is logical, as the facility in Benghazi was not a normal diplomatic post but principally a CIA facility.  CIA had at least as much reason as State to get rid of references to prior warnings and extremists.  While the White House deferred to State, CIA did the actual excising.

To make a long story short, this was a CYA* editing job, to which Susan Rice appears to have contributed nothing.  She was the unwitting victim of a bureaucratic exercise of no particular interest or merit.  Would it not have been better to spend the time and energy wasted on this issue instead on whether the U.S. should have done more to help establish rule of law in Libya after Qaddafi fell?  Come to think of it, that would still be a good question on which to expend some time and effort.

*For my non-American readers, that’s “cover your ass.”