Many conservatives suspect that the U.S. State Department, with the White House in a supporting role, deceived the public about the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. This conspiratorial narrative is, in all probability, false.
Even the embarrassing "Cairo-demonstrations-killed-us-in-Benghazi" messages by United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and President Barack Obama — hers on Sunday talk shows and his before the U.N. — partly sprang from the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical missteps and from the slow and often-purblind way that Washington works.
To get to the heart of this controversy, a thoughtful observer should first ask much tougher questions of the CIA and especially of David Petraeus, its former director.