WASHINGTON, DC, September 20, 2012 ― On September 11, 2012, a group of (fill in the blank) attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and murdered four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevenson. The State Department subsequently said (fill in the blank), then changed its story to (fill in the blank) and is now holding firm with the claim that terrorists (fill in the blank). We need some answers to fill in the blanks and we need them now, not after the election.

There has been some progress on getting the Obama Administration, the “most transparent ever,” to give some answers, but there are still far too many questions. Today the White House finally conceded that the attack was “an act of terror” but gave no other details. This admission follows testimony to Congress yesterday by Matt Olsen, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, that the attack was in fact carried out by terrorists but was, he claimed, “spontaneous.”

This all came after UN Ambassador Susan Rice got it terribly wrong on this past Sunday’s TV talk shows when she insisted the attack was a just spontaneous reaction by a crowd of Libyans protesting a lame video on YouTube. That video was released all the way back in July of this year, but was apparently just noticed by Muslims in 20 different countries on September 11th. What an amazing coincidence.

By Sunday evening we were supposed to believe that this crowd of deeply offended Muslim Libyans,  overly zealous and understandably angry, just happened to fire off rocket propelled grenades and mortars at the embassy and “oops, sorry we nailed a few Americans” in the process. Let’s all have a good laugh at those clumsy demonstrators, and maybe President Obama will go have a beer with them to talk things over and apologize that our ambassador got in the way of a beautiful mortar shot.

So now we can officially believe that some variety of terrorists were involved in the attack though some of us are still troubled with the overuse of the word “opportunistic” by officials.

So where does that leave us now? That a roving band of miscellaneous terrorists, hot and tired after a hard week of planning bomb attacks, just happened to show up at an anti-American demonstration to let off a little steam. How convenient, except there supposedly was no demonstration prior to the attack according to one of the now deceased guards at the consulate.

Also on Wednesday of this week, it came out that a Gitmo alumnus by the name Sufyan Ben Qumu might have been one of the miscellaneous terrorists at the party, possibly even the leader. If you don’t recall, he was a prisoner at Guantanamo who in 2007 was released to Libya and then freed by Qaddafi in 2008 as a concession to Islamists. He is also believed to have links to the financiers of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and to Al Qaeda. Just in case our president missed the coincidence, the embassy attack in Libya was on the same date.

The FBI, formerly chartered to work exclusively inside the United States, has been dispatched to investigate the attack and come up with some answers, or at least some answers that suit the Obama Administration’s claims. We eagerly await the results. Will Mulder and Sculley get to the bottom of this mystery or will Libya simply end up buried in the X-Files? Don’t get too excited, we’re not likely to hear anything much until next season, after the election.

Some analysts and pundits are speculating that the attack might possibly be linked to a possible CIA operation to possibly recover possible huge stockpiles of weapons possibly unaccounted for since the end of the Libyan civil war. We are required to use the word “possibly” a lot when discussing the CIA. The central Libyan government is still coalescing and there is a hodgepodge of militias and warlords running various parts of the country, all of them happy to have shiny new military arms possibly sent there by the American president, possibly via the CIA, to possibly support the rebel cause back in 2011.

That possibly makes sense since the CIA has been known to make a mistake or two or three now and then, but we’ll have to wait for the next possible White House security leak to find out.

This story is what we in the trade refer to as “fast breaking,” which is another way of saying “please fasten your seatbelts, we’re experiencing some turbulence.” Here are a few more newsy items that muddy up the picture:

• The new president of Libya, Mohammed Yussef Magariaf, stated that the U.S. State Department intercepted messages in advance of the attack that indicated the event was coming. We’re not sure how he might know that, but it raises more questions for which there are no answers.
• Former UN Ambassador John Bolton said that the Obama Administration is “playing politics” with the situation in Libya, though we admit he seems to be perpetually angry at something or other and was part of the last administration, you know, the evil one that caused all the problems we face today.
• Senator Susan Collins, Republican from Maine, called for an independent review of the attack by the State Department Accountability Review Board. Perhaps they might name the investigation, “Not So Fast, We’re Furious.”

Our president, the guy who killed Osama Bin Laden and declared an end to the war on terror, does not appear terribly bothered by all of this. At least he seems pretty cool and relaxed as he continues making the rounds of fundraisers and television talk shows. Since he declared that the war on terror is over, he probably felt there was no need to beef up security at our embassies last week, though I suspect our ambassadors and security advisors might have a slightly different view on that.

The mainstream media, as usual, is much more focused on months-old Romney fundraiser comments than investigating the real story of what happened in Libya. What we know right now is that despite Jay Carney’s latest statement, we still don’t know very much, and it’s doubtful that the “most transparent administration in history” is going to provide real answers any time soon. 

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