The Senate Homeland Security Committee report on the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which killed four people, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, makes for painful reading. The committee's findings, following a review of thousands of documents, shed new light on the utter confusion that prevailed at the highest levels of the administration in the days following the attack. Although U.S. intelligence almost immediately recognized the incident as a premeditated terrorist attack, administration officials, from President Obama on down, hedged and pretzled their comments to a fare-thee-well. The committee report, drafted by outgoing Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, Ind.-Conn., and by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, calls for sweeping security shakeups at the State Department and its foreign consulates and embassies. But it also zeroes in on a pervasive Foggy Bottom culture that tends to use softer semantics and euphemisms lest Muslims be offended. On this...(Read Full Post)