Even if it wasn't clear at the time what was behind the Benghazi raid, can you blame them? There were riots all over the Mideast, reports, often conflicting, must have been pouring in to our command centers at all hours of the night and day due to the time difference, with the usual confusion and fog of war. Any one of them could have been deadly, we had no way of knowing while it was happening.

Even if the Administration guessed wrong (and I don't think they did) whether it was film or Fedalleen, what difference does it make? They had to wait for the administrative process to work its way through. They had nothing to gain by lying, before, during or after the event. And of course, Rice had nothing to do with anything. She's UN, not State or Intelligence or Defense.At the most, there was a screw up in communications, which is par for the course during this kind of action. Read the lead-up to Pearl Harbor. Read the German High Command's inability to figure out what was really happening on D-Day. You have hundreds of inconsistent and contradictory reports coming in from scores of sources into dozens of listening posts and agencies, all bubbling up through the bureaucracy for evaluation and coordination, each waiting for confirmation, because most initial reports are incomplete or dead wrong. And the whole time you have the security classification system, which determines who can and can't see this or that message and cable.

This was an incident evolving in real time. Look at events that dragged on for months, and still got FUBAB. Remember WMDs? Yellowcake? Aluminum Tubes? Recordings of eavesdropped Iraqi messages at the General Assembly?

The Monday morning quarterbacks will eventually locate someone who didn't relay a message, or a delay in transmitting a signal, or a bureaucrat who was out playing golf or flying the redeye home, or someone who went home early and missed the call, or a situation that was not anticipated in the Standing Order Book. Someone may even get dinged for screwing up or failing to follow procedure. But there is no conspiracy here. There is no crime. At most, there might be some incompetence, but it will be minor and on the part of some minor link in the chain.

Nothing will come of this, it is a Republican smokescreen designed to hurt the President before the election, which THEY screwed up and couldn't put together in a convincing fashion in time for the polling. Now they're trying to give themselves a little post election (and pre-financial cliff) leverage. You'll see. Nothing will come from the hearings--if they are fair and public. Nothing, because there's nothing there. But the conspiracy will linger on Fox...forever. It will be JFK and Dallas all over again.

Remember "Fast and Furious"? Nothing happened. Holder is still there. It turned out to be a Bush Administration program anyway.
Holder is black. Rice is black, Obama's black. Maybe its just a coincidence. Maybe not. Or maybe Petraeus just couldn't be reached at his office...