Mr. Morell announced at the start of the hearing that he was there to refute claims that he had "inappropriately altered CIA's classified analysis and its unclassified talking points . . . for the political benefit of President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton." Critics of the government's performance on Benghazi have charged that Mr. Morell's revisions principally although not exclusively involved changing the description of the violence and its perpetrators, and removing the suggestion that they might have had ties to a terrorist organization. These changes, it is argued, enabled Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, to promote the discredited and since abandoned narrative that the violence was a reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video produced by a probationer in Los Angeles.
Mr. Morell said he did the revising because it would have looked unseemly for the CIA to appear to be pounding its chest and blaming the State Department.
Of course, neither Mr. Morell nor the directorate of intelligence is responsible for where the administration took the narrative, which included both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama invoking the YouTube video over the caskets of the four slain Americans when they arrived in this country. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton told the grieving families that the producer of the video would feel the weight of the law. It was one promise they kept: Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested in the middle of the night in the glare of TV lights for a probation violation—the only arrest thus far growing out of the Benghazi attack, even though the identity and whereabouts of the principal suspects, one of whom is an alumnus of Guantanamo Bay, have long been known.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's.
