The Wall Street Journal supports Virginia GOP Rep. Frank Wolf's push to force the creation of a bipartisan, congressional select committee to investigate the Benghazi saga.
"It is an excellent idea," a Journal editorial stated Friday. "A select committee is the only means available now for the U.S. political system to extricate itself from the labyrinth called Benghazi."
As Journal editors see it there were two main events relating to the handling of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
"The first was U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's September 16 declarations on TV that Benghazi was part of the Islamic world's violent, spontaneous reaction to the incendiary California YouTube video," the editorial says.
"That assertion, soon revised to acknowledge that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, set in motion a tug of war between some Congressional Republicans and the Obama Administration."
The second important event was this week's congressional testimony by Gregory Hicks, the State Department's No. 2 man in Libya, at the time of the attack.
"The Hicks testimony left no doubt that Benghazi was an attack by organized terrorists," the editorial says.
During the night of the assault Hicks and his aides discussed the events with many other government agencies. "A lot of public officials were in the loop, and in real time," the editorial says.
"The distance and discrepancy between what Mr. Hicks was telling these officials across the U.S. government that night and what Ambassador Rice told the American people five days later is vast. That distance needs to be explained, and the loop closed for the sake of public accountability."
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