Republicans offer advice for Obama on Benghazi probe

If there's one thing both parties in Washington can agree on, it is the necessity of getting to the bottom of the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already agreed to testify to Congress after the completion of the State Department's Accountability Review Board investigation now underway. As for President Obama, he reiterated during his press conference Wednesday that "it is important for us to find out exactly what happened in Benghazi, and I'm happy to cooperate in any ways that Congress wants."

Needless to say, that transparency is not good enough for Republicans and their amen corner. After all, while John McCain called the tragedy a scandal worse than Watergate or Iran/Contra, GOP water carriers like Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck charged the Obama administration with trying to silence former CIA chief David Petraeus.

Of course, when comes to avoiding accountability and deflecting blame for national security catastrophes and foreign policy failures, the Bush administration and its Republican allies wrote the book. Here are just some of the pages Obama chose to ignore.

Oppose the Investigation.  As the chorus grew in early 2002 to create a commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their allies said no. While Cheney warned "the people and agencies responsible for helping us learn about and defeat such an attack are the very ones most likely to be distracted from their critical duties if Congress fails to carry out their obligations in a responsible fashion," House Majority Leader Tom Delay declared:

"A public commission investigating American intelligence in a time of war is ill conceived and, frankly, irresponsible. We need to address America's challenges in intelligence gathering and terrorist prevention. But we don't need to hand the terrorists an after-action report."

Delay's Senate counterpart Trent Lott went a step further, arguing that "there's nothing more despicable ... for someone to insinuate that the president of the United States knew there was an attack on our country that was imminent and didn't do anything about it." His GOP colleague from Texas Kay Bailey Hutchison concurred, protesting, "I don't think that anyone should start pointing fingers in a personal way or suggest that people are trying to cover their political backsides."

Agree to Testify, But Not Under Oath.  Ultimately, President Bush yielded to mounting public pressure and agreed to support the 9/11 Commission under the aegis of Henry Kissinger. (Unwilling to reveal his financial interests, Kissinger withdrew.) But as for his own participation, Bush agreed to testify, but on the conditions that he be questioned behind closed doors jointly with Vice President Cheney and neither man would be under oath. As President Bush explained his White House meeting with the 9/11 commissioners on April 29, 2004:

"If we had something to hide, we wouldn't have met with them in the first place. I came away good about the session, because I wanted them to know, you know, how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats.

The vice president answered a lot of their questions, answered all their questions. And I think it was important for them to see our body language as well, how we work together."

Delay the Findings for Years. After learning that there were in fact no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2003 launched an investigation. But thanks to the maneuvering of GOP Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), the committee divided its work into two phases. But Phase 2, the probe dealing with the Bush administration's uses and misuses of pre-war intelligence, would not be completed until after the November 2004 election. (The Silbermann-Robb commission similarly punted on that vital question, noting that "Well, on the [that] point, we duck. That is not part of our charter.")

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