(NYP) Many Americans were incensed last week when four mid-level State Department officials appeared to take the full fall for the Sept. 11-anniversary terrorist strike in Benghazi and were forced to resign.They're safe because they're progressives. Ideology before competence. That's how Obama got re-elected.
Boy, were they wrong.
It’s not that senior officials have finally ’fessed up and taken their punishment.
Rather, it turns out that no one has truly been punished at all — and certainly no one’s been fired.
As The Post’s Josh Margolin reported yesterday, “The four officials supposedly out of jobs because of their blunders in the run-up to the deadly Benghazi terror attack remain on the State Department payroll — and will all be back to work soon.”
That’s true even for Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security and the senior-most of the four.
An official State Department report on the attack, which took the lives of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, singled out Boswell for censure over the “systemic failures and leadership deficiencies” in Foggy Bottom.
State Department spokewoman Toria Nuland said last week that Boswell resigned as assistant secretary.
But Margolin reports that Boswell is merely “switching desks” and that he “gave up only the presidential appointment as assistant secretary, not his other portfolios.”
That’s not even a slap on the wrist for the man the State Department insists is ultimately responsible for the “grossly inadequate” security measures in Libya that made Ambassador Stevens easy prey.
But none of this is truly surprising, given how duplicitous the State Department has been during every moment of the Benghazi affair.
First it lied about the presence of a group of “protesters” outside the Benghazi consulate on 9/11; its own review has shown that to be a falsehood.
Then it lied and blamed the terrorist attack on an obscure California filmmaker who put a shoddy, anti-Islamic video on YouTube — and who is now sitting in federal lock-up despite having no connection to the day’s events.
But this lie was the pettiest of all — assuring the public that it was holding its own people accountable for what went wrong.
What’s the truth?
Boswell still has a job, and the other three officials are on administrative leave; they’re expected to be back in Foggy Bottom soon.
Which means they’re basically on an extended Christmas vacation right now.
And it means that the only State Department official who lost his job due to Benghazi was Ambassador Stevens.
