Appoint Andrew McCarthy!

Andrew McCarthy is the person who should be the lead attorney on the Benghazi panel. He writes:

You couldn’t help but feel for Robert Lovell. The retired brigadier general is haunted by the failure of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s Africa Command, to respond when Americans were under siege in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. His congressional testimony this week was somber - no faux “What difference, at this point, does it make?” indignation, no “Dude, this was two years ago” juvenilia for him.

It was the solemn duty of the president to come forward with not requests but commands for action. Why was AFRICOM hanging on the State Department’s preferences? Why were our troops hamstrung by what Lovell described as “deference to the Libyan people?” On the night of September 11, 2012, AFRICOM was not beholden to Mrs. Clinton or Tripoli. They answered to Barack Obama.

Of course, no one can answer to a commander-in-chief who abdicates his command, a commander-in-chief who is AWOL.

A commander-in-chief does not get to vote “present.” Over 19 months have elapsed since terrorists savagely attacked the United States in Benghazi. Yet we are still waiting, ever waiting, for an account of where the president was, what he was doing, and what if any directives he gave during the hours and hours during which Americans were being tormented and killed.

If the president’s name were Bush or Reagan, we would long ago have had a minute-by-minute accounting of his every move. And if the incident involved some faraway American warrior’s slaying of a jihadist emir, we would long ago have had a Situation Room photo depicting Obama as maestro . . . with an accompanying soundtrack of classified leaks portraying his courage while others were under fire.

Benghazi, however, is a catastrophe wrought by Obama’s pro-Islamist policies, one that puts the lie to his oft-repeated claim to have “decimated” al-Qaeda. So with Benghazi we get the stonewall, a barricade his praetorian media have been only too happy to fortify.

We know that less than a day after Ty Woods and Glen Doherty were martyred protecting Americans out of a sense of duty, the commander-in-chief in whom that duty is actually reposed was at a Las Vegas fundraiser, insouciantly repeating his campaign line: “A day after 9/11, we are reminded that a new tower rises above the New York skyline, but al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and bin Laden is dead.”

Only hours before in Cairo, al-Qaeda operatives empowered by the president’s pro-Islamist policies had rioted outside our embassy, replacing the Stars and Stripes with their jihadist black flag and chanting, “Obama, Obama, there are still a million Osamas!” Even fewer hours before, in Benghazi, the United States was dealt a humiliating defeat by the very jihadists Obama was still risibly claiming to have quelled. Yet for those hours, we to this day have no accounting of Barack Obama’s whereabouts and activities.

When AFRICOM abstains from battle, or Lois Lerner obstructs an investigation, or Eric Holder misleads Congress, or Michael Morell doctors talking points, or Susan Rice serially lies on national television, Barack Obama is responsible. It is his bidding that they do, and by failing to fire or discipline them he implicitly endorses their malfeasance.

Benghazi is not about what Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta or Susan Rice or Ben Rhodes or Jay Carney or Robert Lovell did or didn’t do. The only question is: What was President Barack Obama doing, and not doing, during the critical hours when his sworn duty required decisive action? Mr. Obama owes Americans a detailed answer. Now.

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