Mrs. Clinton's iron determination to stick with the script

Mona Charen refreshes on what we know about Benghazi:

A convoy of well-armed terrorists rolled into the complex housing the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The attackers sealed off streets leading to the consulate with trucks and then commenced the attack on the building using rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, mortars, and artillery mounted on trucks. Ambassador Chris Stevens called Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks for help, saying “Greg, we’re under attack.” Hicks, who was in Tripoli, conveyed this up the line, but no help arrived.

The terrorists killed Ambassador Stevens and another American and set the building ablaze. (Two more Americans would die later attempting to protect the annex.) As soon as the next morning, Congressman Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described the attack as a “commando-style event” with “coordinated fire, direct fire, [and] indirect fire.” A few days later the Libyan president said that it was a planned terrorist attack. He also said that the idea that it was a “spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous.” Yet a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Obama administration managed to put the press off the story and mislead the American people.

As the Rhodes memo makes clear, the president sent his U.N. ambassador to the Sunday shows to lie. Susan Rice was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” Rice did as she was told. The election was less than two months away. A foreign policy failure would not be politically convenient, so it would be made to go away. It’s one of the minor injustices of this sorry story that Susan Rice has received more condemnations than the president or secretary of state, who pulled the strings.

According to Woods’s father, the vice president used remarkably offensive locker-room talk about the deceased Navy Seal, but Mrs. Clinton stayed on message. She greeted the man whose son who had bravely attempted to fight off far more numerous and better-armed terrorists on the roof of the CIA annex and who gave his life. Did she praise the courage and self-sacrifice of the decorated Navy Seal? Did she express regret that he had been left nearly alone to fight off the Islamist terrorists? No. Not even the flag-draped coffins spread before her could shake Hillary Clinton’s iron determination to stick with the script. She told Mr. Woods that they would catch the guy who made the Internet film and make sure he was punished.

Most politicians are capable of stretching the truth on occasion. But this question, this setting, and this egregious a lie suggest that Mrs. Clinton’s conscience — if she ever had one — is growing flaccid from disuse.

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