President Obama ordered the assassination of an American citizen without due process. He presided over mass surveillance on millions of Americans. And he illegally ordered U.S. troops to war in Libya without obtaining congressional authorization. An investigation into any of those acts could document serious lawbreaking.
But lawbreaking in service of hawkish national-security policy doesn't interest Republicans. They demand sunlight only when they imagine it will prove Obama is a foreign-policy incompetent whose weakness costs American lives—hence the new House select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack. Normally the GOP acts as though the White House is justified in covering up anything that involves CIA presence in a foreign country. This is the exception. "There is much to be learned still about what happened at Benghazi," says National Review, "and how to be better on guard against such events in the future."
Are there any useful lessons to be learned that weren't covered in the independent accountability report on the attacks? If so, I doubt movement conservatives will learn them. Perhaps you've wondered why there were so many violent militia members in Benghazi just prior to the attack on the American consulate and CIA annex. The answer begins with the civil war in which the United States participated. Zack Beauchamp explains what happened next:
After the war ended in August 2011, Benghazi became an epicenter of militia activity. Because it was the most important base of rebel strength, a lot of rebels who later joined militias hailed from Benghazi and the surrounding environs in the region of Cyrenaica. Some of those groups even attempted to turn Cyrenaica into a functionally independent state, with Benghazi as its capital. In March 2014, that seccesionist impulse almost sparked a second civil war. With all of these Libyan factions busy fighting each other after Qaddafi's fall, no one was really interested or able to root out the jihadi groups that moved in after Qaddafi—some of which had participated in the rebellion, some of which had only shown up after. These violent, anti-American groups thrive in chaos, and swiftly grew in strength in Libya after Qaddafi's demise.
There's definitely a lesson here. If America helps to overthrow a dictator, establishes a consulate at an epicenter of the violent chaos that follows, sends diplomats to staff that outpost, and houses them next to CIA agents using diplomatic cover for good measure, their safety is likely to be threatened. If they're killed, it may be possible to look back at mistakes in getting them a security detail, or warning signs that were ignored, but the main lesson is to stop putting Americans at risk in the aftermath of wars of choice.