Carney would never have gone out to speculate on his own about what happened in Benghazi. His line on Sept. 14 had to have been fed to him by the White House chief of staff, Donilon, Obama or all of them.

As for Rice, someone contacted those five TV networks to put her on. And the party line she delivered—the opposite of the truth—had to have been fed to her, almost word for word—by Donilon or the chief of staff.

Could Donilon or Hillary have been in the dark about what Rice was going to say? Could they have still been in the dark about what had happened five days before in Benghazi, when Hillary’s own deputy Charlene Lamb had followed the terrorist attack in near real time?

Hillary and the entire Obama national security team are in that famous photo with Obama watching Seal Team Six in Abbottabad when Osama bin Laden was taken down.

Was the National Security Council alerted by Lamb when she was observing the attack in near real time? Did the NSC also observe?

Was the president told by the NSC that we were getting real-time intel and video from Benghazi, and would he like to see?

There is an even more fundamental question:

Why did the White House persist with the phony story of a protest against a video being the cause of Ambassador Stevens’ death, when they had to know there was no protest?

The most plausible explanation is that the truth—we were being hit with the worst terror attack since 9/11 in a city we saved—would have exposed Obama’s boasting about his Libya triumph and al-Qaida being “on the run” and “on the path to defeat” as absurd propaganda.

Al-Qaida is now in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan.

And the epidemic of anti-American riots across the Muslim world, with Arab Spring elections bringing to power Islamist regimes, testify to the real truth. After four years of Obama, it is America that is on the run in the Middle East.

But we can’t let folks find that out until after Nov. 6.

Hence the Benghazi cover-up.