On Wednesday, military veterans and retired special operations officers demanded, in an open letter released by OPSEC, that former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen be deposed by Congress. The reason they are making the demand is to find out why U.S. forces were not ordered to rescue the four American men who were under attack and died in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

-“Why does your report include no mention whatsoever of requests for military assistance made by the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya which he has testified he made and which were denied?”

-“Your report states that you found “no evidence of…denial of support from Washington or the combatant commands.” That finding is in direct conflict with sworn testimony by DCM Hicks that a Special Operations team was denied permission to fly to Benghazi to assist in the response to the attack. Why did your report fail to account for that incident?

-“The report finds that any military response could not have reached Benghazi in time to save lives but that was not possible to know at the time of the attack when requests for assistance – requests not included in your report – were denied. Why do you believe those requests should have been denied when Americans were still under armed attack?”

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Benghazi, however, is the one scandal he cannot blame on anyone other than himself. Barack Obama was Commander in Chief during the Benghazi attack. It was he alone who could have issued the orders for our special forces to stand down and let our ambassador and three other Americans be slaughtered.

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Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

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Fifteen months after Mr. Stevens’s death, the question of responsibility remains a searing issue in Washington, framed by two contradictory story lines.

One has it that the video, which was posted on YouTube, inspired spontaneous street protests that got out of hand. This version, based on early intelligence reports, was initially offered publicly by Susan E. Rice, who is now Mr. Obama’s national security adviser.

The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The investigation by The Times shows that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.

Mr. Abu Khattala had become well known in Benghazi for his role in the killing of a rebel general, and then for declaring that his fellow Islamists were insufficiently committed to theocracy. He made no secret of his readiness to use violence against Western interests. One of his allies, the leader of Benghazi’s most overtly anti-Western militia, Ansar al-Shariah, boasted a few months before the attack that his fighters could “flatten” the American Mission. Surveillance of the American compound appears to have been underway at least 12 hours before the assault started.

The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

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