Rieder: Benghazi report helps clear the smoke

• An ambitious effort to sort out a murky%2C complex story
• Times finds no evidence of al-Qaeda involvement
• Republicans dismiss report as effort to help Hillary Clinton

Props to The New York Times.

Its ambitious, extensive examination of what really happened in Benghazi is a welcome infusion of factual reporting on a subject that has been dominated by talking points and sloganeering.

Republicans have tried valiantly, but without much apparent payoff, to use the deadly attack on the U.S. mission there as a cudgel with which to beat President Obama and former secretary of State and prospective Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That Benghazi was a tragedy is unarguable. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died there. Perhaps more could have been done to protect the U.S. diplomatic presence, and that is a legitimate subject for debate.

But the GOP has brandished "Benghazi" as a code word to suggest something far more sinister, although precisely what that is is hard to determine. Whitewater, anyone?

Two of the major areas in dispute are whether outrage over an American-made, anti-Muslim video played a major role in fueling the attack, and whether al-Qaeda was behind the assault

Susan Rice, at the time the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, paid a price for taking to the Sunday morning talkfests to blame the video. That narrative was widely ridiculed, and her vigorous embrace of it cost Rice, now Obama's national security adviser, a chance to succeed Clinton as secretary of State.

Instead, Republicans have argued, the raid was the handiwork of al-Qaeda, undercutting the president's assertion that U.S. efforts had marginalized the terrorist outfit.

Then over the weekend, the Times' David D. Kirkpatrick weighed in with a massive and massively detailed reconstruction of what took place on Sept. 11, 2012. And Kirkpatrick's meticulous reporting portrayed a complex, nuanced reality far more Robert Stone novel than simplistic cable cacophony.

The money paragraph:

"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."

This was foreign reporting at its finest, street-level, shoe-leather, on-the-scene detective work aimed at elucidating a very murky situation. The Times went all out on this one.The print version jumped to three inside pages packed with graphics and photos and info boxes as well as words. Digitally, it broke up the lengthy narrative into bite-size chapters accompanied by helpful bells and whistles.

Foreign reporting has been one of the major casualties of the disruption that has bedeviled traditional media outlets in the digital age. Like investigative reporting, it is expensive. As news organizations slashed their budgets in the face of plummeting ad revenue, overseas outposts became exceedingly vulnerable.

A 2011 American Journalism Review report found that 18 newspapers and two chains had closed down all of their foreign bureaus since the magazine's initial census in 1998. The Times, hardly immune from challenging financial pressures, deserves enormous credit for maintaining its commitment to international reporting.

And while an exciting array of new digital outlets are focusing heavily on political developments, investigative reporting and local news, there's hardly a surfeit of equivalent operations featuring large rosters of foreign correspondents. (The outlier is GlobalPost, which relies on a mix of its own reporters and stringers and has a joint reporting arrangement with NBC News.)

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Times story rapidly became grist for the endless political combat that suffuses Washington these days. Rather than deal with the substance of the reporting, some Republicans and conservative commentators chose to focus their attention on the messenger.

Asked by Fox News' Chris Wallace if the story was designed to "clear the deck" for Clinton, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., replied that he found the timing "odd." Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., said the Times was "already laying the groundwork" for Team Hillary.

Warming to the theme, columnist Charles Krauthammersaid on Fox Monday, "The reason that the Times invested all the effort and time in this and put it on the front page is precisely a way to protect the Democrats, to deflect the issue, to protect Hillary."

For his part, Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal says the Times hasn't anointed anyone yet and that he found out about the Benghazi piece when he read it in the paper Sunday.

So don't expect the sniping to stop anytime soon. But congratulations to Kirkpatrick and the Times for an impressive piece of journalism.