How our personnel and property in Libya were left so thinly protected is a question the Obama administration needs to answer in light of the revelations contained in the late Libya Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ diary. Instead, the administration is trying to deflect the question by attacking CNN for reporting what the diary showed: Stevens’ worry about his own safety.

“A source familiar with Ambassador Stevens’ thinking says that in the months before his death, he talked about being worried about what he called the never-ending security threats specifically in Benghazi,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported last week. “This source telling us that the ambassador specifically mentioned the rise in Islamic extremism, the growing al-Qaida presence in Libya, and said he was on an al-Qaida hit list.”

Some of that information came from sources close to Stevens, some came from his diary, which CNN found “on the floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded.”

The State Department’s response was to criticize CNN for taking the diary from a “crime scene” and reporting the information.

First, it’s a battle ground, not a crime scene. Second, CNN wouldn’t have found it if State had secured the consulate — either before or after the attack. The question remains: How was a U.S. ambassador in such hostile territory left so vulnerable?