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Tag: benghazi investigations
Republicans Punish Their Own For Speaking The Truth

Republicans Punish Their Own For Speaking The Truth

“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” — journalist Michael Kinsley

So another Republican congressman has come forward to admit that his party’s Benghazi obsession is little more than an undisguised effort to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner.

In a radio interview on Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) defended his colleague, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had acknowledged that obvious truth as well.

“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth. This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual: Hillary Clinton,” said Hanna.

Well, of course. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention already knows that the unending series of Benghazi “investigations” began as a way to embarrass the administration of President Barack Obama, including his then-secretary of state. When Clinton announced her presidential campaign, the investigations began to center on her (and are now more focused on her use of a private email server).

If you only dimly recall the origin of the GOP battle cry “Remember Benghazi!” it started with a tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2012, Christopher Stevens, then U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed in separate assaults by Islamic jihadists on U.S. installations in Benghazi, Libya. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979.

The incident deserved a thorough probe to see whether there was anything that could have been done to prevent the deaths of diplomatic personnel in the future: Was security too lax? Intelligence ignored? The area too dangerous for diplomats?

But in the days after the deaths, it became clear that leading Republicans were much more interested in scoring their own attacks on Democratic targets than investigating the “Battle of Benghazi,” as it has been called. For one thing, they focused on such superficial and unimportant details as whether Susan Rice, then the president’s national security adviser, had clearly described the assault as “terrorism” or merely extremism. It’s not at all clear what difference that makes, but that line of attack derailed any shot she had at succeeding Clinton as secretary of state.

With that, Republicans were emboldened. And they haven’t given up their efforts to sink some notable Democrat with even a tenuous link to Libya and its national security implications.

They’ve not had any luck so far. After seven congressional and two executive-branch investigations, there has been no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, malfeasance or cover-up. The last was an exhaustive probe conducted by the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee; it found no evidence that either the U.S. military or the CIA had acted improperly. There was no delay in sending a military rescue team, as many conservatives have insisted.

So there was no genuine surprise at what McCarthy told Fox News in a September interview:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping,” McCarthy told Sean Hannity.

Still, he paid dearly for the slip. Criticized by Republican leaders for dropping the gauzy veil over their nakedly partisan smear campaign, he was forced to abandon his plan to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the house.

McCarthy was supposed to keep up the pretense that the House Select Committee on Benghazi is conducting a high-minded probe free of partisan tilt. And that pretense continues. Clinton will appear before the committee later this month.

If there is any better example of the excessive and stultifying partisanship that has laid waste to Washington, it’s hard to know what that may be. After all, it can hardly be considered shocking that an American diplomat was killed in a dangerous country full of Islamic militants. Tragic, gut-wrenching, awful, yes. Shocking, no.

Still, the GOP’s listing and rudderless Benghazi ship — white whale on the horizon — sails on.

(Cynthia Tucker Haynes won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Report: No ‘Deliberate Wrongdoing’ By Obama Administration In Benghazi Attack

Report: No ‘Deliberate Wrongdoing’ By Obama Administration In Benghazi Attack

Republicans who won’t stop trying to turn the 2012 Benghazi attack into the second coming of Watergate now have even less credibility. The House Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a report that states that the Benghazi scandal is — surprise! — not a scandal at all.

“The House Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans,” Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The committee voted last week to declassify the report, and it will become available to the public once U.S. intelligence agencies approve.

According to Rep. Thompson, the report also “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”

The committee also found that while intelligence agencies knew there was an increased threat of violence, they “did not have specific tactical warning of an attack before it happened.”

Thompson added that “there was no ‘stand-down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, no illegal activity, or illegal arms transfers occurring by U.S. personnel in Benghazi, and no American was left behind.”

So Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) claims that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to “stand down” are completely unfounded.

The report also found that a “mixed group of individuals” was responsible for the attack, and that while the administration’s talking points in the following days were “flawed,” they “reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”

So although the Obama administration could have been more careful in developing Susan Rice’s talking points, there is no evidence that the administration actually knew who was behind the attacks right away. At the time, the administration stated that the attack was motivated by an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube. The chief suspect in the attack, the recently-arrested Abu Khattala, has even said that he was motivated by the video.

In a press release sent out on Monday, the Democratic National Committee noted, “There have already been seven investigations, 13 hearing, 50 briefings, and 25,000 pages of documents have been released. But that won’t stop Republicans from re-re-re-investigating Benghazi as a part of a crass partisan ploy to turn out the far-right base in November.”

As MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes, Benghazi has already been investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the independent State Department Accountability Review Board, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

But the investigations aren’t going to stop. The House Select Committee, spearheaded by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), is planning on spending more than $3 million to continue to investigate this incident. And if Clinton runs for president in 2016, the Benghazi conspiracy theories may never end.

Photo via WikiCommons

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