Part of the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi.
Five months after an Accountability Review Board issued its
scathing conclusions in a report on the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate and a nearby intelligence operation in Benghazi, Libya, Republicans and "reporters" at Foxaganda
are still carping on the matter.
They continue to claim, as they have since late September, when some glommed onto the incident and its aftermath as a possible means to put Mitt Romney into the White House, that the State Department not only failed to protect the consulate adequately and failed to respond effectively to the attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, but also that it covered up these failures with lies.
The accountability review team's report agreed with the first claim and partially agreed with the second, but gave no credence whatsoever to the accusation of a coverup. The report was the product of eight hearings, 30 briefings and interviews with more than 100 witnesses.
Come Wednesday, under the guiding hand of its chairman, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be holding yet another Benghazi hearing with three witnesses that various news and entertainment media are hinting will blow the lid off the whole affair. Perhaps Issa and other Republicans figure that even though they couldn't stop Barack Obama from being reelected with their Benghazi accusations, they can damage former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's chances for winning the presidency in 2016.
It seems unlikely that one of the topics of discussion at the hearing will be the GOP's slashing of embassy security budgets worldwide twice, by a total of one-third.
The three witnesses, whose comments have been getting the piecemeal approach on Foxaganda, CBS and elsewhere, are Mark Thompson, the acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the State Department, Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, and Eric Nordstrom, a State Department security officer who has previously testified. Issa claims there are others who have valuable information but that they aren't ready to testify yet because they fear retaliation from their superiors.
The testimony of Hicks, Ambassador Stevens's deputy, is likely to catch the most attention since it contradicts some of what the administration has previously said and the State Department report. In particular, senior officials stated last year that the State Department had utilized all resources at hand, but that no heavy-duty military assistance could have arrived in time to stop the attacks. Thus, no jets were scrambled. But the Republicans are now hinging the impact of the latest hearing on the idea that a small U.S. Special Forces team from Tripoli could have intervened effectively, but they were told to stand down.
Please read below the fold for more on the upcoming Benghazi hearings.
According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that [Special Operations Command Africa] commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."
Hicks also said a Special Forces commander told him, "I have never been so embarrassed in my life, that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military," referring to his willingness to authorize the mission.
U.S. military officials confirmed Hicks's account late Monday. However:
U.S. military officials confirmed late Monday that a four-man Special Operations Forces team was denied permission to leave the US Embassy in Tripoli following reports that the consulate in Benghazi had been attacked.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the team was reviewing security at U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East and was not prepared for a combat assault mission, being armed with only 9mm sidearms.
Four guys with pistols. Not as well armed as the average teenager who showed up at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston over the weekend.
As documented in the State Department report, a six-member team of CIA reinforcements from the Global Response Staff had flown the 45 minutes from Tripoli into Benghazi on a chartered plane that was later used to evacuate surviving personnel. They arrived after Stevens was already dead and retreated to the CIA compound. Two members of that team, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were soon killed on the roof of the compound by a mortar shell.
From the get-go, straining at gnats has been the modus operandi of Foxaganda and various Republicans refusing to let go of the Benghazi story. We'll be getting more of that same old, same old, on Wednesday while issues that haven't been explored with hearing after hearing and an in-depth report are left to languish in obscurity.