Benghazi Select Committee
You want a
Benghazi scandal?
Even after Congress approved the U.S. military joining a NATO mission in May 2011 whose efforts contributed to Gadhafi’s fall and death, neither the House nor the Senate ever held a hearing about Libya and what the NATO-led effort had left behind. After four decades of living under Gadhafi, all with no real security force or order, Libya struggled to maintain security, its economy failed to recover and the weak government in Tripoli was powerless to fend off extremists who took control of the restive country.
Republicans were front and center in the failure to explore what was happening in Libya. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a harsh critic of the Obama administration over its handling of the Benghazi attacks, met with Stevens during a July 2012 visit to Libya, just two months before Stevens’ death. A month earlier, unknown attackers in Benghazi had attempted to assassinate the British ambassador to Libya.
In response to the attempted assassination, Britain closed its consulate. McCain didn't mention it. McCain didn't mention that security was imploding. McCain
did issue a press release lauding the great strides Libya was making toward democracy. This was as accurate as his infamous 2007
lauding of the security in Iraq, as that country was spiraling into hell.
The intelligence community “produced hundreds of analytic reports in the months preceding the Sept. 11-12, 2012, attacks, providing strategic warning that militias and terrorist and affiliated groups had the capability and intent to strike U.S. and Western facilities and personnel in Libya,” according to a report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that was released in January.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
And yet, in the year and a half between the U.S. intervention in Libya and the attack at Benghazi, despite those hundreds of warnings, McCain and his pet poodle Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued exactly two combined press releases pertaining to Libya.
It gets better.
The chairman of the new House select committee has a mixed record on Libya. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., voted for the resolution that allowed for U.S. intervention. But weeks later, he supported one intended to prevent the U.S. from providing the kind of military presence that some argue was needed to prevent Libya’s post-Gadhafi decline into chaos. That resolution read in part: “The President has failed to provide Congress with a compelling rationale based upon U.S. national security interests for current US military activities regarding Libya.”
Let's reiterate: the chairman of the
witch hunt investigative committee voted for U.S. intervention in Libya, then voted against the robust military presence that might have protected the Benghazi diplomatic mission.
As for the rest of the committee:
The six GOP lawmakers announced Friday are Reps. Susan Brooks of Indiana, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mike Pompeo of Kansas, Martha Roby of Alabama, Peter Roskam of Illinois and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.
And together with Gowdy, on the June 3, 2011 resolution offered by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH),
which read:
Declaring that the President shall not deploy, establish, or maintain the presence of units and members of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Libya, and for other purposes
Among those supporting the resolution were Reps. Brooks, Jordan, Pompeo, Roby, Roskam, and Westmoreland.
If the Republicans want to investigate Benghazi, they need to look in a mirror.