Which one of these facts doesn’t belong among the others?
• U.S. Marines are on alert to evacuate remaining Americans from
Libya.
• On the night of September 11, 2012, Gregory Hicks, a State
Department official stationed in Tripoli, had a telephone
conversation at 8 pm Washington time — that’s 2 am Tripoli time —
with Hillary Clinton.
• The Obama administration had a private meeting with their press
allies on Friday and CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson is reportedly under
fire for taking a skeptical approach to the administration’s spin
on Benghazi.
• Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) hearing last week left far too many
questions unanswered.
Okay, you got me: it’s a trick question. None of those things
doesn’t belong among the others, and all add up to the conclusion
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) reached in January. The House needs to pass
Wolf’s H. Res. 36 and create a select committee to investigate the
terrorist attack on Benghazi that took four American lives.
Wolf’s point is simply that the conflicting priorities of
congressional committees make the Select Committee the only
practicable way to get at the truth. As he pointed out in his
letter last
Friday to Speaker Boehner, Wolf’s bill is now supported by nearly
two-thirds of the Republicans in the House, 139 co-sponsors.
Will Boehner have the guts to pass Wolf’s bill? He should, for a
host of reasons both substantive and political. In a Friday
editorial the
Wall Street Journal
wrote, “Across this country’s history, the murder of an
American ambassador, the nation’s representative, has been taken as
not merely a tragedy but an attack on U.S. interests that demands
an official accounting to the American people.” With the
Journal providing cover for him, Boehner has no excuse to
not pass it.
That the Marines are on alert to evacuate the remaining
Americans in Libya should be the last stake in the heart of Obama’s
“Arab Spring” policy. From Libya to Syria (and Yemen and Iraq and
Mali and in so many other places), Obama has worked hard to create
a political fiction: that democracy is blooming where it cannot —
wherever Islamic law prevails — and al Qaeda is dying among its
flowers. Instead, we see terrorist groups fighting among themselves
for dominance in too many places. Too many places in which we have
lost our ability to influence events.
Which leaves us with the other facts at hand. We know a lot of
the questions that still need to be answered, thanks to Wolf’s
letter and Andy McCarthy’s usual great work. For example, McCarthy
points out
here that the Hicks-Clinton telephone call was probably
recorded. If that recording (still) exists, it should be turned
over to the House and Hillary’s involvement in dealing with the
terrorist attack — or not doing so — should be fully
investigated.
As should be so many other aspects of this scandal. Another
example is the CIA talking points that White House flack Jay Carney
claimed were the basis for Amb. Susan Rice’s falsehoods on the
September 16, 2012 Sunday talk shows. Carney said, on November 28,
2012, that “Those talking points originated from the intelligence
community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they
thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have
made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those
talking points by either of those two institutions were changing
the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’
was inaccurate.”
Which was absolutely false. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that the
CIA’s talking points were mangled beyond recognition — at least
twelve versions exist according to ABC News — yet the CIA and the
intelligence community were blamed for what they and Susan Rice
said. The talking points were changed for a reason, and that reason
had to be political.
Political as in re-electing Obama. Everything points to the
president. His involvement and the involvement of his cabinet and
personal staff have to be investigated.
The most interesting part of this is that the White House is
feeling sufficient heat on Benghazi to call in the Obamamedia’s
most faithful, including CBS News President David Rhodes. (Rhodes’s
brother — Ben — is the White House Deputy National Security
Advisor for Strategic Communication and reportedly played a major
role in changing the CIA talking points.) If, as it appears, the
White House is trying to censor Sharyl Attkisson, the alarm bells
are ringing all around. Not in the media: they’re Obama’s captives.
The desperation alarms are ringing in the White House. They have to
bury the Benghazi story before it buries Obama’s presidency.
And they might succeed. Issa’s hearings won’t go on forever and
the Benghazi story may only survive in the conservative media. But
not if Boehner passes Frank Wolf’s bill and creates the select
committee.
What the White House obviously understands is that if Boehner
has the courage to do that, there won’t be any way for Obama to
escape the Benghazi story between now and the 2014 election. No
matter what he does, no matter what he says, as a matter of reflex
the media’s attention will return to the select committee’s
dealings.
The select committee would, under Wolf’s bill, have the power to
subpoena witnesses and documents. So who’s getting subpoenaed this
week? Is Obama resisting the document subpoenas? Has he claimed
executive privilege yet? What did Hillary’s spokeswoman, Victoria
Nuland, say in her deposition? It’s easy to see that creating a
select committee could have one overriding effect: the White House
should be as tied up with it as Congress was with Obamacare. Our
politicians spent about eighteen months on that without a
break.
Some of us remember the good old days on Monica Beach. That’s
when reporters staked out Ken Starr’s grand jury proceedings in the
broad concrete courtyard in front of the U.S. District Court, which
became known by that name. There will be enough “process crimes” —
lies to congressional investigators that breed lies to grand juries
— in any Select Committee’s investigation to keep the Obama
administration reeling through 2016.
One of the big reasons that the White House will be tied up is
that their friends in the liberal media — especially the crazies
on MSNBC and their ilk — are so scared of the Benghazi story that
they can’t resist covering it. It may go so far — as one radio
talk show host predicted last week — that they would try to cover
the Benghazi select committee, even if only to lampoon it, sooner
than the rest out of fear of the damage it could cause Obama.
And that’s all politics, the fun side of what we do. The
substance of politics is policy, and Obama’s needs to be laid bare
to the public.
It would not be beyond the purview of the Benghazi Select
Committee to investigate just what Amb. Chris Stevens was doing in
Benghazi the night he was killed. What policy purpose was there in
exposing him to terrorist attack? Was there some goal that Obama or
Hillary was trying to reach?
What was the purpose of the separate mission being conducted by
the two former SEALs who were killed the same night? There are so
many rumors floating around about what they were doing that a new
category of intelligence info had to be created just for it by a
friend of mine. He calls it “rumint.” We’ve heard about “MANPADs”
— man portable air defense missiles they may have been trying to
round up lest they fall into the hands of terrorists. Were they
successful? How did their actions further our policy in Libya?
There is every reason for us to be skeptical of Obama’s goals,
motivations, and policy. And, given the attention span of the
Congress and its committees, there is no prospect that the truth
about Benghazi will ever be determined unless Boehner creates the
Benghazi Select Committee. The truth still matters. Let’s get this
done.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/13/next-the-benghazi-select-commi
