Darrell Issa: House Oversight Committee to depose Pickering and Mullen over Benghazi

[bsteadman]

Darrell Issa: House Oversight Committee to depose Pickering and Mullen over Benghazi

Twitchy
Twitchy Staff
5/12/2013

Excerpt:

Darrell Issa reports that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which he chairs, will depose Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen over Benghazi.

View the complete post at:

http://twitchy.com/2013/05/12/darrel...over-benghazi/

[bsteadman]

Free Republic is running a thread titled, 'Darrell Issa: House Oversight Committee to depose Pickering and Mullen over Benghazi', which was started 5/12/2013 by 'smoothsailing'

The thread references a 5/12/2013 Twitchy post - http://twitchy.com/2013/05/12/darrel...over-benghazi/

View the complete Free Republic thread at:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3018531/posts

[bsteadman1]

Image: General Dempsey - Statement regarding F-16 fighter response time to Benghazi

http://www.wasobamaborninkenya.com/I...=6097#post6097

[bsteadman]

Review chairman: Clinton didn't make Benghazi call

Associated Press
Philip Elliott
5/12/2013

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The seasoned diplomat who penned a highly critical report on security at a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, defended his scathing assessment but absolved then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. "We knew where the responsibility rested," Thomas Pickering said Sunday.

"They've tried to point a finger at people more senior than where we found the decisions were made," Pickering, whose career spans four decades, said of Clinton's critics.

The Accountability Review Board, which Pickering headed with retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not question Clinton at length about the attacks but concluded last December that the decisions about the consulate were made well below the secretary's level.
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View the complete article at:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories..._INVESTIGATION

[bsteadman]

Spinning Benghazi

The New Yorker
Alex Koppelman
5/10/2013

Excerpt:

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.

From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. The initial draft revealed by Karl mentions “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi” before the one in which four Americans were killed. That’s not in the final version. Nor is this: “[W]e do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” That was replaced by the more tepid “There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” (Even if we accept the argument that State wanted to be sure that extremists were involved, and that they could be linked to Al Qaeda, before saying so with any level of certainty—which is reasonable and supported by evidence from Karl’s reporting—that doesn’t fully explain these changes away.)

Democrats will argue that the editing process wasn’t motivated by a desire to protect Obama’s record on fighting Al Qaeda in the run-up to the 2012 election. They have a point; based on what we’ve seen from Karl’s report, the process that went into creating and then changing the talking points seems to have been driven in large measure by two parts of the government—C.I.A. and State—trying to make sure the blame for the attacks and the failure to protect American personnel in Benghazi fell on the other guy.

But the mere existence of the edits—whatever the motivation for them—seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue. This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “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.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now. In his regular press briefing on Friday afternoon (a briefing that was delayed several times, presumably in part so the White House could get its spin in order, but also so that it could hold a secretive pre-briefing briefing with select members of the White House press corps), he said: - (bold and color emphasis added)

The only edit made by the White House or the State Department to those talking points generated by the C.I.A. was a change from referring to the facility that was attacked in Benghazi from “consulate,” because it was not a consulate, to “diplomatic post”… it was a matter of non-substantive factual correction. But there was a process leading up to that that involved inputs from a lot of agencies, as is always the case in a situation like this and is always appropriate.

This is an incredible thing for Carney to be saying. He’s playing semantic games, telling a roomful of journalists that the definition of editing we’ve all been using is wrong, that the only thing that matters is who’s actually working the keyboard. It’s not quite re-defining the word “is,” or the phrase “sexual relations,” but it’s not all that far off, either.

View the complete article at:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...ite-house.html

[bsteadman]

When Myths Collide in the Capital

The New York Times
Maureen Dowd
5/11/2013

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON

THE capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.”

The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.”

(Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.)

Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld.

The toxic theatrics, including Karl Rove’s first attack ad against Hillary, cloud a simple truth: The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, was unworthy of the greatest power on earth.

After his Libyan intervention, President Obama knew he was sending diplomats and their protectors into a country that was no longer a country, a land rife with fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Yet in this hottest of hot spots, the State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected, and contingency plans were not drawn up, despite the portentous date of 9/11 and cascading warnings from the C.I.A., which had more personnel in Benghazi than State did and vetted the feckless Libyan Praetorian Guard. When the Pentagon called an elite Special Forces team three hours into the attack, it was training in Croatia — decidedly not a hot spot.

Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Chris Stevens were rushing to make the flimsy Benghazi post permanent as a sign of good faith with Libyans, even as it sat ringed by enemies.

The hierarchies at State and Defense had a plodding response, failing to make any superhuman effort as the siege waxed and waned over eight hours.

In an emotional Senate hearing on Wednesday, Stevens’s second-in-command, Gregory Hicks, who was frantically trying to help from 600 miles away in Tripoli, described how his pleas were denied by military brass, who said they could not scramble planes and who gave a “stand-down” order to four Special Forces officers in Tripoli who were eager to race to Benghazi.

“My reaction was that, O.K., we’re on our own,” Hicks said quietly. He said the commander of that Special Forces team told him, “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more” chutzpah “than someone in the military.”

The defense secretary at the time, Leon Panetta, insisted, “We quickly responded.” But they responded that they would not respond. As Emma Roller and David Weigel wrote in Slate: “The die was cast long before the attack, by the weak security at the consulate, and commanders may have decided to cut their losses rather than risking more casualties. And that isn’t a story anyone prefers to tell.”

Truth is the first casualty here when competing fiefs protect their mythologies. Some unhinged ideologues on the right cling to the mythology that Barry and Hillary are out to destroy America.

In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.
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View the complete article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/op...e-capital.html

[bsteadman]

Geraldo Rivera: My Sources Tell Me Benghazi Was About Running Missiles to Syrian Rebels

TheBlaze
Madeleine Morgenstern
5/10/2013

Excerpt:

Geraldo Rivera said Friday that his sources tell him the U.S. was involved in a secret mission in Libya to arm the Syrian rebels, which was the reason for the initial secrecy about the attack in Benghazi.

Rivera said on “Fox & Friends” that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may have been briefed by then-CIA Director David Petraeus “to suggest that there was a secret mission going on there, that we can’t go there, we can’t talk about it.”

“I believe, and my sources tell me, they were there to round up those shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, they were going to hand those missiles over to the Turks and the Turks were going to give them to the rebels in Syria,” Rivera said. “It was like Iran-Contra, I think it merits gigantic investigation, it will all become clear.”

View the complete article, including video, at:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...-syria-rebels/