Benghazigate
May 10, 2013 — John Hinderaker
This American Crossroads video does a good job of laying out, in a simple and understated way, the basic facts of the Benghazi cover-up, in light of Wednesday’s hearing. If you have friends who haven’t been following Benghazi and don’t know what the fuss is about, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to email it to them: Whether the Benghazi lies make a difference depends in part on whether you
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May 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Raymond Maxwell was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Maghreb (North Africa) Affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs from 2011-2012. He also one of the three Deputy Assistant Secretaries removed due the fallout over Benghazi. Maxwell has written the following poem about his experience at the hands of “the Queen’s Henchmen”: The Queen’s Henchmen request the pleasure of your company at a Lynching – to be held
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May 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday’s Benghazi hearing provided important information about the cover-up that occurred following the attack, and the leading role of Hillary Clinton in that cover-up. We already knew that the talking points Susan Rice used on five Sunday talk shows had been changed to provide false information about the Benghazi attack. Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s number two man in Libya when the attack began, confirmed yesterday that there was no
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May 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday’s Benghazi hearing tended to confirm my view that, looking back, the four Americans who died during the attack (which occurred in two distinct phases) were doomed due to the inadequate security provided by the State Department. In other words, there probably was nothing we could have done once the attack commenced that would have saved them. However, the hearing also confirmed that the U.S. declined to take actions that,
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May 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, I watched the replay of the House Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi. The hearing enhanced my knowledge of key events before, during, and after the attack. This post focuses on events before the attack. We already knew that the embassy in Libya had requested that the State Department beef up security, and that, instead, the number of people providing security had been slashed. And we already knew that
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May 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Benghazi hearing before the House Oversight Committee had been previewed over the weekend in stories featuring some of the highlights of the witnesses’ testimony to staff behind closed doors. In the event the testimony of the witnesses was if anything more dramatic than we might have anticipated. The bombshells were flying Fast & Furious. Three New York Times reporters have a good story summarizing the testimony. John Podhoretz renders
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May 8, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today’s Benghazi hearing had many dramatic moments and added significantly to our knowledge of that disaster. For example, we now know that there were multiple instances when special ops would-be rescuers were told to stand down, leading Lt. Col. Gibson to tell Greg Hicks, “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.” Obvious questions remain to be answered: Barack
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The bombshells were flying Fast & Furious, you might say, at the House Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi today. The former deputy chief of mission in Libya told the committee: “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya.” We commenced this series in response to Obama administration spokesman Susan Rice’s round of Sunday post-attack gabfest appearances asserting: ”What happened this week…in Benghazi was a result, a direct result of a
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings is the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee before which the Benghazi hearing was held today. He did his best to carry water for the White House and the former Secretary of State. Rep. Cummings earns his own entry in this series, as both a fool and a knave, for his advice to the Benghazi witnesses, before the families of the loved ones murdered in
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As the massacre of our fellow Americans in Benghazi returns to the news in a big way today, with the hearing scheduled in the House, it is well to remember the promotion of the Muhammad video by President Obama and Secretary Clinton in this context. It shows the politicization of the massacre by the Obama administration from the first moment on. The Obama administration’s attribution of responsibility for the massacre
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May 7, 2013 — John Hinderaker
With a hearing on Benghazi scheduled for tomorrow in Darrell Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee, this is an opportune moment to begin assessing the potential importance of the Benghazi scandal. As with any major scandal in the modern era, comparisons with Watergate are probably inevitable. Michael Ramirez makes the analogy explicit: So, which was worse? Watergate or Benghazi? This is a topic to which I intend to return in
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May 6, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
When it first became clear that the CIA’s Benghazi talking points had been altered, many of us viewed the White House as the prime suspect. After all, it served President Obama’s political purposes to claim, at the height of a political campaign in which he was taking credit for the fall of al Qaeda, that the death of a U.S. ambassador was down to spontaneous outrage over a video, rather
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May 5, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Obama administration has politicized the Benghazi catastrophe from day 1, protecting Obama from exposure of his nonfeasance, creating an alternative universe in which the attack on the consulate grew out of a “spontaneous” protest, and kicking the whole thing past the election. On Friday Steve Hayes kicked off the latest round of exposures with his excellent Weekly Standard article “The Benghazi talking points.” Now come Bob Schieffer and Rep.
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May 3, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Weekly Standard has posted an advance online copy of Steve Hayes’s “The Benghazi talking points” from the new issue, and Bill Kristol has sent out an email alerting us to the article. Steve reports: Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what
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May 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday the FBI posted images of three suspects captured by surveillance cameras on the grounds of the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, when it was attacked on September 11, 2012 — the attack that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Why has it taken the FBI eight months to get around to releasing the images if they need the help? That’s
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April 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Fox News has two related stories regarding State Department and CIA employees who reportedly have information they wish to offer about the Obama administration’s conduct in relation to the Benghazi attack. According to a lawyer for one of these whistleblowers, the information pertains to (1) the State Department’s failure, prior to the attack, to provide proper security despite warnings that should have led to a security beef-up (2) the government’s
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April 24, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, as John noted, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and four other House committees provided a report to GOP members on the investigations into the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi on 9/11 of last year. The report shows that the Obama administration continuously denied requests for additional security prior to the attacks, and then attempted to hide responsibility for those decisions. Today, the heads of the
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