“Asked And Answered”: Hey, Benghazi-Heads, You Stand Down!
Let’s redirect our attention back to Benghazi. When is that special Benghazi committee in the House of Representatives going to get cracking, you may have wondered? Good question. It hasn’t been announced yet. But here’s a better question. What, now, is it going to investigate?
While we’ve all been focused during the past week on the border, there was a pretty major news development on Benghazi that got buried and is in need of a little sunshine. Last week, the Associated Press reported on transcripts of hours of closed-door interviews with nine U.S. military leaders that had been conducted by two House committees, Armed Services and Oversight (the latter is Darrell Issa’s committee). Those military leaders agreed on a, or maybe the, central point as far as this continuing “investigation” is concerned: There was no stand-down order.
The stand-down conspiracy has been a central right-wing talking point virtually since the tragic storming of the consulate, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The idea is that our heroic men and women in uniform could have saved the quartet, but President Obama and Hillary Clinton didn’t want them to, because they’re weak and they want America to fail.
Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz has been among the most vocal and direct Republicans on this point, saying last year: “We had proximity, we had capability, we had four individuals in Libya armed, ready to go, dressed, about to get into the car to go in the airport to go help their fellow countrymen who were dying and being killed and under attack in Benghazi, and they were told to stand down. That’s as sickening and depressing and disgusting as anything I have seen. That is not the American way.”
Issa has made similar comments. South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, who will chair the special committee once it does get off the ground, has never been quite so matter-of-fact as Chaffetz, but he too has performed the stand-down Fox trot, in a slightly more glancing way back in early May. “Well, Greta, your viewers would still have the same unanswered questions as we have: why our security profile was so low on the anniversary of 9/11; why we didn’t have any assets moving during the siege itself; and why the government can’t be trusted to answer your questions completely and accurately in the aftermath,” he said. “The jury that I’m interested in are reasonable-minded, fair-minded people, like your viewers.” The key phrase there is “why we didn’t have any assets moving,” which means “military people dispatched.”
The transcripts show that that question was answered—back in March—behind closed doors by the two military officials responsible. The senior military officer who issued the “remain in place” order to troops based in Tripoli, 600 miles away, and the detachment officer who received the order both told the House it was the right decision. A four-member team that included the detachment leader, a medic, and two others was told to remain in Tripoli because the determination was made, according to the AP’s reporting on the transcripts, that there was simply no way the team could have reached Benghazi in time to make any difference. The mayhem had already taken place.
If and when these ridiculous hearings happen, I’d wager that you’re going to be hearing Republicans wailing about when the “remain in place” phone call was made. On that question, there is some dispute. It might have happened as early as 5:05 a.m., or it might have happened as late as 6:30 a.m. So that’s a pretty large time window during a crisis for the GOP to exploit. But remember as you hear all this: It doesn’t matter. The second attack at Benghazi happened around 5:30 a.m. and lasted 11 minutes. It takes 90 minutes to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi. So it was completely physically impossible for the team to get there, unless its members had the power to spin the world backward and reverse time, like Christopher Reeve did to bring Margot Kidder back to life.
The officer who gave the order concluded that given that reality, the team would be better off in Tripoli, where the embassy was being evacuated in the aftermath of the Benghazi consulate attack. Some three dozen Americans were being taken from the Tripoli embassy to a classified location outside the city. And lo and behold, the medic who stayed behind in Tripoli saved one American life during the evacuation, according to the report. So according to these officials, the United States suffered one less death because the “remain in place order was issued.
Remember, this testimony is old. March. It was given behind closed doors, so we didn’t know about it. But Darrell Issa, and one has to assume John Boehner, did know. And still Boehner empaneled this committee. Yes, I suppose there are other questions the committee can pursue. But the public-interest question is whether anything more could have feasibly been done to prevent those four deaths in Benghazi, and nine military leaders have said no, it couldn’t have. The other questions are just the usual political ones—can they find some flimsy basis for impeachment, and can they hurt Hillary Clinton. Our troops didn’t stand down then, but someone sure should now.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 14, 2014
“For The Eighth Time”: Benghazi Conspiracy Theory Collapses, Again
For years, conspiracy-minded Republicans have insisted that someone in the Obama administration — usually, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — issued a “stand-down order” to the U.S. military on the night of the 2012 attack at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, preventing a Special Operations team from intervening and saving the lives of the four Americans who died in the assault.
According to newly released testimony, they are flat-out wrong.
As the Associated Press reported on Friday, transcripts of hours of testimony from nine military officers were made public this week, completely disproving the conspiracy theory:
The “stand-down” theory centers on a Special Operations team — a detachment leader, a medic, a communications expert and a weapons operator with his foot in a cast – that was stopped from flying from Tripoli to Benghazi after the attacks of Sept. 11-12, 2012, had ended. Instead, it was instructed to help protect and care for those being evacuated from Benghazi and from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.
The senior military officer who issued the instruction to “remain in place” and the detachment leader who received it said it was the right decision and has been widely mischaracterized. The order was to remain in Tripoli and protect some three-dozen embassy personnel rather than fly to Benghazi some 600 miles away after all Americans there would have been evacuated. And the medic is credited with saving the life of an evacuee from the attacks.
The report goes on to note that “despite lingering public confusion over many events that night, the testimony shows military leaders largely in agreement over how they responded to the attacks.”
This is not the first time the “stand-down order” myth has been debunked; Lt. Colonel S.E. Gibson and General Martin Dempsey had already told Congress as much. But the report’s timing could prove particularly problematic for the congressional Republicans who have repeatedly pushed the myth.
It arrives as the House Select Committee tasked with probing the attack for the eighth time is “ramping up” its investigation. And as the National Journal’s Lucia Graves points out, the panel happens to be filled with Republicans who have eagerly pushed the conspiracy.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the committee chairman, suggested that the Benghazi attack “kinda undercuts” the principle that “we’re not gonna send anybody into harm’s way under our flag without adequate protection, and if they get in trouble we are gonna go get ‘em. We’re gonna save ‘em. Or at least we’re gonna make a heck of an effort to do it.”
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) has said that the military “had the opportunity” to take action, but didn’t.
Rep. Jim Jordan wondered, “Why weren’t we running to the sound of the guns?”
Well, now their questions have been answered — again — yet the panel is still planning to spend up to $3.3 million to relitigate them. And the task of explaining why they need to spend more than the yearly budget of the House Veterans Affairs Committee or the House Ethics Committee to keep asking questions that have already been answered just got a lot harder.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 11, 2014
“Benghazi, The Cost Of An Obsession”: A Farcical Waste Of Time And Money
The furious, year-and-a-half-old effort to turn the deadly Benghazi attack into a Watergate-level scandal has so far failed. Naturally that hasn’t stopped Republicans from howling at hearings and turning over seat cushions in search of evidence. “Naturally,” because the Republican base has so far embraced these tactics.
But the Democrats, who for the most part have responded to the hysteria with loud sighs, are increasing their efforts to change the politics of the endless investigation by showing that it’s a farcical waste of time and money.
So it was that on Monday Nancy Pelosi provided journalists with a document revealing this year’s anticipated operating costs for the 12-member select committee on the Benghazi attacks. House Republicans have apparently requested $3.3 million for the panel, which will be composed of seven Republican lawmakers, five Democrats and an expected staff of 30.
USA Today put that figure in perspective:
Since the Benghazi committee was created in May, its full-year equivalent budget would be more than $5 million. This is more than the House Intelligence Committee, which has a $4.4 million budget this year and spent $4.1 million last year. The largest House committees — Energy and Commerce; Oversight and Government Reform; Transportation and Infrastructure — have budgets between $8 million and $9.5 million for the year.
A special committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming created by Democrats in 2007 spent about $2 million a year until it was shut down by the new Republican majority in January 2011.
The $3.3 million doesn’t count as a new expenditure since it will come from legislative branch funds that have already been appropriated. But this kind of profligacy won’t help the Republicans sell themselves as fiscal conservatives.
By: Juliet Lapados, Taking Note, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, July 8, 2014
“The Scandalmongers”: Benghazi, What New Details Reveal About The ‘Scandal’ And Its Promoters
In the years since the terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, his aide Sean Smith and CIA officers Tyrone Smith and Glen Doherty in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, President Obama’s congressional critics have complained long and loudly about his failure to apprehend the perpetrators immediately. Republican experts like Ted Cruz and Darrell Issa, along with the right-wing media machine, even insinuated that Obama might not really want to catch the Benghazi perps.
So when news came last weekend that US forces had picked up Abu Khattala, the chief suspect, in a long-planned secret raid, all the politicians who have proclaimed their anguish over the murders of our diplomatic and intelligence personnel ought to have been elated. They should have sent congratulations, if not apologies, to the White House.
But if the Benghazi tragedy has revealed anything, it is the utterly partisan obsession of those who have tried to stoke the “scandal.” So naturally, the same Republicans who have been preparing yet another Capitol Hill show trial – their “select committee” to investigate Benghazi – were barely able to conceal the dismay they so obviously felt over Khattala’s capture.
It is astonishing to watch the long faces of these elected officials, who yield to none in their flag-waving super-patriotic posturing, when the Obama administration manages to neutralize a dangerous enemy of the United States. Their animosity toward the president always seems far more intense than their hatred of our country’s actual adversaries. It is equally remarkable to listen to their petty complaints and phony arguments, as they try in every instance to diminish his achievement.
In this particular instance – as the Republican “terrorism experts” on Capitol Hill, in Washington think-tanks and the national media undoubtedly know – the time required to nab the alleged Benghazi ringleader was fairly short. Remember that the Bush administration never managed to find Osama bin Laden for seven years following 9/11 – after seeming to allow the al Qaeda chief to escape from Tora Bora. Nobody heard a whining peep from the likes of Lindsey Graham or Darrell Issa over that “intelligence failure” – indeed, they appeared content to pretend, along with President Bush, that bin Laden truly no longer mattered. And former vice president Dick Cheney, author of all those failures, even invented a cheap reason to attack the president.
Finding and arresting terrorists abroad is almost always a long game, as proved in the 1998 African embassy bombings that killed a dozen Americans and hundreds of local employees in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. That investigation entailed 15 years of hunting before Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai was finally grabbed by American forces last October – including eight years during which the Bush administration accomplished nothing, again without eliciting a word of recrimination from the Republicans who now criticize Obama incessantly. Evidently none of those critics thought the Ruqai arrest worthy of notice.
No doubt the Republicans will persist in their Benghazi inquest, without embarrassment – although everyone understands that it is nakedly aimed at Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worries them more than any terrorist could. But even as they brood and plot, the news proceeding from the Khattala arrest is even worse than they might have expected. Now that the alleged ringleader is in custody, the key element behind accusations of a White House “cover-up” is evaporating.
According to the Republican narrative, Ambassador Susan Rice was dispatched to recite misleading talking points about the Benghazi attack. In television interviews, she indicated that a video offensive to Muslims might be the underlying cause of the attack. The purpose was to suggest a spontaneous assault rather than a planned act of terror, which might contradict the president’s assertions, in the midst of the 2012 election, that his efforts had decimated al Qaeda.
The truth turned out to be more complicated than the guidance provided to Rice by the CIA. Terrorists, mainly from a Libyan gang known as Ansar al-Sharia, did participate in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound.
But The New York Times last weekend reported that Khattala told his associates he led the attack to “take revenge for an insult to Islam in an American-made online video.
“An earlier demonstration venting anger over the video outside the American Embassy in Cairo had culminated in a breach of its walls, and it dominated Arab news coverage. Mr. Abu Khattala told both fellow Islamist fighters and others that the attack in Benghazi was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.”
He made the same assertion on the record to a reporter for The New Yorker, while denying his own culpability.
So much for the Benghazi scandal, which was never much of a scandal at all: Whatever details may emerge in the months to come about the motives of Khattala, we already have learned all we need to know about the motives – and character – of the scandalmongers.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 20, 2014
“What A Disappointment!”: Ahmed Abu Khattala Arrest Spoils GOP’s Benghazi Party
Oh, I do so enjoy reading the conservative websites and watching Republicans on cable on the days the Obama administration does something they can’t find fault with. The arrest of Ahmed Abu Khattala for leading the attack on the Benghazi consulate in 2011 has them turning the expected rhetorical cartwheels, their displeasure evident across their surly visages at the huge hole blown in their argument that President Obama is objectively pro-terrorist.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the GOP’s leading rhetorical gymnast on all things Benghazi, called the arrest “long overdue,” implicitly imputing to the administration a dilatoriness that is just about the Republicans’ only line of offense. New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who holds the Joe Lieberman chair in John McCain Studies in the U.S. Senate, expressed her pleasure that Khattala is “finally” in custody and huffed: “Rather than rushing to read him his Miranda rights and telling him he has the right to remain silent, I hope the administration will focus on collecting the intelligence necessary to prevent future attacks and to find other terrorists responsible for the Benghazi attacks.”
Poor folks. The House Republicans are gearing up for the unveiling of their big select committee to keep Benghazi in the news, and lo and behold, it turns out that Benghazi is going to be in the news anyway, with the (or an) alleged ringleader facing the bar of American justice. Not exactly the backdrop they had in mind. “Why hasn’t anyone been brought to justice?” has been, admittedly, the second-order question Republicans have been asking, the first-order questions relating of course to whether there was some kind of cover-up. But even so, the question was sure to feature strongly in the GOP hearings. It’s not hard to imagine that a full week might have been slated to be devoted to that question, a week of great merriment and ribaldry over at The Daily Caller and the Free Beacon that will not, alas, come to pass.
The best they can do now is echo the Ayotte line about Miranda rights. The very phrase is guaranteed to spike the blood pressure of right-wingers. But the facts are plain and worth repeating quickly, even though they’re well known: Our track record of convicting terrorists in civilian courts is far superior to the track record of military tribunals.
Up through 2011, according to the NYU Law School Center for Law and Security, the Bush and Obama administrations had commenced the prosecution of more than 300 cases in civilian courts; 204 cases were resolved, with 177 convictions, for an 87 percent conviction rate (PDF). By contrast, we convicted via military tribunal up through 2011 a grand total of seven defendants.
No one that I can find on deadline has been keeping those numbers quite so assiduously since then, but all we have to do is engage the old memory banks for a few moments to know that the more recent years have held to pattern. Why, it was only a month ago that federal prosecutors in Manhattan won the conviction, on all counts, of Mostafa Kemal Mostafa, the British imam who orchestrated the violent kidnappings of American, British, and Australian tourists in Yemen. It took six weeks, and Mostafa himself spent several days on the stand. But he’s headed to the hoosegow, and the jury foreman, a guy from Westchester County who works for Xerox, said there was “no doubt in my mind” that Mostafa got a fair trial.
I don’t know about you, but I rather like the idea of a guy who works for Xerox, otherwise known as a citizen of the United States, passing judgment on someone like Mostafa. That is what we do. Well, that is what we do at our best, when we’re lucky, when a bunch of war-mad demagogues don’t succeed in scaring Americans into thinking that we have to abandon our best principles to keep the country safe.
It does take some gall. Here we sit with Iraq unraveling in precisely the way some of the war’s opponents predicted. Joe Biden’s old suggestion about making three countries out of Iraq may or may not be the best solution here, but it sure doesn’t look crazy now, even though he was sneeringly pooh-poohed by the people who swore that the war would lead to a garden of multiplying democracies. And who’s the guy who said it was a “dumb war”? Oh, right, Obama. And yet he is left to try to fix the world-historic tragedy they created.
We have been led by these lizards into some of the darkest moral dead-ends in our entire history as a people. Did the Benghazi attack, in the larger scheme of things, happen because of a video or because there wasn’t enough consular security? Neither. It happened because the United States went into the Arab world and spent a decade making gratuitous violence. There was justified violence—going after al Qaeda—and then there was gratuitous violence. As we’ve seen, we can decapitate al Qaeda with drones and special-ops raids. No big war needed. But by God, we had to have that war. And when you make war, other people make it back.
If Khattala was one of those people, a civilian jury is perfectly capable of making that determination. I trust one a lot more than I trust the select committee to keep deflecting responsibility for our current low moral standing in the world from where it really belongs.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 18, 2014
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