“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
“She Can See Things 16 Days Before They Happen”: The Woman At The Center Of The IRS ‘Scandal’ Must Be Clairvoyant
If I were the Republican Party, rather than attacking Lois Lerner as a modern-day E. Howard Hunt, I’d hire her as an election consultant. Why? Because the former commissioner at the center of the “newly re-burgeoning” IRS “scandal” is clearly a clairvoyant. I should think she’d be pretty handy for Reince Priebus to have around this October. You see, she can see things 16 days before they happen.
How do I know this? Consider the timeline of events. Lerner, who worked in the service’s Washington office, was first alerted that employees in the Cincinnati branch were using “inappropriate criteria” (key words like “tea party”) to process the applications of nonprofit groups on June 29, 2011. This comes from the very Treasury Department IG report that first made this whole business public. See the timeline here.
OK, so that’s that. Now, you’ve been hearing all this stuff lately about her lost emails, right? Her emails from between January 2009 and April 2011 disappeared. Went poof. It was in early 2010 that the IRS began using the inappropriate criteria. Looks awfully suspicious, doesn’t it? She lost all her emails pertaining to the period under examination and then some. Stinks to high heaven. Some have compared the missing two-plus years to the famous 18 1/2-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.
One problem. Her computer crashed on June 13, 2011. It was the following day that she wrote to other IRS personnel to tell them: “My computer crashed yesterday.” This date was noted last week by Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
That was when all those emails disappeared on her. It happened 16 days before she even knew about the problem in the Cincinnati office. So how likely is it that she deleted those emails in order to prevent House investigators from being able to learn anything about the “scandal”? Considering that she didn’t know about the problem yet, I’d say bloody unlikely.
In other words, this is just another ridiculous allegation in a parade of them. Admittedly, all of these revelations have looked dubious at first glance. But all of them have fizzled upon serious examination. It wasn’t just groups on the right that were targeted. The IRS head who visited the White House 155 times or whatever it was turns out to have gone to the Old Executive Office Building, not the White House, most of those times, and largely to talk about the IRS’ role in crafting and implementing Obamacare. And so on.
On top of that, the idea that Obama himself had some hand in this stuff, which was of course the original suspicion and orgasmatronic dream in Wingnuttia, is and always has been utterly crazy. I wouldn’t have put much past George W. Bush, but I would never have believed that even he would have orchestrated a scandal with such little upside (keeping some groups from getting 501c3 status) and such massive downside (possible Nixonian illegality). Dick Cheney, maybe, but not Bush.
And on top of that, the extremely unsurprising fact is that federal government computers crash all the time. These agencies’ internal operations are all underfunded, and bureaucrats all over the country are using primitive computers that groan under the weight of today’s demands. Plus, requirements for data preservation are fairly lax—and even if they weren’t, problems happen in this realm frequently.
Remember the Bush-era U.S. attorney firings? The Bush White House announced that it had lost 5 million emails during that probe. Not all emails relating to the Valerie Plame investigation were properly preserved. And finally, a Justice Department report found that many emails written by and to two Bush administration officials who’d been involved in crafting the “torture is legal” argument had suddenly gone missing. I’m sure the people today saying that the IRS scandal is bigger than Watergate were making excuses then.
In this case, no excuses need to be made. Unless Lois Lerner is a clairvoyant, the idea that she deleted emails on June 13 to cover up behavior she didn’t even learn about until June 29 is simply preposterous to any rational person with even a passing respect for facts and evidence. Unfortunately, that doesn’t describe Darrell Issa, who is holding another hearing Monday night (yes, night!), casting his fishing line out into the sea one more time. His colleague Trey Gowdy is going to be getting all the Benghazi headlines once that committee is up and running, so Issa has to find something to do, I suppose.
What’s amusing to me here is this: Conservatives are the people who think government can’t do anything right. That is exactly the situation we have here. IRS employees in Cincinnati really screwed up the processing of applications. The people in the charge of them in Washington were to some degree asleep. Computers crashed and emails were lost. As far as conservatives are concerned, that’s what government does all the time.
To conservatives, that usually explains a lot. But here of course they thought they had a chance to advance the more delectably sinister theory that Obama is out to destroy his political enemies. But sorry. Obama’s no Nixon, and Lois Lerner is no Rose Mary Woods.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 23, 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
“The One Child Left Behind”: Rand Paul Still Doesn’t Understand What He Doesn’t Understand
Last week, in an apparent attempt to embarrass the White House, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) leaked a new detail to the media: as the attack in Benghazi got underway, some Obama administration officials reached out to YouTube to “warn of the ‘ramifications’ of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video.”
There was, however, a problem: Issa’s leak made the White House look better, not worse – the fact that officials contacted YouTube is proof that the administration genuinely believed that the violence was in response to an offensive video. Issa accidentally leaked evidence that bolstered the White House’s case, offering proof the administration’s consistent line was sincere.
But Glenn Kessler reports that despite Republicans inadvertently helping the White House on Benghazi, some on the right tried to exploit the news anyway.
FOX HOST ERIC BOLLING: “So this is kind of startling news that the White House was on the phone with YouTube as the attacks were still taking place that night, saying, Hey, did you see what’s causing this? They were already being political at that moment.”
SEN. RAND PAUL (R-Ky.): “You know, I’m appalled by it. One of the things that’s interesting is that very night, they were still struggling to get reinforcements. We had some more Special Operations forces in Tripoli. They couldn’t find a plane for them. So instead of calling to get a plane or to try to make arrangements to get a plane, they’re on the phone trying to create spin to say that, ‘You know what? This is about a video, which never had anything to do with this attack.’ So you know, it saddens me. Doesn’t surprise me, but does sadden me.”
It’s rather amazing to appreciate just how wrong this is.
To be sure, Bolling’s question appears to be based on some striking confusion – the White House reaching out to YouTube and the role of a YouTube video in contributing to violence is not “being political.” Indeed, it’s the opposite.
But Rand Paul’s response suggests his basic understanding of the relevant details is somehow getting worse, even as he’s presumably exposed to more information.
First, the Republican senator seems to be under the impression that the national security team at the White House only has one telephone – instead of making plane “arrangements,” he said, officials called YouTube. (Note to Rand Paul: the Situation Room has fairly sophisticated communications equipment. They’re capable of making more than one call at a time.)
Second, though it’s really not up to the White House to coordinate Special Operations flights directly, even if it were, when the senator claimed officials didn’t try to find a plane for Special Operations forces, that’s clearly wrong.
In other words, the Kentucky senator is “appalled” and “saddened” by details Rand Paul doesn’t actually understand.
That seems to happen quite a bit with the GOP lawmaker.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2014
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