For anyone getting their news from any source other than Fox News it should have always been a foregone conclusion that the GOP House Committee on Benghazi would turn up nothing. The whole endeavor was never about finding some undiscovered truth but, instead, about inflicting political harm on Hillary Clinton and damaging her presidential run for office. Seven other committees had found no smoking gun or anything else harmful to Clinton or the Obama administration and only deranged Hillary haters should have or could have expected a different result. Oh, and did I mention the far higher losses of life on the watches of Ronald Reagan and Chimperator Bush which never were given such an exhaustive investigation? It is unfortunate that the GOP members of this witch hunt do not have to personally repay the sums wasted for no legitimate reason. The
Washington Post blasts the committee in a main editorial Here are excerpts:
ON THE night of
Sept. 11 and morning of Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. diplomats and intelligence
officers in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists armed with automatic weapons, mortars
and fuel to start fires. By the next morning, four brave Americans lay dead —
Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; his aide, Sean Smith; and two former Navy
SEALs providing security, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. It was a horrific
crime whose perpetrators remain for the most part unidentified and unpunished —
and a setback for U.S. foreign policy in the wider Middle East.
As if all of that weren’t bad enough,
the Benghazi attacks mutated into yet another of the partisan dramas that U.S.
politicians — in this case Republican politicians — generate in lieu of
constructive policy making. Unable to turn the events to their advantage when
they occurred, during the 2012 election campaign, Republicans have persisted in
attempting to milk the “scandal” for the past four years. They have done so
even though repeated previous investigations — including by a GOP-led House intelligence panel — found nothing to contradict the
Obama administration’s basic account.
And
now, after two years and $7 million, comes Tuesday’s final report of a
Republican-led House select committee, which adds exactly nothing substantial to the story. It’s
true that the panel’s investigation did, along the way, help trigger the
revelation of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which is a real issue. On the most sensitive
point, however — Ms. Clinton’s personal culpability for what happened in
Benghazi — the committee came up empty.
Yet
for reasons best known only to themselves, Republicans have insisted on pursuing
their own more inflammatory and conspiratorial version of events. Maybe someone
should investigate that.
Ironically, at the same time
Vanity Fair is running a piece that looks at the Stevens family's request that Hillary Clinton cease being blamed for the tragedy that claimed the life of their family member. Odd how they have less of an agenda than sleazy Republicans obsessed with inflicting political harm on Ms. Clinton. Here are article highlights:
Democrats
on the House Committee released their own, three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page report on Monday. They also cited “woefully inadequate”
security in Benghazi. But they claimed to have been virtually shut out of the
official Committee report. They called the probe, led by the South Carolina
Republican Trey Gowdy, a witch hunt. “Gowdy has been conducting this
investigation like an overzealous prosecutor desperately trying to land a
front-page conviction rather than a neutral judge of facts seeking to improve
the security of our diplomatic corps,” the report said.
Dr.
Anne Stevens, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens, has served as a family
spokesperson since his death. She is the chief of pediatric rheumatology at
Seattle Children’s Hospital. We spoke twice in the past three days, including
shortly after the House Select Committee report was issued. Dr. Stevens
recalled that her brother had been fascinated by the Middle East since
childhood, when he dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, with a towel and a pot
atop his head. He served in the Peace Corps, in Morocco, before joining the
Foreign Service, and he served twice in Libya before his final posting there,
as well as in Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. My interview with Dr.
Stevens has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Whom do you fault for the lack of security that resulted in the
death of your brother, in Benghazi? It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not
sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But
what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to
increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests
for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State
Department is underbudgeted.
I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They
were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And
their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the
resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now.
But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the
risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took
on himself.
After years of congressional investigations, do you feel that your
brother’s death has been politicized in Washington?
Yes! Definitely politicized. Every report I read that
mentions him specifically has a political bent, an accusatory bent. One point
that seems to be brought up again and again is the accusation that the attack
was a response to the video. I could understand why that conclusion would be
made, because it was right after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. But,
frankly, it doesn’t matter that that was the thinking, that night, about why
the attack occurred. It’s irrelevant to bring that up again and again. It is
done purely for political reasons.
And guess who blocked increase security for State Department facilities? Congressional Republicans, of course.
The take away is that the next time you hear some Republican apologist whining about Benghazi, what you need to do is ask them to their face when they plan on having a tattoo that says "I'm an idiot" placed on their forehead. .
