[the article appeared in the print edition of DI last week… website is temporarily blocked] Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead, Dzhokhar is wounded and imprisoned, Bostonians cheered like baseball fans… The bad guys are caught, but the mujahidin escaped in a cloud of anecdotal details, hapless or deliberate misconceptions, and a blackout on the ways and […]
Hi Gang:
Just when you thought you had seen or heard it all, another outrageous story pops up!
A former colleague from the old INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) just forwarded an e-mail to me that has really rattled my cage!
The Inspector General that has responsibility for the Witness Protection Program, conducted an audit of that program and found gaping holes in the system. While it is important for the government to protect witnesses whose testimony and information is vital to conducting successful investigations and prosecutions of criminals and terrorists, it must also be remembered that witnesses can themselves, pose a threat to public safety. The Witness Protection Program is commonly known by an acronym, WITSEC that stands for “Witness Security.”
Perhaps the important WITSEC program should henceforth be referred to “WITLESS Security!”
Here is the headline from the most recent example of galactic incompetence by our government, this time where WITSEC is concerned, as it appeared in the Atlantic Wire article:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/05/us-marshalls-lose-suspected-terrorists-witness-protection/65307/
Here is how the CNN report filed by Jake Tapper begins:
townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2013/05/16/from-philosemitism-to-antisemitism-the-church-of-scotland-then-and-now-n1597184/print 3/3
Dennis Prager and others have done an excellent job of highlighting the genuinely anti-Semitic contentof a recent Church of Scotland publication entitled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the
‘Promised Land,’” and Prager has even called it “ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times.” What has not been mentioned, however, is the great tradition of philo-Semitism in recent Scottish Church history, making the contrast all the more extreme.
Some of the great Scottish Presbyterian leaders of the 19th century built on the heritage of EnglishPuritan theologians like John Owen (1616-1683), who wrote, “The Jews shall be gathered from allparts of the earth they are scattered, and brought home into their homeland.”
Robert Leighton (1611-1684), a contemporary of Owen, stated, “Undoubtedly, that people of the Jews shall once more be commanded to arise and shine [with reference to Isaiah 60:1], and their return shall be the riches of the Gentiles (Romans 11:12 [meaning, bringing spiritual revival to the nations]),and that shall be a more glorious time than ever the Church of God did yet behold.”
In stark contrast, the recent report states, “There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an increasing number of difficulties. . . .”
So, what these 17th century theologians viewed with great longing, these 21st century theologians view with great loathing, even claiming that, “There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land.”
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2013/05/16/let-our-people-fly/
In January of 2011, Delta Airlines announced its support of Saudi Arabian Airline’s application to join its Sky Team global airline alliance. Delta’s vice-president had this to say: “We are honored that Saudi Arabian (airline) has chosen to link its future growth and success with Delta and our SkyTeam partners.” We should remember that word “honored” in light of Delta enforcing the rules that pertain to the Saudi Airline and Kingdom: No Jew can enter Saudi Arabia. This means that no Jew can board a plane on American soil headed for Saudi Arabia. Let’s be more specific: no American Jew can board an American Delta plane on American soil that is jointly operated by Saudi Air. When pressed on this disgraceful practice, Delta blames it on the Saudis, saying that they (Delta) are merely following the dictates of the country of destination. We should keep in mind that Delta voluntarily entered into this partnership with eyes wide open regarding Saudi policies and mouths watering for the increased income that 35 additional Middle Eastern destinations would provide.
What has happened to American principles in the years since the boycotts of South Africa for their apartheid policies? Picture a Delta partnership in those days in which black Americans were forced into segregated seating or more aptly, were not allowed to fly on those planes at all. We can be sure that our top political leaders would have spoken out against such abrogation of American policies. Although there already are state and federal laws outlawing religious discrimination, Delta has not been enjoined from proceeding in their willful disregard of them.
http://politicalmavens.com/ I’ve been wondering what makes some disorders sexy and worth confessing while others remain embarrassing and permanently in the closet. It’s ok to be bulimic, for example, even though that conjures up horrible images and smells but you won’t hear Christine Quinn come out about her hemorrhoids or bunions. All sorts of addictions are […]
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7255 There’s an immeasurably deep cleavage between left and right in America, illustrated vividly in the way Americans regard the Benghazi scandal and outrage. It’s in the DNA. Democrats generally and liberals in particular can’t understand what the noise from Benghazi is about, though they’re willing to concede that the deaths of the American ambassador […]
http://sarahhonig.com/2013/05/17/another-tack-while-we-keep-kvetching/
The wardrobe adaptability of the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is very telling. The same goes for his cousin, Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani.
When it serves their purposes, Qatar’s staggeringly wealthy two most powerful players strut about in very traditional Arab garb. But when the occasion deems it expedient, they soothe subliminal western anxieties by donning tailored suits of the exceptionally elegant sort that proliferates in European Union forums. That purportedly imparts an impression of trustworthiness.
The cousins’ policy line is just as chameleon-like. There’s a yawning gap between their utterances in English and in Arabic.
Not too many years ago, Qatar was an Israeli success story, or so it was widely believed in Jerusalem. Relations with Doha, especially trade ties, flourished since the mid-Nineties. They weren’t formal or full, yet they were hardly covert. Everyone knew about them. Unnamed Qatari higher-ups had reportedly visited Israel and Shimon Peres, then deputy premier, openly visited Qatar in 2007. Tzipi Livni did the same a year later. Other Israelis, such as Ehud Barak, hobnobbed with the emir.
But Qatar unilaterally abrogated these ties after Operation Cast Lead. Doha offered to restore them if Israel allowed unrestricted shipments of building materials to Gaza. Since these can be used to build bunkers, Israel refused.
However, the Qatari transformation isn’t only Israeli-linked. Qatar had become the financial sponsor of the misnamed Arab Spring, bankrolling assorted Muslim Brotherhood insurgents and their allies. The upheavals shaking the Arab world – Syria foremost – were in effect orchestrated by Doha.
The emir – despite his excellent personal ties with Israelis, Americans and other Westerners – has used his clout and unimaginable riches to bring to power and sustain Islamist forces that are fundamentally inimical to the West, to say nothing of their implacable hatred for the Jewish state.
With abundant hype, pomp and circumstance the emir visited Gaza last autumn. It was the first such high-profile gesture by a head of state since Hamas seized power in 2007. It allowed Gaza to eclipse Ramallah and demonstrate that the post-Arab-Spring rise of the Muslim Brotherhood bolsters Hamas, itself a Brotherhood offshoot.
This yet again underscored the Brotherhood’s reinforced impact, via collusion with Gulf State Islamists. The inherent incendiary potential cannot be belittled, even if US President Barak Obama prefers to obfuscate the gloomy reality he has helped create.
No matter what spin was spun, the emir was clearly seen as meddling in the intra-Palestinian squabbles, putting his full political weight behind the utterly rejectionist Hamas that explicitly proclaims its aspiration to destroy Israel.
The emir underwrites his support with financial largesse as well. This puts him in league with particularly fanatic forces. He has, for example, been a most generous benefactor to such militant jihadist groups as Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida subsidiary now on the warpath in Syria.
Not to be omitted is the pivotal importance of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news network, which serves the Thanis’ agenda at the expense of even token journalistic integrity. Al-Jazeera’s inflammatory tendentious reporting has fomented insurgencies in Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria.
One would therefore assume that such non-too-innocuous intervention would decisively give the lie to Qatar’s purported moderation and peaceful inclinations.
But on the opportune occasion of the Qatari prime minister’s recent stopover in Washington, the chameleon switched colors again. Stylishly attired in a dark confidence-boosting business suit and schmoozing Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden in cordial English, their guest successfully peddled worn old merchandise as a novel revolutionary concept.
Needless to stress, Obama’s crew bought it all, lock stock and barrel as per the Kerry/Biden inclination from the outset. Perhaps they altogether suggested the stratagem that they later appeared to laud as an extraordinary breakthrough in attempts to resurrect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.Qatar’s premier Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (right) in Washington with US Secretary of State John KerryOf course the raison d’être of these talks is – one way or another – to squeeze Israel back into those incredibly untenable 1949 armistice lines, in effect till June 4, 1967 and now misrepresented as bona fide borders.
And so, the international community and Israel’s ever-obliging left-wing were quite expectedly wowed when al-Thani declared that “The Arab League delegation affirmed that agreement should be based on the two-state solution on the basis of the 4th of June 1967 line, with the [possibility] of comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land.”
Been there. Heard that. But so what? When supposed honest brokers determine that the secondhand castoff is in fact spanking new, their say-so ostensibly constitutes a sterling seal of approval. Such recycling in turn becomes a means to ply more pressure on Israel with a perceived fresh Arab concession, which is nothing of the sort.
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/05/obama-and-the-official-truth.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Obama+and+the+%22Official+Truth%22&utm_campaign=20130517_m116078692_Obama+and+the+%22Official+Truth%22&utm_term=Continue+reading___
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing.
But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his parole.
Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula’s film – and scapegoated Nakoula – for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.
With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS’s prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency’s prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department’s subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.
On the surface, they seem like unrelated events.
But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an “official truth” about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that “official truth.”
From the outset of Obama’s tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.
Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban.
It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.
For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother’s jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.
To advance its “official truth,” the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran’s nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration’s foreign policy narrative.
Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration’s narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama’s claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama’s support for the al-Qaida-aligned anti-regime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011.
Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.
For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely – and libelously – accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of “book burning.”
Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America’s allies.
Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration’s tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as “bitter” souls who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren’t like them.”
In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.
And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama’s domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups’ donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.
We also learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports homosexual marriage. The latter group was led by one of Obama’s reelection campaign’s co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported Obama’s pro-abortion policies.
All of this aligns seamlessly with the Obama administration’s demonization of conservative donors like the Koch brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come out over the past several years.
Last July, The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as “less-thank reputable” eight businessmen who supported political action committees associated with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department investigation.
Finally there is the administration’s discriminatory treatment of pro-Israel organizations.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/15/naqba-commemorating-a-self-inf#commentcontainer
Israel’s founding wasn’t the reason for Palestinian displacement.
Today, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over the years, mark what they call the naqba (Arabic for catastrophe). It was on this day 65 years ago that Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.
That juxtaposition of Israel and naqba in not accidental. We are meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousand of Palestinian Arabs.
But the truth is different. A British document from early 1948, declassified only weeks ago, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered a series of overwhelming defeats…. Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”
In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already fighting and Arabs fleeing even before Israel had sovereign existence.
Thus, on May 15, what is now called the naqba consisted, not of an Israeli act of forcible displacement of Arabs, but of neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responding to Israel’s declaration of independence and Britain’s departure with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.
Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment — the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents — and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes.
So the term naqba is misleading. Indeed, it smacks of falsehood, inasmuch as it implies a tragedy inflicted by others. The tragedy, of course, was self-inflicted.
The illustrious author names Rohrerbacher as a good candidate for the Benghazi investigation committee. Rohrerbacher? He praised the Taliban and came to the defense of Islamic terrorist funder Jack Abramoff!
Kelly also puts forth Darrel Issa as a good candidate. Jihad Darrel? Darrel Issa was a good buddy of Yassir Arafat, praised Hezbollah as a humanitarian group, called Israel an apartheid state and referred to 9-11 as “simply a plane crash!” (However, with his criminal record, he fits in well with members of Congress)!
The head of the CIA is a Muslim! The secretary of defense is at the very least a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer! Our government is rife with MB operatives and sympathizers! What about the Commander in Chief (SOA)? What about Huma’s tool? (Not to mention the hundreds of Islamic terrorists cells and JuF compounds around the country!)
How do intelligent, experienced people get the dumb idea that a massive structure devised over a 60 year period is going down with a committee – especially one composed of MB operatives and sympathizers?
Janet Levy,
Los Angeles
THE ROAD AHEAD FOR A BENGHAZI COMMITTEE BY JACK KELLY http://www.tothepointnews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5437&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=92 http://www.tothepointnews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=5437&itemid=92
http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/5437/130/
Thanks to the testimony of whistleblowers last week, and subsequent reporting of how “talking points” were systematically scrubbed of every reference to the truth, we know for sure President Barack Hussein Obama and senior aides were lying when they blamed a Youtube video for the attack on our consulate in Benghazi.
More important is what is being covered up. To get to the bottom of what may be more a looming national security crisis than a scandal in the past, we must have answers to these critical questions:
*In only 14 of 264 diplomatic posts was the threat of terrorist attack deemed “high” or “critical.” Two were our embassy in Tripoli and the consulate in Benghazi. Despite this — and despite the fact the CIA was running an op out of the annex there — security at the consulate was well below the minimum standard set by the State Department. There had been 14 Special Forces soldiers assigned to guard the embassy in Tripoli. That was cut to 4 last July.
Why was security in Benghazi so lax? Why did the State Department ignore pleas from Ambassador Chris Stevens and Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom for more? Why was the number of Diplomatic Security Service officers assigned to Libya reduced?
Who decided to put security for the consulate chiefly in the hands of an Islamist militia with ties to al Qaida? Why?
It was routine in the Bush administration to beef up security as the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached. Why wasn’t this done on the eve of the tenth anniversary?
*Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya, testified that a small Special Forces team was prepared to go to the rescue of the consulate, but was ordered twice to “stand down.” This contradicts the assertion by administration officials that no “stand down” orders were issued. Who issued the stand down order? Why?
Former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, were CIA security contractors in Libya They told their superiors they were going to help, were ordered to stand down, but went anyway, according to “sources who were on the ground,” reported Jennifer Griffin of Fox News. Who ordered them to stand down? Why?
Before they were killed by mortar rounds, Woods and Doherty were shining a laser designator on the location of the terrorist mortar team and calling out coordinates on the radio, according to Ms. Griffin’s “sources who were on the ground.” Since this would give away their position to the terrorists, it’s unlikely the former SEALs would do this unless they thought there was a US Spectre gunship overhead that could take out the mortar. Did they have a reason for thinking that?
*There were sensitive documents kept in both places, but the burned and looted sites of the consulate and annex were unsecured for days afterward. Journalists — including the CNN reporter who found Ambassador Stevens’ diary — wandered through them unmolested, so it doesn’t seem plausible this duty was neglected out of concern for the safety of Americans.
Journalists have conducted in-person interviews with the ringleaders of the attacks, so why can’t the FBI find them? Why did the FBI wait until last week to send out photos of the suspects?
Why have the 31 Americans who survived the attack been prevented from telling their stories to Congress?
When a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans are killed, we must hold those who were negligent (or worse) to account. But the more urgent reason for finding answers to these questions is because they likely are tied to President Obama’s policy of outreach to Islamists.
Learning the truth about Benghazi may tell us whether the president’s policy is endangering the lives of Americans, and give Congress the leverage to force him to change a disastrous course before it causes a calamity of enormous proportions.
* * * *
The next step should be for the House of Representatives to form a Select Committee, armed with subpoena power, to investigate what was going on before and during the attack on 9/11/2012, and what’s been happening since.
The Oversight Committee, in particular Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-UT, chairman of the terrorism subcommittee, has done fine work. But its members are relatively junior. It lacks the expertise and staff resources to explore fully the many ramifications of this scandal.
The disjointed manner in which it must conduct its hearings – with questioning jumping from Member to Member for periods of 5 minutes or less – makes it all but impossible to get to the bottom of a particular issue with a witness or witnesses, and only the committees which authorize their budgets can put real fear into the bureaucracies of the departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security, and the CIA.
The Benghazi Committee should consist of 12 Republicans and 9 Democrats — the same as the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It should be chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va, because (a) the Select Committee is his idea; (b) he is a very senior Republican, but is not now chairman of a major committee, so he could devote his full attention to this inquiry, and (c) he is well versed in this issue and this type of inquiry, having been instrumental in creating the National Commission on Terrorism in 1998, and the Iraq Study Group in 2005.
Next in seniority should be Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Ca, chairman of the Oversight Committee; Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Cal, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Rep. Ed Royce, R-Ca, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Tex, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich, chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
They should be on the committee because they have expertise and contacts on particular aspects of the scandal, staff resources they can lend to the effort, and because they can put real fear into bureaucrats at State, Defense, Homeland Security and CIA. But because they have important day jobs, we can’t expect them to do much more than show up for hearings and ask a few relevant questions. (An exception, I hope, will be Rep. Rogers, a former Army officer and special agent of the FBI.)
So the heavy lifting on the Benghazi Committee will have to be done by:
*Rep. Chaffetz. He’s sharp, and no Member is more familiar with the subject.
*Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-SC. A junior member of the Oversight Committee, but one of its sharpest tacks, as we saw last week’s hearing. He was a federal prosecutor before being elected to Congress.
*Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Ca. He chairs the Emerging Threats subcommittee on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and had the stones to sneak into Afghanistan with Jack Wheeler during the war with the Soviets. He’s sharp, honest, passionate about the issue, and he’s our bud.
The final three I’d put on the Benghazi Committee are Rep. Michael Grimm, R-NY, Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-OK. They’re all very junior (Grimm’s in his second term; Cotton and Bridenstine are freshmen), but they are among the GOP’s brightest young stars; the fact they are so junior means they’ve nothing more important to do, and they have special expertise.
Grimm is a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a former FBI special agent. Cotton is the only Harvard law grad to become an Army Ranger. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bridenstine is a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. He flew F/A-18 Hornets in Irag and Afghanistan.
The Benghazi Committee should – as the Senate Watergate Committee did — hire a special counsel to direct investigative activities, and to do the initial questioning of witnesses at hearings. The special counsel should be wise in the ways of Washington and very familiar with national security issues. Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn, Minority Counsel on the Watergate Committee, would be a good choice. So would be Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing.
The Benghazi Committee also should have its own media guy (Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, would be a good choice), and one or two full time investigators (one of whom should be a recently retired SEAL or Green Beret with excellent contacts among his former colleagues.
Additional staff can be detailed on a full or part time basis from the staffs of the Oversight, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Homeland Security and Intelligence Committees, and/or from the personal staffs of the Select Committee members.
* * * *
It won’t be bad if journalists note similarities between the Benghazi Committee and the Watergate Committee, but Republicans and conservatives must stay far away from the “I” word. We must learn the truth to illuminate and force changes in a dangerously flawed policy. Democrats and their allies in the news media want desperately to dismiss this as a partisan witch hunt. We must not provide them with ammunition.
There were good reasons to be against the impeachment of President Clinton as a matter of policy. (His conduct with Monica Lewinsky was disgusting and despicable, but not related to his official duties. His lying about it under oath in that deposition in Arkansas is, technically, perjury, but also had little relationship to his official duties.
The proper thing for the special prosecutor to have done was to issue a sealed indictment, to be served the moment Clinton’s successor’s hand came off the Bible.)
And because it was an exercise in futility. (Had the half-eaten remains of small children been found in the Oval Office, Senate Democrats still would not have voted to remove Clinton from office.)
And because it was sure to backfire. (Impeachment proceedings shifted the emphasis from the president’s despicable behavior to GOP overreach. Customarily, the out party gains seats in Congress in the 6th year of a presidential term. In 1998, the GOP lost five seats in the House.)
If there is premature talk of impeachment over Benghazi, Republicans will blow it again. And talk of impeachment is wildly premature. We know for a fact there’s been a coverup. But all the evidence to date indicates is that what is being covered up is negligence – gross negligence — but not a crime like burglary. And much of the negligence being covered up may be the fault of bureaucrats at State, Defense and CIA, not by the president or political appointees.
There is an ugly possibility that would justify – even make mandatory – impeachment proceedings. Kevin Dujan speculates the administration made a deal with Egyptian President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to permit the kidnapping of Ambassador Stevens, who would then be exchanged for the Blind Sheikh. Morsi would get what he seeks most; by arranging for the safe return of Ambassador Stevens, Obama would look like a hero on the eve of the election.
This theory could explain why:
(a) Hillary Clinton asked Stevens to go to Benghazi on 9/11/2012;
(b) Woods, Doherty, and LtCol. Gibson were ordered to stand down;
(c) the person or persons who told Mark Thompson not to mobilize the FEST team thought they knew how long the attack would last;
(d) Stevens – who was asphyxiated in a fire – was taken to a hospital and an attempt made to revive him, and
(e) the administration has prevented the 31 survivors of the attacks on the consulate proper and the annex from telling their stories to members of Congress.
But as of now, this is all just speculation. There should be no talk of impeachment unless and until proof of this (or something equally sinister, such as the speculation about a Uriah Mission in Afghanistan) is unearthed.
Hearings by the Benghazi Committee during the August recess could make for riveting television the broadcast nets couldn’t ignore. The truth about Benghazi, coupled with the IRS scandal and the problems sure to arise from implementation of Obamacare could make the 2014 midterms as bad for the Dems as the 1974 midterms were for the GOP. But only if we keep our focus on finding the truth.
Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
