House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has been whining about the new select committee Speaker John Boehner has formed to investigate the September 11, 2012 attacks on the Benghazi consulate in Libya the resulted in the deaths of 4 Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first American ambassador to be killed since the Carter administration.
Pelosi has issued all sorts of demands about what role Democrats should play on the committee and Democrats have hinted if their demands are not met, they will boycott the hearings altogether.
Here’s what I say to about that: Screw Nancy Pelosi. And screw anybody else who casually dismisses this as nothing but a partisan witch hunt.
Contrary to the partisan blubbering coming from Democrats, their cohorts in the mainstream media and their media flaks such as Media Matters (these cretins claim the events surrounding Benghazi are nothing but a “hoax.”) , a majority of the American people continue to believe the Obama administration has been untruthful and want investigations to continue.
Those defending the administration say there have been enough hearings and millions of pages of documents have been provided. That is true, but there are three central areas for which there still are not any coherent answers.
1. What extent was the dereliction of duty by officials when Chris Stevens was pleading for more security? Why were those pleas ignored? Democrats pitched a lame attempt to blame the GOP for budget cuts to the embassies as the culprit but the Washington Post blew that nonsense to smithereens.
Trey Gowdy has to be sure this hearing is run like a court case and not a forum for political grandstanding. He was prosecutor for over 15 years prior to running for Congress. He needs to bring that mentality to these hearings and demand answers.
2. What was going on during the attacks? What was President Obama doing? What was he being told? Charles Krauthammer has a great rundown on what needs to be discussed:
What happened during the eight hours of the Benghazi attack, at the end of which the last two Americans (of four) were killed by mortar fire? Where was the commander in chief and where was the responsible Cabinet secretary, Hillary Clinton? What did they do?
The White House acts as if these are, alternatively, either state secrets or of no importance.
For President Obama, we have three data points. At 5 p.m. EDT, he is briefed on the attack by the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
At around 8 p.m., Obama spends an hour on the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu to tamp down a breaking, politically injurious story that Obama had snubbed the Israeli prime minister. The White House then issues a readout saying the two leaders had agreed there had been no snub.
So the White House is engaged in campaign damage control literally in the middle of the Benghazi events – at a time when Ambassador Chris Stevens is still missing and the final firefight that killed two other Americans is still three hours away.
We’ve just learned that Obama was not in the Situation Room that night. Then where, doing what?
We know, finally, that at 10 p.m. Obama called Clinton to get an update. What did they discuss, decide, order?
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has pointed out, a half-hour later, State issued a statement deploring the video, setting the premise for the video excuse. Were Obama and Clinton working on a cover story – even before Glen Doherty had joined Tyrone Woods on the roof of the CIA annex where they were to die minutes later?
Yes, that’s speculation. Well, then, give us facts. After all, the White House provided a cascade of hagiographic facts about Obama’s involvement in the Osama bin Laden raid.
Yet regarding Benghazi – the most serious operational challenge of his presidency – he is nowhere to be seen.
3. Finally, we need to know what happened after.
We know for a fact the administration pawned off a big fat lie about the video on the public. The bogus PR push for several weeks was put out there by lower level administration officials as well as Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State and President Clinton. If you need any reminder of just how much emphasis they put on the video, go back to this video I helped work on with Ben Howe for Heritage over a year ago:
There was obviously a coordinated campaign to shield the President from the political fallout that would come from an attack by Al Qaeda on the anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks, particularly after he had been bragging that Al Qaeda was “on the run.”
The time has come to finally get to the bottom of what happened. The truth needs to come out and these hearings are the best — but also the last — chance for somebody to be held accountable – not only for the failures leading up to the attacks but also for the coverup that occurred after.