Kabukimeister Darrell Issa isn't done with Benghazi yet.
Kabukimeister Darrell Issa isn't done with Benghazi yet.
Back in 2011, Darrell Issa, newly ensconced as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee,
let the cat out of the bag:
In an interview with the [Washington] Times, Issa said the Democratic National Committee may have violated campaign laws by filming a fundraising video starring President Barack Obama at the White House. Issa called on the Justice Department to investigate and said committee hearings would be forthcoming.
“It’ll be good theater,” Issa told the Times.
And that, plus scratching around to find
something to hang around the neck of Hillary Clinton, is what the Benghazi hearing at the committee was all about Wednesday. The pretense was, of course, that this is all about national security and a dastardly Obama campaign electioneering scheme followed by a coverup.
The problem, to mix entertainment media for a moment, is that the trailer for the hearing, as is so often the case, promised to deliver a lot more than we ultimately got.
Days ahead of time we'd been told the then-deputy chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, Gregory Hicks, would blow the whistle on the allegedly feckless response to the attack. Foxaganda, CBS and other media reported Hicks was furious that no jet fighters had been scrambled to fly over Benghazi to make the attackers of the U.S. consulate and CIA Annex there wet their pants and flee. And he also was incensed about the military's order to Special Operations soldiers to "stand down" rather than get on a flight from Tripoli to Benghazi where they would reinforce the CIA operatives and Libyan militia fighting the attackers.
But well before he sat down in front the microphone, Hicks knew the answer for why the jets hadn't been scrambled: They couldn't have gotten there in time, something examined in full by the Accountability Review Board's independent report.
As for the Special Operations guys, they weren't some fully outfitted Delta Force unit ready to obliterate the men who had dared attack American facilities. They were just four guys in all, no doubt brave and eager to go. But they weren't combat ready, being armed solely with 9mm sidearms. If they had left on the plane for Benghazi, they would have arrived too late to save any lives.
It's impossible to believe that Hicks wasn't, eight months after the fact, fully aware of the reason those four weren't sent. Please continue reading below the fold for more on Benghazi.
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