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.
Foxaganda viewers might have confused those Special Operations guys with the ones discussed by an anonymous Special Operations fellow the channel interviewed on April 30. With his identity concealed, he said that there had been a 40-man Special Operations CIF [Commander's in-Extremis Force] unit in Europe at the time of the attack and they that could have made it to Benghazi in time to make a difference. His view was that the Americans in Benghazi had been left to fend for themselves.
But in Foreign Policy magazine on May 2, Billy Birdwell, formerly a Marine Corps infantry officer, laid out why this was bogus:
If the Commander of European Command coordinated with his counterpart in Africa Command as soon as the National Command Center informed General Dempsey at 2230 and they diverted a C-17 to Croatia in anticipation, it is still highly unlikely the plane would have been on the ground in Croatia before midnight; it takes an hour to fly to Croatia from Germany and a crew would have had to have gotten ready, briefed, examined contingency plans, and fueled the plane. From Zaton Military Airport in Croatia, it is over 900 miles to Benghazi, which would have taken approximately two hours in a C-17 cargo plane. Zaton is on the coast and it more likely the CIF would have flown out of Udbina Airport, but this is a best case scenario.
Assuming the Air Force was willing to land a C-17 at the Benghazi airport with an unknown security situation, once on the ground, the 40-man CIF would have then had to have moved to the annex which was 30 km away. Moving such a far distance would have required vehicles. 40 operators can move in 8 HMMWVs, which can fit into one C-17. However, did they have the vehicles with them? Did they have everything on the training mission that they needed to go into combat? If not, it would have taken more time for someone to get everything ready. Maybe the man of mystery is creative and planned on renting cars from Avis (yes, Avis has a location at the Benghazi Airport) and using stealth to get to the consulate in a move akin to the French using taxis to get to the front in order to stop the Kaiser's hordes back in 1914. Mystery man is really a cook who has never been on a deployment. Strike two. [...]
Even if the CIF was on ready 5 (fully armed, sitting in the aircraft with pilots at the controls) in Sigonella (the closest European base to Benghazi) with advanced warning of an attack but unsure of the time, and they launched at 2232 on only-in-Hollywood orders from someone other than the president, they would not have been able to do anything about Stevens and Smith's deaths, nor stopped the mortar rounds. Strike three.
Congressman Issa made it clear when he ushered the hearing to a close on Wednesday that this theatrical production has an infinite number of acts ahead of it, no matter how rotten the script.