According to the New York Times, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released its final report today. The result? No new evidence of anything. Two years (more than the investigations into 9/11, the JFK assassination, the attack Pearl Harbor, and the failed response to Katrina), more than seven million dollars, and no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing.
The purpose of the committee was clear, especially after House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) clarified them:
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Mr. McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”
In other words, a witch hunt.
McCarthy’s comments about Hillary’s numbers are no longer accurate AND they improved as I recall following her own appearance in front of said committee. Good job, House Republicans!
… we’ll learn the CIA role is the real story here, and why the administration was being coy.
“Outposts they could not protect” — like an embassy? There have been some suggestions that the CIA has infiltrated our diplomatic corps, endangering all of them. In short, one rumor has it that Stephens was CIA.
I don’t know, I can’t prove anything — but I think cutting through CIA meshugas would answer a lot of the questions.
Indeed, that’s the sort of thing that a real investigation might have revealed.
Of course, that’s not what the GOP had in mind, and that’s not what we got.
Ambassadors have to go through the advice and consent process. Are you suggesting CIA recruited Stephens to work for them at cross-purposes with the State Department? If I’m interpreting your comment correctly I’m not at all comfortable with the implications.
No one knows if he was CIA. Hopefully he wasn’t, but there has been speculation that he was.
It is true that CIA, historically, has little respect for the rules jconway lists in his comment below. It is also true that (despite massive failures) the CIA is larger and more powerful than ever.
That would be a massive scandal worthy of its own investigation. There will always be some clandestine officers attached to embassies, of any government, but typically they are lower level and used for great power politics intelligence.
The biggest issue with CIA, and DOD in general, is that they are still calibrated to fight the Cold War. CIA was never meant to be operating forward bases in combat zones, but it is now with the drone program. So I get the concern, but I see little rational benefit for an ambassador level position to be clandestine.
It would violate the intent of diplomatic immunity, and they are far too conspicuous of a role to gather any useful intelligence. John Kerry won’t be sneaking around the Iran nuclear reactors, because everyone knows who he is.
Now could an economic atache in China get access to some classified material and send it back home? Absolutely, and that’s where CIA can and does plant covert intelligence operatives pretending to be Foreign Service as their cover. But they aren’t real foreign service. Stephens would never have had the skill set or training for this kind of work, and his high profile would have prevented him from being useful. His entire career would have had to have been predicated on that lie, and it’s unlikely you get to Ambassador level status in the Foreign Service without decades of real diplomatic work that a covert agent wouldn’t have the time or skill set to achieve.
There is a strict line of demarcation between the diplomatic corps and the clandestine services precisely for this reason. Some Lower level Foreign Service officers or spouses may be employed as clandestine (see Valerie Plame) but a Level 1 Danger posting wouldn’t have that kind of assignment.
Doing so is a major breach of protocol that makes a mockery of diplomatic immunity and the Geneva Conventions. Plus who was he spying on? ISIL? It does a real disservice to a career diplomat to suggest that. The real scandal is how much diplomatic security was cut in the sequestration and how little we invest in it today. You can’t always call in the Marines, and diplomatic security is a particular specialty that is largely outsourced to private contractors but could be done in house if we hadn’t cut the programs.
The Ambassador of Panama under Bush told me that he had been mistaken for CIA and detained by the KGB when he was an economic attaché in the 80’s, and it’s because he looked like the guy who was the actual clandestine officer. Generally the intelligence agencies know who the others spies are. ISIL doesn’t have counter Intel, they just knew they could kill an ambassador and get away with it. And they did, and will continue to do so since Libya is a quagmire of our own creation. The real scandal is that we didn’t have a post war plan, and failed to learn the lessons of Iraq.
…it strikes me that it seems the committee majority actually pulled their punches a bit regarding Hillary Clinton. Trey Gowdy is telling anyone who will listen that this is not about one person and that people should draw their own conclusions. I expected him to be shouting from the rooftops about how this report so clearly shows that Clinton shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House.
Tip O’Neil led an investigation into the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut, he could’ve used it to embarrass the Reagan administration and score points for the Democratic ticket in the upcoming election year. He didn’t. The committee consulted experts, got them to testify, identified the intelligence and security failures that led to the mistake, removed the incompetents who allowed it to happen and ended with bipartisan recommendations implemented by Reagan. Other than the 1998 bombings and Benghazi, embassy attacks are rare and the casualties have been substantially lower than that attack.
The Obama administration did have a major fumble on Benghazi. The communications was poor, cabinet members weren’t on the same page, and the system to identify threats and post additional security was cumbersome and impeded by outdated technology and lack of available resources.
Have the intelligence failures been addressed and recommendations implemented? Has the security channel been modernized? Or the threat recognition response? I don’t think anything was accomplished to prevent the next one, and that’s the real tragedy of this partisan farce.