The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (“HPSCI”)— chaired by vocal and frequent Obama critic, Republican Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan—has de-classified and released its findings on what they conclude actually took place in the attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi.
The key findings can be summed up as follows:
- The committee found that, contrary to what has been told the public by opponents of the administration, the U.S. did not fail to send assistance to those under siege at Benghazi;
- The supposed ‘stand down orders’ issued to the CIA security team at the annex never happened;
- No intelligence failure occurred with respect to the attack;
- The CIA was not running weapons out of Benghazi to American allies in Syria;
- While the controversial explanation first offered by Ambassador Susan Rice on a Sunday morning talk show were incorrect, there was no evidence of a purposeful and intentional attempt by the White House to cover-up the reasons behind the events surrounding the attack; and
- No CIA officers, officials, etc. involved with Benghazi were threatened, given polygraph tests or, in any way, pressured to avoid honest testimony about the Benghazi attack and the government’s follow up to that attack.
While much of what is contained in the report goes a long way in absolving the Obama Administration from involvement in some nefarious cover-up designed to deflect negative public opinion before the presidential election in 2012—the very heart of the message Republicans worked hard to sell to the public leading up to the 2012 election—other elements of the report present conclusions that many find highly suspect.
While there will be no shortage of analysts who will criticize the report—some of that criticism being justified—if you look carefully at what the Rogers committee published, you will see that the true lessons of Benghazi can be found in what the report works hard to obscure.
That truth?
Too many Republicans and Obama critics moved far too quickly to use the tragedy as a political opportunity when they (a) didn’t really know what was going on in Benghazi and the U.S. interests involved; (b) either did not understand, or did not care, that they were also condemning their own leadership who very much did know what was going on having approved the operations,and (c) did not really care if the road they were choosing to travel for political gain put an important CIA covert operation to benefit the country at risk.
Well placed sources long ago disclosed to me that there were eight members of the Senate and House of Representatives who knew precisely what we were doing in Benghazi—conducting a covert, ‘off-the-books’ action designed to assist in getting weapons collected in Libya to our Syrian allies who were combatting the Assad regime. Not only did these eight people know what we were doing, they had approved our going forward in that mission.
Here is that “gang of eight”:
John Boehner (R), Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D), House Minority Leader, Harry Reid (D), Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R), Senate Minority Leader, Mike Rogers (R), Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,Dianne Feinstein (D), Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,Dutch Ruppersberger (D), Ranking Minority Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Saxby Chambliss (R), Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
As you can see, there are four Democrats and four very important Republicans who were read in on this operation and had given their approval.
As a result, there has always been sensitivity on the part of the Republican leadership when it comes to Benghazi. While they can certainly appreciate the political gains that could come with using the attack as a powerful club to be used against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they know that a true finding of all the facts would reveal that these leaders are each up to their necks in the Benghazi story.
This reality shows up in spades in the HPSCI report.
Let's begin with the finding of the Intelligence Committee that the CIA was not involved in “collecting or shipping arms to Syria.”
This statement may, in fact, be technically true—but incredibly misleading all the same.
For one thing, those of us who believe that the business of the CIA annex in Benghazi was all about playing a role in delivering arms to our Syrian allies—and I have little question that is precisely what was going on—the report is likely correct when it states that we were not directly shipping arms to Syria. For starters, any arms that were passing through the CIA annex in Benghazi were being shipped to Turkey, with their ultimate destination being Syria.
Further, these transactions—and as sources will confirm this week through a variety of television and radio appearances, continue to this day—were structured in a way that placed the United States in a ‘supervisory’ or oversight role while the British, Turks and Arabs were—and are— the ones actually doing the shipping. By setting the operation up in such a manner, the CIA would, under the law, succeed in greatly narrowing the circle of people in government who had to be informed of the action.
This being the case, it is fair to say that the Rogers report is accurate on this point, if purposefully misleading.
But then, one can understand the obligation Chairman Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking Democrat on the committee and one of the ‘gang of eight’, would feel not only to continue to protect the secrecy of the operation for the benefit of the nation but also to benefit their own self-interest in the effort to keep secret that they were each aware and involved in the Benghazi mission long before the attack of September 11, 2012.
Then there is the report’s discussion of what Ambassador Susan Rice had to say in her Sunday talk show appearance that set off the firestorm.
The report notes that while Rice had the story wrong, it was not intentional. Rather, it was the result of the many different sources reporting very different explanations of what had occurred in Benghazi. As you may recall, the administration, including then Ambassador Rice, did set the record straight on this as more verifiable intelligence became available.
What the report does not want to say is that Rice was certainly not going to appear on television and inform the world that we were engaged in a CIA covert operation sending weapons into Syria. What Rogers is doing is taking the administration off the hook,as well he should, for doing what they should have been doing— and that is not telling the world of our covert operations.
No matter how strong a critic you have been of the Benghazi scenario, do you really think that Ambassador Rice, or anyone else, should be broadcasting what our CIA is doing in support of our national interests?
The one place where I am somewhat perplexed by the report is the suggestion that there had been no stand-down orders given to the CIA security team that was anxious to move from the annex to the embassy to help defend those who were under attack.
Having spent time in conversation with a few of the members of that security team—each of whom has restated time and time again that they were, indeed, given stand-down orders keeping them from going to the aid of their friends–I’m inclined to believe that the report is misstating this detail in an effort to put out one more fire so that they can put this entire matter behind them.
Clearly, the overriding concern here was the protection of what the CIA annex was really up to and the importance of keeping the secret from being exposed as a result of the attack.
The moral to this story?
When politicians cannot resist using a scenario to score political gains (Are you listening Senator Graham?), they put the national interests at risk and all for their own personal political benefit.
Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or something else, you have to agree that this is truly shameful.
What we see in the HPCSI report is an effort by the Intelligence Committee to protect the interests of the CIA and get us past a fiasco that put the nation’s interests at risk because of political greed. The longer Benghazi survives as a story, the greater the risk that the CIA activities in Benghazi will be exposed. The longer Benghazi survives as a political narrative, the greater the risk that the involvement of Republican and Democratic leadership—including Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger themselves—will be exposed.
Chairman Rogers wants this all to be over.
The problem is, Benghazi will not go away as the House Special Benghazi Committee, under the direction of Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C. ), does not intend to allow it to go away. In fact, that committee is only getting started and will likely dominate the news as we head into the new year and a new Congress.
This being the case, you have to ask why Speaker Boehner, with reason to fear from too much information about Benghazi coming out, would allow this committee to go forward.
Note that it took Boehner quite a long time to allow the formation of the Gowdy committee. Indeed, my sources indicate that he greatly resisted its formation until the political pressure was so great that he had no choice.
So, what will the Gowdy committee do to keep the political benefits of Benghazi paying off while protecting the leadership?
They will go to the one place where the House Intelligence Committee does not go—the involvement of the State Department and its leader during the Benghazi attack, Secretary Hillary Clinton. Remember that the Intelligence Committee’s report speaks only to the actions of the intelligence community—not the actions of the State Department.
Accordingly, the Select Committee on Benghazi will focus on one thing and one thing only—making Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency in 2016, look like the bad guy in the Benghazi tragedy, despite the fact that she clearly had little to no involvement in what was a CIA controlled matter.
This leads me to a word of warning to Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell:
You gentlemen have been pretty lucky in this so far as nobody has focused on your involvement. If you use the Gowdy committee to target Hillary Clinton, you should not imagine for one minute that the Clinton forces will not fight back.
And when they do, the final victims of Benghazi may well be you.
Contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
