Republican lawmakers have been trying nearly a year to get to the bottom of what went wrong in Benghazi. After being stonewalled for months by a State Departmentunwilling to make Benghazi witnesses available, they are finally having some luck with the CIA.
CIA Director John Brennan now says his agency will make survivors of the Benghazi attack available to talk to lawmakers, in a possible breakthrough for members of Congress investigating the strike.
Brennan made his comments in a three-page response to a letter sent to him by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
The Sept. 3 letter comes as five separate House committees are investigating the attack and demanding why no one has been held responsible or brought to justice.
“You cannot have an attack on the mission, 12 months later identified a good number of the participants, and have absolutely no consequences for the taking of American lives,” Rogers said.
Brennan’s comments were in response to an Aug. 2 letter from Rogers who asked the head of the CIA a series of question on Benghazi including whether survivors were told not to come forward and share their first-hand account of what happened that bloody night in Libya.
“To the best of my knowledge after inquiry, I am unaware of any such officer who has been threatened with reprisals,” Brennan wrote. “Information identifying those officers is classified. We will work with the Committee to provide the relevant information via classified channels.
Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee announced a full committee hearing on Benghazi to be held, next week with the leaders of the Accountability Review Board that investigated the Benghazi attack.
“Reviews of the Benghazi Attacks and Unanswered Questions”
Sept. 19, 9:30 am. In 2154 Rayburn House Office Building
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) delivered another excellent speech today at the Heritage Foundation’s 4th Annual Jesse Helms Lecture Series. His focus on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 was foreign policy.
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out Wednesday morning
Simple, no?
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
On 11/14/2001 – President Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero – bullhorn in hand – and ad-libbed a speech that has gone down in history as one of America’s greatest. It was great because it was sincere. It came from his heart, and the people around him – liberals, conservatives, libertarians, “lofos” – they weren’t thinking about politics at that moment – their emotions were raw and enormity of what had just happened obviously overrode petty politics. Political ideology for a few precious weeks was put on the backburner and the country was united. President Bush did not waste that moment. In fact, he would never throughout his entire presidency ever use political ideology to divide Americans. I don’t think the thought would even have occurred to him.
Contrast that with what we have now.
We have a president who can’t even get in front of the American people when he’s asking for our support without insulting a good half of us. He’s just congenitally unable to say one gracious thing about his political “enemies” ever, due to his Alinsky training to always “target”, “isolate”, ridicule” and “otherize” his opponents. Every speech he gives is an opportunity to community organize – every speech he gives – he must prop himself up while underscoring the inhumanity of “the other side.”
He did it again in the speech he gave last night to argue the case before the nation for a “limited” but “muscular” strike against Syria. I barely listened. The sound of his dumb, disingenuous voice sets my teeth on edge, and I knew he would have nothing groundbreaking to say.
Come witness the Master Diplomat use his silvery tongue to insult the very people whose support he’s asking for.
In a speech that had been good, for an Obama speech, avoiding his usual gassy nothingness in favor of tangible nouns and clear verbs of the sort he apparently was taught were poor form in college, Obama chose to drop this little insult:
And so to my friends on the right, I ask you to reconcile your commitment to America’s military might with a failure to act when a cause is so plainly just. To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.
Note that Obama’s “friends on the left” believe in freedom and dignity in all people. People on the right don’t, apparently.
What do people on the right believe in? “Military might.” Pure force. Note that he decouples military might from any moral purpose — he doesn’t say “your commitment to keeping the nation safe” or “your commitment to a patriotic defense of America.” No, such moral approval is stripped away so that Obama can speak neutrally of the one thing Obama thinks conservatives care about, naked martial power.
We share this love of naked martial power, shorn of any moral or ethical purpose, with some of his other friends on the right, such as Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.
His friends on the left, see, support the values which might be attained by exertion of raw military might, such as “freedom and dignity of all people,” but his friends on the right are just about having the biggest bombs and stuff.
Even when he’s supposedly “reaching out to us,” this Master Diplomat and Coolly Brilliant Poet-Warrior steadfastly refuses to pay the right the slightest degree of respect.
And this man represents us in our dealings with foreign actors. Imagine how his similar haughtiness plays overseas. Imagine how it’s already played for five years, and how it will play for another three.
Smart diplomacy, huh?
Hey wingers, get behind this war. It’s got the three things you Bitter Clingers can’t get enough of– Guns, Spooky Religious Nonsense, and Killing Foreign People.
Now, Friends on the Left, you can get behind it for the true moral purposes which flow from reason and higher functions of the brain.
Read the whole thing – Ace was just winding up, there. It gets better and he includes video aids featuring David Bowie and The Planet of the Apes to help illustrate his point.
You know what’s a scary thought? Imagining our current president standing in the rubble at Ground Zero with a bullhorn in hand, there ostensibly to soothe a nation united in its horror of what just happened, but unable to resist the temptation to tweak his political enemies and divide the nation one more time.
Ugh.
I miss W.
SEE ALSO
Andy at AoSHQ picks up on the hypocrisy of Barack “Stop the BAIPA” Obama feigning outrage and horror at the sight of children writhing in pain on a cold hospital floor : The Balls On This F’n Guy
In an interview on Fox and Friends, this morning – the 12th anniversary of 9/11 – “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani said that in regards to Syria, the president is acting in the opposite way that a leader should act.
“We’re going to negotiate with Russia and Syria and Syria is going to let us inspect the chemical weapons they’ve always denied having. Something in that picture is very strange”, Giuliani said.
He went on to say that what worries him is that the president’s vacillation on Syria “makes the US look weak, and it cedes leadership to the Russians. I don’t get that.”
Asked about his thoughts on the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack one year later, Giuliani said, “I have real questions about whether it ever had to happen in the first place, I have a significant amount of questions about the failure to give security to that area for six months before when it was crying out for more security, I have significant questions about the actions of the United States government, that night – including our president – I still don’t know where he was, that night. and why we immediately didn’t deploy as much force as possible to the area, we could have always called it back, and I have very significant questions about why everyone has been kept silent for so long, and now all of a sudden after a year of preparation, they’re all going to speak…so I think the people who died that night, and their families deserve a lot better than the way in which this government has treated them.”
He called 9/11/2001 “the most complicated day of my life, and probably in the history of my city – it was the worst day, it was the greatest day – some of the greatest losses and some of the greatest acts of heroism…and I think ultimately, you look 12 years later – the city is a lot stronger than it was before.”
Colorado Senate President John Morse of Colorado Springs Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo conceded their seats Tuesday night in the state’s first ever recall election.
He and Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo faced recall elections because of their support for the stricter gun laws passed last spring.
Two billionaires — New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Eli Broad of Los Angeles — gave a combined $600,000 to fight the recalls, while labor unions, Planned Parenthood Votes and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee have also pitched in.
Michelle Malkin wrote that “the significance of this historic and unprecedented battle cannot be overstated.”
As I’ve reported over the past several months, the effort was an astonishing grass-roots effort in which ordinary citizens gathered more than 16,000 signatures for a recall petition in Colorado Springs over a matter of weeks. The role of women (Coloradans Laura Carno, Kelly Maher, Kim Weeks were among the leading lights) in pushing back against false gun-grabbing narratives and smears was invaluable. The birth control fear-mongering failed. The use of social media to organize echoes other successful Tea Party efforts.
he National Rifle Association, which helped fund the recall effort, has issued a statement.
A historic grassroots effort by voters in Colorado’s Senate District 11 has resulted in the recall of Colorado Senate President John Morse (D). The people of Colorado Springs sent a clear message to the Senate leader that his primary job was to defend their rights and freedoms and that he is ultimately accountable to them – his constituents, and not to the dollars or social engineering agendas of anti-gun billionaires.
Recall proceedings began earlier this year after Sen. Morse pushed through anti-gun legislation that restricted the ability of law-abiding residents to exercise their Second Amendment rights, including their inherent right to self-defense. This effort was driven by concerned citizens, who made phone calls, knocked on doors, and worked diligently to turn voters out in this historic effort.
The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) is proud to have stood with the men and women in Colorado who sent a clear message that their Second Amendment rights are not for sale. We look forward to working with NRA-PVF “A” rated and endorsed Bernie Herpin (R) from Colorado Springs.
Nice Deb 