The four whistleblowing witnesses scheduled to
testify to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are said
to be eager to tell a story far different from the various accounts, all
confused and all contradictory, peddled by the Obama administration.
Someone at the White House should have remembered that old Washington
chestnut, as true now as ever, that “it’s not the crime, it’s the
cover-up.” Smarter men than even Barack Obama, wiser women than even
Hillary Clinton, have paid dearly for lapses of convenient memory. (The
crime was bad, too.)
Mark Thompson, the ex-Marine who is now the deputy co-ordinator for
operations in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau, is
expected to testify that Mrs. Clinton tried to cut the bureau out of the
loop when Ambassador Chris Stevens was pleading for help from Benghazi.
The administration was preoccupied in the midst of a presidential
re-election campaign and cries for help at a consulate surrounded by
radical Islamic killers was not something the White House thought was
fit to hear. The war on terror was over.
Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, the pugnacious Joe diGenova, says his client
has been subjected to threats and intimidation from his superiors at the
State Department, but they all deny that and insist that everything
everybody else says are fibs, stretchers and “full growed lies.” That’s
what superiors always say (and once in a while they’re right). Mrs.
Clinton convened an internal review board to look into such allegations
and several coats of whitewash were duly applied, but the facts are
still showing through. “You should have seen what [Mrs. Clinton] tried
to do to us that night,” a second official in the State Department’s
counterterrorism bureau told his colleagues in October.
Emails and documents from the State Department, the CIA and the
National Security Administration, published in the current edition of
the Weekly Standard magazine, reveal that officials of those agencies
tried to delete all references to the involvement of al Qaeda in the
talking points, and identify Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the State
Department, as complaining that the revisions did not go far enough to
satisfy “my building’s leadership.” The leadership of the “building,”
and no doubt the people in it, wanted all evidence of al Qaeda
involvement, not only in the attack on Americans in Benghazi, but in
attacks on other Western target, removed from the “talking points.”
Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the Republican who will chair this
week’s hearings, told “Face the Nation” interviewers Sunday that both
the CIA and Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya when the
ambassador and three colleagues were slain, knew at once that the
Americans were under attack, not under protest.
Mr. Hicks watched the Sunday talk shows after the attacks on the
consulate in September and was astonished by the claims of Susan Rice,
the ambassador to the U.N., in five appearances, contradicting the
emphatic assertion of the president of Libya that he had “no doubt” that
the attacks were the work of terrorists, not mere community activists.
“The net impact of what has transpired is that the spokeswoman of the
most powerful country in the world has basically said the president of
Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My jaw
hit the floor as I watched this,” he told investigators for the House
committee. “I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, [as
I was] on that day.” He is expected to repeat that to the committee
this week.
All politicians are interested most in what happens to them. It’s the
bipartisan reality of how things work. But the Obama White House,
perhaps unique in our times, plays partisan politics 24/7. Bubba, for
all his sins, frequently interrupted politics for a roll in the White
House hay and gave us a little comic relief. If Hillary isn’t paying
attention to the politics of 2016 she isn’t the player we all think she
is.
It was easy for her to take the long view when Chris Stevens was
pleading for his life, but she may pay yet for forgetting the Bard’s
warning in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) that “murder, though it have no
tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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