Remember the presidential campaigns last fall when Republicans
thought the issue that would sink Obama was the Benghazi screw up and an alleged cover up on the scale of Watergate? The US Ambassador to Libya and 3 other
Americans were killed while visiting a dangerous part of Libya. As an issue, It did not enter into the electorate’s psyche
in 2012. The same fate is likely to meet
this current rehash in 2016.
If we learned anything in 2012 foreign policy mess ups that are water under
the bridge rarely become a determining issue in a campaign .The
economy, debt, , tax policy class
warfare, and immigration issues drowned
out the Benghazi tragedy as factors determining the outcome and no doubt some of
these issues and issues yet unknown will dominate 2016, too, if Hillary Clinton
or anyone else is standard bearers of
the Democratic party..
As much as some in
the GOP hope it would be, Benghazi is no Watergate, a cover up which did impact future elections and brought down Pres. Nixon. Watergate covered up a crime sparked by political dirty tricks, …a
break in at the Democratic headquarters.
At worst,
the Benghazi talking points could indeed have been spun to some
political purpose to protect the President’s posterior at the end of a
re-election campaign . At best, they walked back
Pres. Obama earlier
attribution of terrorist involvement in the Benghazi attack
before the actual identification of the perpetrators were known.
Those talking points
, delivered days after the event by UN
Ambassador Susan Rice, positioned the at cause as part of wide spread demonstrations
across the Muslim world instead of an attack by militants. That is not
the first time a high US diplomatic official
repeated points spun by others . Secretary
of State Colin Powell was fed
bogus “proof” of Iraq’s WMD which he repeated at the UN. While it did gather international support for conducting the longest war in US
history, it did not result in George W
Bush’s election loss or in talk of impeachment proceedings. The Benghazi spin had
no comparable impact on shaping US policy.
The GOP controlled
House of Representative committee has almost
exclusively focused on finding proof that Benghazi was a covered up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This stinks to high heaven as a
witch hunt concocted to wound Clinton enough to keep her from being a winning candidate for president in 2016 . If the House committee really cared about preventing such future tragedies, they should instead be
examining whether all diplomats in instable areas need more security or
an rescue squad should be kept on call
nearby when diplomats venture from their green zone, whether the risk assessment was faulty, or whether there was adequate funding for our
diplomats’ security.
The House hearing so far has disclosed substantially little more than we had learned running up to
the 2012 election or a subsequent
investigative report . As Ambassador
Thomas Pickering, who chaired the
independent investigative report,
commented on Candy Crowley’s CNN show Sunday , he found that Clinton did
not make decisions on the actual events and that the military commanders
responsible confirmed that logistics
made rescue impossible. Pickering further commented that
he saw nothing new coming from the committee hearings regarding conduct of the
actual Benghazi event.
New information that
did emerge so far concerns post attack actions.
A committee of government agencies, including representatives of the
CIA, White House and State
Department, revised Rice’s talking points twelve times . The
State Department reassigned the second in command of the Libyan embassy for blowing the whistle without a minder present contrary to personnel policy . That
action did not contribute to proving cover up since the cat was already out of the
bag.
For more, visit www.Mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com
(This is a version of my column that will appear in the Sky Hi Daily News this week)
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