Just a reminder: Congress not done investigating Benghazi

Nor should they be.  Four Americans died, at least two of which might have been rescued had prompt action taken place when the attack occurred — and none of them would have been dead had the Obama administration paid attention to the increased warnings from our own staff and our allies around the region.  And let’s not forget the fact that this White House told a fable about a YouTube video for nearly two weeks, when enough data was almost immediately present to seriously undermine that story from the beginning.

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Saxby Chambliss isn’t forgettting, not just because an election has passed:

While Republican attacks on Obama over the handling of the assault, which killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, became a major part of the campaign in recent weeks, an investigator said on Wednesday the inquiry was never related to the election.

With majority control of the House of Representatives, Obama’s Republican critics will continue to wield broad investigative powers, including the ability to subpoena evidence and testimony from administration officials.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which held a contentious hearing in early October on the Benghazi attacks, will continue its investigation, a spokesman for the committee said.

The Republican vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, said his panel would proceed with its review of the Benghazi attacks.

Investigators seek to understand “how terrorists were able to successfully breach our diplomatic facilities, why the administration obscured the role of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists in its presentations to the American people, and why there appears to be a lack of urgency in finding and holding accountable those responsible for the deaths of four Americans,” Chambliss wrote in an email to Reuters. He also said the investigation was never related to the campaign.

In fact, the Senate investigation couldn’t possibly have had a direct impact on the election.  It won’t even start until November 15th, when the 112th Congress gets back into session for its lame-duck return to Washington.  The House Oversight probe began last month, but that ‘s because it was just a few weeks after the Obama administration got forced into changing its story more than once about the nature of the attack, its knowledge of the security issues at the consulate, and who knew what when during the attack itself.

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Speaking of the YouTube video that the Obama administration insisted was the cause of the attack, even to the extent of Obama speaking of it at the United Nations, the producer of the film will spend the next year in prison for “probation violations” that got mysteriously discovered just when the White House needed a scapegoat.  Coincidence?  Hey, why not?

The Cerritos man behind an anti-Muslim film that roiled the Middle East was sentenced Wednesday to a year in prison for violating his probation stemming from a 2010 bank fraud conviction by lying about his identity.

U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder immediately sentenced Mark Basseley Youssef after he admitted to four of the eight violations that had been alleged, including obtaining a fraudulent California driver’s license.

None of the violations had to do with the content of “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that depicts Mohammad as a religious fraud, pedophile and a womanizer. The movie sparked violence in Libya and other parts of the Middle East, killing dozens.

Youssef, 55, was arrested in late September, just weeks after he went into hiding when deadly violence erupted in Libya and other parts of the Middle East in response to the movie.

If he violated his probation — and he apparently admits to doing so — then he should go back to prison. But no one would have known about his probation violations had the government not needed to make a high-profile arrest of the man who made the movie for which this administration tried to blame the “spontaneous demonstration” that never existed into an unplanned attack that clearly wasn’t.  While we’re asking questions about the administration’s failure to properly protect our Benghazi consulate, come to its aid while under attack, and then insisting that they had “no evidence” that it was a planned terrorist attack when they had evidence in the first hours of the attack that it was, perhaps we should also ask questions about who ordered the sudden high-profile investigation into Nakoula’s probation status — and why.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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