Rep. Trey Gowdy was on Fox News on Saturday and let slip a tease for what he terms “explosive” hearings on the September 11, 2012 attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, appearing on Fox News on Saturday afternoon, promised that “explosive” congressional hearings over the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, are “coming quickly.”
“There are more Benghazi hearings coming; I think they’re going to be explosive,” Mr. Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Fox’s Uma Pemmaraju.
Mr. Gowdy wasn’t able to give out too many details, but he hinted that the public for the first time might hear from witnesses to the terror attack that left four Americans dead.
“I am bound by certain measures of confidentiality, but I would tell you that you are getting very warm,” Mr. Gowdy said when asked by Ms. Pemmaraju whether witnesses could be coming forward. “[The hearings] are coming sooner rather than later.”
He said several questions need to be answered, such as why there was a failure of security, “what happened during the siege itself and why aid was not sent,” and whether the testimony by Susan E. Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was “grossly negligent or whether it was intentionally misleading.”
Mr. Gowdy added that in a trial, “direct evidence, direct testimony by eyewitnesses is always the most compelling.”
The administration has had the eyewitnesses on ice and has refused to allow them to testify before Congress. Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News in March:
“The bottom line is they feel they can’t come forth…They’ve been told to be quiet.” Graham said: “We cannot let this administration or any other administration get away with hiding from American people and Congress…people who were there in real time to tell the story.”
Fox News also reported that a congressional source told them investigators believe that including Ambassador Stevens and the three other casualties, 37 people were in Benghazi on behalf of the State Department and CIA on September 11, meaning that 33 were evacuated. One of them, a State Department security agent, suffered a severe head injury during the assault. It is believed that Secretary of State John Kerry visited him at the Walter Reed Medical Center last January.
On April 17, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) told Secretary Kerry at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing: “We have made request after request about, for example, just to get the list of the people who were evacuated from Benghazi, and we haven’t even gotten that, much less some important questions.” Rohrabacher emphasized: “We need to talk to the people who are on the scene. Can you give us a commitment now that this administration, you will be coming up with the request, the honest request of this committee as to who was evacuated and how to talk to them so we can get a straight answer and an understanding of what happened in Benghazi?”
Kerry responded that he didn’t think anybody lied to anybody, and “let’s find out exactly, together, what happened because we need… we got a lot more important things to move on to and get done.”
You know what the Democrats and the press are going to say: This is old news and besides, the investigation is a partisan witch hunt.
Does it still matter that we get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi?
But for some, it does matter, and perhaps less because mistakes were made, and more because after being shrouded in blatant public deceptions, the same mindsets underlying those misjudgments and misrepresentations continue. As with Benghazi, the Obama administration was unwilling to attribute the bombings which killed and maimed innocent Boston Marathon attendees to radical Islamic terrorists. Meanwhile, Benghazi eyewitnesses are sequestered to avoid congressional inquiries into causes and responses, while killers which the president pledged to bring to justice roam free.
It took the FBI a month to make it to Benghazi and by that time, there was little physical evidence left to examine. The killers of our ambassador wandered freely in Benghazi without fear that the weak (and perhaps sympathetic) government would do anything.
From start to finish — from the investigation by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department to every utterance by the White House on the matter — there have been blatant attempts to deceive. I will be very disappointed if the only reason they sought to fool people was because of the election. Surely something more vital, something related to policy or some grand strategic vision, was at stake that caused the Obama administration to stonewall congress and lie to the American people.
In the end, that’s the only answer worth getting; why? If that question can be answered, the rest will fall into place.
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