If there’s a consensus that seemed to be emerging from the Republican-hyped House hearings on the tragedy in Benghazi hears today it seems to be this: the hearings are revealing incompetence, but no cover- up. This is, of course, cutting out Fox News and conservative talkers but by most accounts (news coverage, news accounts, and the opinions of people not associated with ideological websites) it echoes the view of The National Journal’s Michael Hirsch:
There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come to haunt Hillary Clinton, the first Secretary of State to lose an ambassador in the field in more than three decades, if she runs for president in 2016.
But the obvious Republican effort to turn this inquiry into the Democratic (Obama) version of the Iraq intelligence scandal that has tarred the GOP since the George W. Bush years — led by that least-credible of champions, the almost-always-wrong Darrell Issa — is just not going to amount to much.
And Hirsch is correct, here.
I wouldn’t call Issa The Dick Morris of the House.
But he’s coming awfully close to deserving that name. MORE:
The testimony Wednesday by three highly credible witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee added to the serious questions that have been raised for months about Benghazi. Last December, Clinton’s own “Accountability Review Board” — chaired by two major national-security figures, retired Amb. Thomas R. Pickering and Adm. Michael Mullen—detailed a broad failure of U.S. intelligence and policy-making over the deaths of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Statements and testimony in recent days from the three State Department officials, led by Stevens’ former deputy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, only appeared to underline the administration’s failure to take action, futile though it might have been, to save the lives of its emissaries. Hicks, in prepared testimony, said the U.S. military turned down his request for help during the attack, both special operations troops and F-16 fighters. Another witness, Mark Thompson, the deputy coordinator for operations at the State Department, was expected to say that Hillary Clinton sought to cut her department’s counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of decision-making, suggesting that she was downplaying the rise of terrorism in keeping with the administration’s political line during the 2012 presidential campaign (which Clinton has already denied). The last witness, Eric Nordstrom, the diplomatic outpost’s former chief security officer, has said that the Benghazi compound failed to meet security standards despite serious security threats.
The most moving — if still-not-quite scandalous — testimony came from Hicks, who described how he virtually begged for help as Stevens and his colleagues were being killed that night of Sept. 11, 2012. The help never came. The administration’s response has been that Hicks, a diplomat, is no expert in military capabilities, and his allegations have already been directly rebutted by both Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and former Defense Sec. Leon Panetta. Dempsey testified in February that it would have taken “up to 20 hours or so” to get F-16s to the site, and he called them “the wrong tool for the job.”Hirsch notes:The military may yet have more to answer for as it conducts its own internal followup. And, without question, all of these statements Wednesday tend to bolster the critique of last year’s State Department report, which concluded that the administration had failed to appreciate the growing Islamist threat in Libya. As the report put it, “there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests.”
What there is still no evidence of, however, all these months later, is a deliberate cover-up by Obama, Clinton or other senior officials concerning what they knew about the attack and when.
But that fact will be totally irrelevant in the accounts and commentary on the hearings from some partisans.
That’s the way our politics works — but the law and public opinion don’t always follow the partisan and ideological narratives or agendas.
And he is correct in another sense: the story in its totality will be a blemish on Hillary Clinton’s record and image.
But it’ll unlikely to be (so far) an Oval Office disqualifier.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.