|
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 7,688
|
[QUOTE=spence;1058280]The Senate investigation found numerous cases of gross exaggeration and repeated public statements by top Administration officials that simply weren't based on accepted intelligence. Isn't that wrong?
As in the Benghazi investigation, the opinion was divided. The minority did not go along with the characterization of the majority. Among other things, according to Huf Post, they said "in a minority report authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch, Christopher Bond and Richard Burr, the Republicans accuse committee Democrats of committing a key error of governmental logic. 'Intelligence informs policy. It does not dictate policy,' they wrote. 'Intelligence professionals are responsible for their failures in intelligence collection, analysis, counter-intelligence and covert action. Policymakers must also bear the burden of their mistakes, an entirely different order of mistakes. It is a pity this report fails to illuminate this distinction.'"
If the majority opinion was correct, that "gross exaggerations" were made and statements weren't based on "accepted" intelligence, that certainly is not different than what happened in the Obama Admin. explanation of what happened and how in Benghazi. As far as I can tell from how politics works, and from many of your previous posts, gross exaggeration is not wrong but the norm. And "accepted" intelligence on Iraq was wrong in the first place. The Senate majority conclusion was a report based on opinion not on fact. And the Benghazi report is the same. Wrongdoing was not "proven," in the Iraq "investigation," it was highly conjectured to imply wrongdoing.
Further the Pentagon's own Inspector General found the actions of the OSP under Rumsfeld's direction -- to stovepipe contrary raw intel to the Administration -- to be inappropriate. Isn't inappropriate behavior wrong?
It certainly could be considered so. In the relativistic world you live in, it would depend on whose ox is being gored. Being appropriate would depend on what the goals are. For example, would it be appropriate to "stovepipe contrary raw intel to the Administration" via memos about what talking points to use as an explanation for what happened in Benghazi? Wouldn't it be inappropriate, for instance, to rule in unconstitutional ways? Yet that seems quite appropriate to most politicians, and the more progressive they are, the more appropriate it is. I believe that you approve of that. So, being inappropriate doesn't "seem" to be wrong in and of itself. Besides, I wasn't comparing the Inspector General's "finding," just comparing investigative results.
Even better, remember the Lawrence Franklin scandal? Good lord, here we have the Pentagon sanctioning meetings with Iran, Israeli spies...so much great stuff in the very same group making up their own intelligence to fit the facts around the policy.
Nothing wrong about that.
Again wasn't comparing the Lawrence Franklin scandal. I suppose you could compare that and other Bush admin. "scandals" to the host of other Obama admin. scandals--IRS gate, fast and furious, Obamacare lies, etc., etc.
Contrasted with Benghazi where the issues were found to be systemic communication failures.
Apples and oranges. [QUOTE]
You know, that "systemic failure" bit is way too convenient. Even as sloppy as the intelligence committee investigation report on Benghazi is, it didn't completely fall for it. As Noah Rothman states in Hot Air, it came to "the clear conclusion that State under Hillary Clinton utterly failed to provide adequate security for a dangerous location, and that the US government under Barack Obama was shockingly unprepared for hostile action on the anniversary of 9/11."
That is not wrong doing, since it was inaction and incompetence, but if it is not "wrong," it is certainly inappropriate.
As for the thoroughness and competence of the report, there is this by Stephen Hayes:
[QUOTE]"Rogers had long been reluctant to commit more time and resources to investigating Benghazi. At a meeting of intelligence committee Republicans in early 2013, just four months after the attacks, Rogers laid out his priorities for the new Congress. Not only was Benghazi not on that list, according to three sources in the meeting, he declared to the members that the issue was in the past and that they wouldn’t be devoting significant time and resources to investigating it. Whatever failures there had been in Benghazi, he explained, they had little to do with the intelligence community, and his intelligence committee would therefore have little to do with investigating them.
In the months that followed, more troubling details about the Benghazi story emerged in the media. Among the most damaging: Internal emails made clear that top Obama administration officials had misled the country about the administration’s role in the flawed “Benghazi talking points” that Susan Rice had used in her Sunday television appearances following the attacks, and that former acting CIA director Michael Morell had misled Congress about the same. Other reports made clear that intelligence officials on the ground in Benghazi had reported almost immediately that the assault was a terrorist attack involving jihadists with links to al Qaeda—information that was removed from the materials used to prepare administration officials for their public discussion of the attacks. A top White House adviser wrote an email suggesting that the administration affix blame for the attacks on a YouTube video.
The revelations even roused the establishment media from their Benghazi torpor and generated extraordinarily hostile questioning of White House press secretary Jay Carney by reporters who had trusted his claims of administration noninvolvement.
None of this convinced Rogers to make Benghazi a priority—a fact that frustrated many of the committee’s members. Boehner received a steady stream of visits and phone calls from House members who complained that Rogers wasn’t doing his job. In all, seven members of the intelligence committee took their concerns directly to the speaker or his top aides."
[The report, Hayes writes, is a product of a slapdash effort to get Benghazi out of the way rather than a serious look at a disturbing intelligence and security failure:]
"Although it adds to our overall understanding of Benghazi, even a cursory read reveals sloppy errors of fact and numerous internal contradictions. For instance, on one page, the report has a top intelligence officer sending an email from Benghazi on September 15, before a crucial White House meeting on the Benghazi talking points. A few pages later, the report has the same email sent on September 16 and arriving the day after that White House meeting. Elsewhere, the report informs readers that the first CIA assessment of the Benghazi attacks, an Executive Update published internally on September 12, reported that “the presence of armed assailants from the incident’s outset suggests this was an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest.” One paragraph later, however, the report tells us that Morell, the agency’s point man on Benghazi, testified that the first word there was no protest came on September 14. And later still we are told that the intelligence community didn’t have confirmation that there was no protest until surveillance video was recovered on September 18—a full week after the attacks.
Those are minor errors, however, compared with the major omissions and mischaracterizations that mar the report. In a section on the controversy over the inaccurate talking points, for example, the committee inexplicably relies on Morell as its key fact witness and arbiter of truth. But nowhere in the body of the report is there even a hint that Morell misled Congress repeatedly about his involvement in those talking points for eight months after the attacks. The report also attempts to clear the CIA of allegations that the agency made personnel sign special nondisclosure agreements related to their work in Benghazi. To do so, the authors ignore public, on-the-record claims of the attorney for those officials directly contradicting that conclusion. Mark Zaid, a veteran national security lawyer representing five CIA officers who served in Benghazi, told The Weekly Standard last year that his clients were presented with nondisclosure agreements that were “legally unnecessary” and intended to send a message. “There is no doubt that the NDAs would not have been presented to them had it not been for Benghazi,” Zaid said at the time. “That is their impression and my analysis based on 20 years’ experience.” Curiously, the report seeks to exculpate a Libyan militia that provided security to the U.S. mission in Benghazi. But doing so requires the authors to omit key evidence that the group was compromised, including video evidence acquired since the attacks of a leader of that militia fighting alongside Ansar al Sharia—the al Qaeda-linked group that took part in the assault on the U.S. facilities.
The report begins by asserting that it is a “comprehensive” look at Benghazi resulting from an intensive investigation of nearly two years. Neither claim is true."[END QUOTE]
The Trey Gowdey report may ultimately be more thorough and competent, or not--the ruling class never ceases to amaze. But, like the Iraq "investigation," nothing will come of it. People will believe what they want. And like all the other "investigations" and scandals, politics will go on as usual. Or maybe not.
Last edited by detbuch; 12-07-2014 at 11:20 AM..
|
Linear Mode
