http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/darrell-issa-trashes-senate-benghazi-report#.UthQn4G3D1Y.twitterDarrell Issa Trashes Senate Benghazi Report
"The question isn’t could they have gotten there in time, because at the beginning of this, no one knew how long it was going to last"
1.16.2014
Jeff Dunetz
On Wednesday the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. Although the report was critical of the Obama administration for not anticipating the attack, there were many who were very critical of the paper saying it left too many unanswered questions. One of them is Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is running the Benghazi investigation in the House of Representatives. Issa appeared on Wednesday's Hugh Hewitt Show to explain his issues with the Senate's report.
Overall, Issa felt the report wasn't even good enough to be described as a whitewash:
Whitewash would imply that there’s a enough cover that you’re not seeing something. I think we all see very transparently that Secretary Clinton’s administration of the State Department denied the Ambassador the security he asked for before the attack, did not allow assets that were available, such as the Special Ops people who could have gotten into that aircraft and were told effectively to stand down to come to the rescue. And very, very clearly, she has to own responsibility for one of her ambassadors, even at the direction of the White House, falsely stating it was a video on all five Sunday shows.
Much of his criticism centered debunking claims there were no U.S. military resources in position to intervene in short order in Benghazi to help defend the mission facility and its annex:
And of course the question isn’t could they have gotten there in time, because at the beginning of this, no one knew how long it was going to last. For those of us young enough or old enough to remember that famous scene from Top Gun where he’s on his way in and he says I’ll be there in two minutes, and he says well, this firefight will be over by then. Well, you don’t know that. You don’t know how long one is going to go on. It went on eight and a half hours. The truth is they didn’t know. The only launch that occurred was that Marines were prepped to come in to represent backup security in Tripoli. They took 23 and a half hours to get in, because they weren’t provided military lift. And eventually, the lift they got was C-130s that had come down, I believe, from England. But Hugh, I want you to understand that this statement may be technically true, but let me tell you what isn’t in there. We have three allies in the region that are supplied with KC-135s. We sustain the fleet by us at no cost to them. That’s Egypt, Turkey and Israel. Israel has, I believe, seven KC-135s, and as you know, the Israelis are always available in a matter of minutes. They’re always aware that their attackers doesn’t give them any standoff. So the real question is if you know you have refuelers that could take care of our F-16s and make them able to get in from Italy, did you call Bibi Netanyahu? And the answer is no. So did you do everything you could do with our allies to attempt to prepare a relief effort of some sort? The answer is no. And that’s not in the report.
