Benghazi Special Investigation

So it looks like Republican Trey Gowdy doctored documents with the intention of misleading the committee. The CIA confirms that they declassified the documents and he, personally redacted them so as to remove exonerating evidence.

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/rep...

If there was any remaining doubt that this is a hack job masquerading as "justice", it belongs in a bath of acid.

Paleocon wrote:

So it looks like Republican Trey Gowdy doctored documents with the intention of misleading the committee. The CIA confirms that they declassified the documents and he, personally redacted them so as to remove exonerating evidence.

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/rep...

If there was any remaining doubt that this is a hack job masquerading as "justice", it belongs in a bath of acid.

Is it legal to doctor CIA documents?

NathanialG wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

So it looks like Republican Trey Gowdy doctored documents with the intention of misleading the committee. The CIA confirms that they declassified the documents and he, personally redacted them so as to remove exonerating evidence.

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/rep...

If there was any remaining doubt that this is a hack job masquerading as "justice", it belongs in a bath of acid.

Is it legal to doctor CIA documents?

Gowdy redacted names and sources of information from documents that the CIA said weren't sensitive or classified information. So he's not "doctoring" CIA documents, but rather blacking out information that the agency doesn't have any problems with the public knowing while claiming he's doing it for national security reasons.

So it's not just me...

In the short run at least, the committee likely did more to help, rather than hinder, Clinton in her bid to win the White House a year from now. In reality, the day’s events did more to shine a spotlight on a damaged congressional oversight process, a committee without a clear objective and a party determined to strike back at the policies and priorities of the Obama administration.

...

The day of testimony began at 10 a.m. with an unusually defensive statement by Gowdy, who sought to justify what was about to take place. It ended about 9 p.m., after a final round of questioning from the Republicans that appeared aimed more at provoking Clinton than in adding something useful to the public record about a tragedy that killed four Americans, including Stevens.

Gowdy and others veered off on tangents. One was the interest in Clinton’s relationship with longtime friend and acolyte Sidney Blumenthal, a loyalist controversial enough to have been kept out of the Clinton State Department by officials in the Obama White House who did not trust him.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/hk0hQCQ.png)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...

But there is one overriding principle that does animate and define the Clinton campaign, and that's keeping Republicans out of office. For years, this has been the Democratic Party's stock answer for every sordid legislative compromise, every shameless capitulation to expediency, every insulting line of two-faced stump rhetoric offered to get over: We have to do this to beat the Republicans.

I never bought that argument, for a lot of reasons, but Trey Gowdy made it look pretty good Thursday. Those idiots represent everything that is wrong not just with the Republican Party, but with modern politics in general. It's hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn't be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power.

Great work by the vlogbrothers (Hank and John Green, who helped start Crash Course, and John apparently wrote The Fault in Our Stars which I guess is kind of a big deal).

I am a patient boy...

http://www.dailydot.com/lol/hillary-...

The week of the Benghazi committee hearing, the Internet had no shortage of questions about Hillary and Fugazi. How was the band connected to all this politics stuff? Is it because they were from D.C.? Is Hillary straight-edge? Is she going to get black X’s tattooed on her hands?

Fugazi is just a minor threat in the overall DC scene...

IMAGE(http://s0.limitedrun.com/images/1106517/v300_1394048989.jpg)

Today is the 32nd anniversary of the 1983 truck bombing in Beirut Lebanon which took the lives of 241 American servicemen.

Every day the VA facebook page posts a 'Veteran of the Day', and on 10/23 it was all the Marines killed in Beirut. I was thinking for a moment that someone at the VA was getting their snark on after the Benghazi hearings until I saw that it was the anniversary of the event.

There are some interesting comments from Marines that were there about the ROEs and whether the Marines on guard were issued ammunition or not.

I'm sure this has made the rounds in one of these threads, but just in case.

Great vine of Clinton during the Benghazi hearings

I bet it hits in November. Because of declassification problems.

As long as we are making predictions - Republicans will find it supporting why Hillary is evil, Democrats will say it shows she did nothing wrong, and absolutely nothing will be resolved.

OG_slinger wrote:

The House Select Committee on Benghazi has announced that it's nearly two year-long investigation is almost over and that its report will either be released in mid-July or, if declassification takes longer, September.

I'm going way out on a limb and predicting that, for some unexplained and totally non-partisan reason, the declassification will take longer.

So basically we should expect another investigation to begin in mid-July?

Kehama wrote:

I bet it hits in November. Because of declassification problems.

Look, we understand that improperly sharing classified data is a big deal.

Niiiiiice.

NormanTheIntern wrote:
Kehama wrote:

I bet it hits in November. Because of declassification problems.

Look, we understand that improperly sharing classified data is a big deal.

IMAGE(http://twitchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/valerie-plame.jpg)

I'm hoping the Republicans try to indict her just as many times as they have tried to strike down Obamacare. How many times are up to with that, by the way? A hundred? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and...

Vrikk wrote:

I'm hoping the Republicans try to indict her just as many times as they have tried to strike down Obamacare. How many times are up to with that, by the way? A hundred? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and...

It's only insane if they believe they're going to repeal it. If they're showboating for their constituents and to get brownie points from businesses, well, they're accomplishing their goal.

We don't really have to actively push repeal anyway, a giant novelty veto pen held by the Invisible Hand is already reaching down from the sky.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

We don't really have to actively push repeal anyway, a giant novelty veto pen held by the Invisible Hand is already reaching down from the sky.

ALL HAIL THE HAND.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

We don't really have to actively push repeal anyway, a giant novelty veto pen held by the Invisible Hand is already reaching down from the sky.

In what way? States that don't have obstructionist legislatures or governors are actually doing well, last I checked.

House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which it occurred, and it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in the Libyan city, and especially for maintaining outposts in Benghazi that they could not protect.

The committee, led by Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, also harshly criticized an internal State Department investigation that it said had allowed officials like Mrs. Clinton, then the secretary of state, to effectively choose who would investigate their actions. In addition, it reiterated Republicans’ complaints that the Obama administration had sought to thwart the investigation by withholding witnesses and evidence.

The report, however, did not dispute that United States military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel who died — a central finding of previous inquiries.

How long until the next investigation begins?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

How long until the next investigation begins?

The way it looks, I think we will have 8 solid years of investigations.

Paleocon wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

How long until the next investigation begins?

The way it looks, I think we will have 8 solid years of investigations.

Fiscal conservativism is a VERY important part of the Republican platform.

But it is by no means the most important part. They will toss fiscal responsibility under the bus to hunt Hillary,
to stop (non-existent) voter fraud, fund war, or attempt to defund Obamacare