Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is leading the GOP's Benghazi witch-hunt (Credit: Reuters)

Roll Call reports that Republican aides are saying staffers are getting bogged down chasing bogus accusations.

“We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward,” a GOP aide told Roll Call. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe some of this stuff. It’s just — I mean, you’ve got to be on Mars to come up with some of this stuff.” Another aide expressed frustration at accusations that military assets weren’t properly deployed during the night of the attacks and that a team from Tripoli could have been flown in to fight off the attackers:

“There are some real issues there and then there is just some crazy stuff,” the senior House GOP aide said. “The crazy stuff is, you know, the airman in Ramstein [Air Base, Germany,] that knew that the Predator [drone] was armed. There are no armed Predators in the region there. The [status of forces agreement] does not allow us to fly them armed, and everybody knows it.” [...]

GOP aides described another criticism aired at a recent House Oversight Committee hearing that there were four security officers at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli who were ordered to remain in the capital for several hours after the first reports of an attack, rather than being scrambled to assist the consulate in Benghazi.

“The stand-down order was for four guys,” the GOP aide said. “When you step back and say how were the people killed at the annex, they were killed by an indirect fire mortar round. Four more M-4s [rifles] inside the annex doesn’t change that outcome. In fact, they might have just created more casualties. We have got to get down to what really happened on the DoD side and for us the DoD side was not properly postured, why?”

It appears that some Republicans are also beginning to see that the GOP’s Benghazi affair isn’t paying dividends. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed away from some Republicans’ baseless claims of an Obama White House cover-up. And Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) in an interview on Fox News on Monday warned his colleagues about taking the issue too far:

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House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) responded to President Obama’s forceful condemnation of the GOP’s effort to portray his administration’s response to the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya as a cover-up on Monday, suggesting that the president sought to downplay the severity of the incident by describing the killings of four Americans as an “act of terror” rather than a “terrorist attack.”

In the day following the Benghazi attacks, Obama appeared at the White House Rose Garden alongside then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his remarks, Obama referred to the incident as an “act of terror” and used the phrase again at a campaign rally the day after in Denver, CO. “I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished,” he said.

But Issa claimed that Obama relied on the “act of terror” formulation to dissuade Americans from thinking it was a terror attack, thus improving his chances of re-election.

“The president sent a letter to the President of Libya where he didn’t call it a terrorist attack even when at the time the President of Libya was calling it pre-planned Sept. 11 terrorist attack,” Issa told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “The words that are being used carefully — like you just said, ‘act of terror’ — an ‘act of terror’ is different than a ‘terrorist attack.’ The truth is, this was a terrorist attack, this had Al Qaeda at it.” Watch it:

Seven days after Obama’s comments at the Rose Garden, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen called the the assault in Benghazi an “opportunistic attack” in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. “I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” he said, presumably pleasing Issa.

Darrell Issa (Credit: Bloomberg)

A GOP Congressman yet again made the false claim that President Obama “lied for a month” about the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has, from his perch atop the House Oversight Committee for months, been the House of Representatives’ lead investigator on Benghazi, which roared back into the headlines this week. Speaking to host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press, Issa once again made the claim that the Obama administration lied for a month about whether the assault was a terrorist attack or not, engaging in a massive cover-up.

Issa claimed that the administration leaned heavily on the CIA to change its draft of the now infamous set of unclassified talking points on what happened in Benghazi to better fit a political narrative and hiding the true nature of the attack from the American people:

ISSA: The fact is, we want the facts, we’re entitled to the facts. The American people were effectively lied to for a period of about a month. That’s important to get right. And –

GREGORY: I just want to be clear here what you believe the lie was.

ISSA: This was a terrorist attack from the get-go. The attack succeeded extremely quickly, because in no small part because the consulate or the diplomatic facility in Benghazi was not given the support it needed or quite frankly the decision to leave which might have been just as good. Either way, they were in fact covering up an easy attack that succeeded that was from the get-go about a terrorist attack. It was never about a video.

Counter to Issa’s claim, however, the evidence shows that while the administration acted cautiously in what it put forward, it ultimately told the public just what it knew to be fact about the attack. President Obama himself referred to the assault in Libya as an “act of terror” at least twice within 48 hours.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice delivered the final draft of the talking points on Sept. 16, 2012, appearing on all five Sunday news shows. Rice gave what was at the time the administrations’ best knowledge about what caused the attacks, saying that it was the result of a demonstration that mutated into a coordinated attack. Those appearances lead to her being the target of a Republican smear campaign in the weeks and months ahead.

From the CIA’s original draft of the talking points, however, the intelligence community believed that what occurred in Benghazi was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The Cairo protests were, in fact, spurred on by an anti-Islamic video as Rice ultimately wound up referencing in her appearances. In another draft, before the document was provided to the rest of the government for input, the word “attack” became “demonstrations,” showing that the very claim that Republicans have accused the White House of lying about came from the CIA itself. The view that the video had at least some part to play in the attack’s genesis has been borne out in later reporting.

What’s more, the administration acknowledged from the beginning that the official story on Benghazi would change as more information became known. “We’ll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms, but that’s the best information we have at present,” Rice said at the time. And rather than “scrubbing” the points of references to Al Qaeda to benefit Obama, then-CIA Director David Petraeus reportedly himself asked for the mentions to be removed to avoid “tipping off the groups” involved.

None of this has stopped Republicans from taking what was inherently a turf war between the CIA and State Department and attempting to turn it into a scandal that will bring down the Obama administration.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)

“I’m curious, did you learn anything new today?” Fox News host Greta Van Susteren asked Issa in an interview after the hearing. After meandering around for a bit, Issa finally got to the hearing’s grand revelation — Benghazi was a terror attack:

ISSA: I think the American people learned today from these brave witnesses, these whistleblowers, that the facts as we were told before during and after the attack at Benghazi just simply aren’t what they really were. The acting ambassador after Ambassador Stevens was murdered, told us in great detail about what happened that day and what happened in the days to follow and why we should know that he knew and everyone else in the mission knew from the moment it happened, from the get-go, as he said, that this was a terrorist attack.

Watch the clip:

While indeed, former deputy chief of mission Greg Hicks’ testimony detailing his experiences as the attacks on the Benghazi diplomatic mission unfolded was new and riveting. But it didn’t have much to do with what Issa himself said the mission of the hearing would be: expose more Obama administration failures and perhaps even some kind of cover-up (of what, is unclear exactly). “Our hearing will examine new facts about what happened and significant problems with the administration’s own review of Benghazi failures,” Issa said previewing the hearing last month. “This committee will expose what they did and hold them accountable to the public.”

There’s “no question,” Issa said two days before the hearing, that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff or even Clinton herself, was involved in a Benghazi “cover-up” (there was no cover-up of any kind, by anyone).

However, Issa’s hearing didn’t expose anything, except perhaps how fact-free a number of right-wing Benghazi conspiracy theories are, including the idea that Clinton personally signed off on cables denying additional security for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

But as far as labeling Benghazi a terror attack, that issue has been settled long ago. President Obama referred to it as an “act of terror” the day after the attack and directly referred to the incident as “a terrorist attack” two weeks later. Issa probably didn’t need a hours-long hearing to get confirmation on that.

Republicans are touting today’s House Oversight Committee hearing as a potential final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s continuing cover-up of what really happened the night a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya was attacked last September. In truth, the event is sure to be a rehash of previously debunked finger-pointing and yet another round of political posturing surrounding the tragic death of four Americans.

The GOP’s star witness at today’s hearings is the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, who the right-wing has labeled the main Benghazi “whistle-blower.” Hicks is expected to give testimony before the panel detailing what he believes could have done above and beyond the efforts the administration expended the night of the attack, actions he claims could have saved lives:

“If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split,” Hicks told House Republican investigators.

Hicks is also expected to explain to the panel that a team of special operations forces was told not to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi prior to the second wave of the attack. According to an excerpt of Hicks’ testimony “[Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

Republicans are latching onto Hicks’ testimony about the lack of military response during the attack as evidence of the administration’s negligence in protecting diplomats overseas and a resulting cover-up to avoid scrutiny. “We were certainly misled at every step of the way,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), one of the loudest voices on Benghazi, said on Monday to a surprisingly skeptical panel on Fox News.

The military has repeatedly said, however, that there were simply no air assets close enough to Benghazi that would have arrived in time to make a difference. Hicks himself admitted during his pre-hearing testimony that the nearest fighter jets were at Aviano Air Base in southern Italy, hours away from Libya with no tanker assets available for refueling purposes.

And while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) during the Senate’s last hearing on the military’s response to Benghazi scolded the Pentagon for not having assets available at the Souda Bay naval base in Crete, Greece, the fact remains that even the hour and a half from the island to Benghazi would have been too late to save Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and communications specialist Sean Smith. Both died during the first wave of the attack, less than an hour after the Pentagon was first notified.

Likewise, despite what Fox News reports have said, U.S. forces based in Europe as part of U.S. Africa Command would not have arrived until after the second wave of attacks, which took place at the CIA annex in Benghazi hours after the first, had finished.

“The United States military, as I’ve said, is not and frankly should not be a 911 service, arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world,” then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services committee in February. That hasn’t stopped conservatives from railing against the lack of cavalry riding into Benghazi at the last minute, which in turn ignores the valiant efforts from the CIA’s response team that saved lives the night of the attack.
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