Posted on 12/15/2012 5:20:09 PM PST by Libloather
Republicans are 'not giving up' on Benghazi
By Julian Pecquet - 12/15/12 03:24 PM ET
Republican lawmakers are vowing to keep pressing the administration on Benghazi despite Susan Rice’s decision to drop her bid to become secretary of State.
“We'll continue to seek answers,” a Republican Senate aide told The Hill. “We're not giving up on it.”
Rice’s decision to step aside averted a contentious confirmation fight with Republican senators that might have pointed to an end to the political battle over the U.S. consulate attack. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had become the flash-point for criticism since describing the deadly attack as a protest gone awry three months ago.
Rice’s decision came as the Obama administration has been seeking to mend bridges with lawmakers who have felt deprived of information about the attack. The administration had planned to send Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify on Capitol Hill next week about the attack.
However, the State Department said Saturday that Clinton fainted and suffered a concussion after becoming dehydrated due to a stomach virus. She will not testify before House and Senate panels.
Clinton deputies Tom Nides and Bill Burns will testify in her place.
Republicans had promised tough questions for Clinton, and assert they’ll continue to hold the administration’s feet to the fire over how terrorists could have launched a successful attack on the U.S. consulate that left U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three others dead.
“We're not going to let this go,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rice's most prominent critic along with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), vowed on Fox News after her decision was made public. “How could, for seven hours, nobody come to the aid of the people during the attack? Why did we leave the consulate open? Where was the president when the British decided to close their consulate in June? And afterwards, how did the intelligence get so screwed up, for lack of a better word?
“So we're going to keep pressing this so we can learn from it and not have it happen again,” Graham said.
McCain made the same promise through his spokesman.
“He will continue to seek all the facts about what happened before, during and after the attack on our consulate in Benghazi that killed four brave Americans,” Brian Rogers said in a statement.
And Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also made it clear he has unanswered questions.
“We expect the secretary of State to come and answer some questions that frankly have been asked by the media and the House and the Senate,” Royce told Fox News. “There are real answers to be given here.”
The Senate remains in Democratic hands however. And in the House, action will largely depend on Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) desire to make Benghazi a priority of his oversight committee, which has subpoena power.
Issa held a hearing on security lapses in Benghazi in October and has requested numerous diplomatic cables and other internal State Department documents, but he has largely stayed silent about the Benghazi attack since the election. His office did not return a request for comment Friday.
Clinton is expected to brief the House and Senate foreign affairs panels about the findings of the independent panel reviewing security lapses in Libya on the day of the September 11 attack and in the days before it.
The State Department vowed Friday that the report would be ready in time after a spokeswoman cast doubts on the timetable the day before, prompting grumblings from lawmakers.
“Right now we anticipate that the ARB [Accountability Review Board] will complete its work early next week,” State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said at Friday's briefing. “The committees have announced that the secretary will be on the Hill next Thursday, and so that's the plan.”
She didn’t faint, she feinted and continues to do so.
Been waiting two years for justice in Fast and Furious and all I've seen is talk, talk, and bluster.
If you are going to DO something, DO IT!
Treason has been committed in both cases. The silence is deafening.
Anyone wanting on or off this ping list, please advise.
Mean Congresscritters. It will take awhile for Hillary to recover from her case of the vapors, and her concussion may make it hard for her to remember things...
Susan Rice was sent out to lie, because Hillary knew that would be career suicide.
Now that Susan Rice is out of the picture, the spotlight is back on Hillary.
Thus the “concussion.”
And stay tuned for “amnesia.”
“I don’t recall”
Gee, some of the same cast, and the same road we’re headed down — Ken Starr wanted Monica’s testimony, dress, and oh yeah all those missing FBI files that were later discovered concealed in plain sight right in the White House, and all anyone in the Drive-by Media talked about was how evil Ken Starr was hounding our innocent President, and that the dress didn’t exist, until it did, and then, how much money Starr’s office spent pursuing that dress.
Thanks Libloather, but the only thing this committee can do is keep holding hearings, which unlike the Ollie North hearings won’t be televised, and keep this (and Fast and Furious) as much in the public eye as it can. That way, at the midterm elections, they can be blamed by everyone here for having done nothing, and we can lose the House. It’ll be fun!
I've known more than one alcoholic.
This is a pretty common side effect of prolonged binges on the hard stuff.
“She didn’t faint, she feinted and continues to do so.”
Imagine if Condi pulled a stunt like that. The damned whores who call themselves the “media”.
It is treason. You don’t leave Americans to fight for 9 hours with no support although it is readily available unless you want them to die, or at lease lose the fight.
This is grounds for impeachment. There is absolutely no justification for the inaction.
A lot heads need to roll on this on. Obama, Clinton, Panetta,Petraeus, etc.
SHE WAS NEVER NOMINATED!
She can't withdraw from something she was never nominated for!
Good luck. You can be SURE that Hillary’s “concussion” was not an accident. Its far too convenient for her and the Emotion Pimp who is her boss.
Glad to see this part of the story coming to the fore. Something's very stinky here. Rice withdraws. Clinton won't testify. Petraeus steps down. Panetta hasn't been heard from in weeks.
Fact One:
1) Only the POTUS can authorize a CBA (cross border authority) command for a rescue mission in a foreign nation.
Plus Fact Two:
2) No rescue mission was attempted.
Equals Fact Three:
3) 0bama turned his back on 41 State Dept. and CIA employees refusing to issue a CBA command and went to bed so he could go to Las Vegas the next day.
Really not a compelling issue for the uninformed. And their numbers are vast, I’m very apprehensive over what the next few months bring.
The best that the Democrats can come up with is,
“Hillary fall down and go boom!”
And this happened a few days ago, but it gets announced now?
Looks to me like they’re running out of cards.
The question I want answered is this: why was the ambassador there at all? It was a dangerous town, the place was more a CIA outpost than a diplomatic post—not a consulate, even. So why was he there with no protection?
I would not hold my breath waiting on Bonehead and his bunch to
do something about ANYTHING.
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