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Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages
... one of the best fact-based articles on the Republican Benghazi Inquiries. THis is an article conforming to genuine standards of journalism - foremost among them, it is FACT BASED, and in depth. If you thought you knew everything there was to know about the Benghazi Inquiries, read on. You may be surprised.
http://www.newsweek.com/benghazi-biopsy-comprehensive-guide-one-americas-worst-political-outrages-385853
Moussa Koussa.
That is the name of the “classified source” in an old email from Hillary Clinton released last week by Republicans purportedly investigating the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Under the instructions of the Benghazi committee’s chairman, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, Koussa’s name was blacked-out on the publicly issued email, as Republicans proclaimed revealing his identity would compromise national security. The media ran with it, saying Clinton had sent classified information through her personal email account.
But the CIA never said the name was secret. Nor did the Defense Intelligence Agency or the FBI. No, Koussa’s role as an intelligence source is about as classified as this column. He is the former intelligence chief and foreign minister of Libya. In 2011, he fled that country for Great Britain, where he provided boodles of information to MI6 and the CIA. Documents released long ago show Koussa’s cooperation. Government officials have openly discussed it. His name appears in newspapers with casual discussions about his assistance. Sanctions by the British and the Americans against Koussa were lifted because of his help, and he moved to Qatar. All of that is publicly known.
[font size="3"]But, as they have time and again, the Republicans on the Benghazi committee released deceitful information for what was undoubtedly part of a campaign—as Kevin McCarthy of the House Republican leadership has admitted—to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers.[/font] Republicans have implied—and some journalists have flatly stated—that Clinton was reckless and may have broken the law by sending an email that included thirdhand hearsay mentioning Koussa’s name. The reality is that the Republicans continue to be reckless with the truth.
[font size="3"]The historical significance of this moment can hardly be overstated, and it seems many Republicans, Democrats and members of the media don’t fully understand the magnitude of what is taking place. The awesome power of government—one that allows officials to pore through almost anything they demand and compel anyone to talk or suffer the shame of taking the Fifth Amendment—has been unleashed for purely political purposes.[/font] It is impossible to review what the Benghazi committee has done as anything other than taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party’s leading candidate for president. Comparisons from America’s past are rare. Richard Nixon’s attempts to use the IRS to investigate his perceived enemies come to mind. So does Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting during the 1950s, with reckless accusations of treason leveled at members of the State Department, military generals and even the secretary of the Army. [font size="3"]But the modern McCarthys of the Benghazi committee cannot perform this political theater on their own—they depend on reporters to aid in the attempts to use government for the purpose of destroying others with bogus “scoops” ladled out by members of Congress and their staffs. These journalists will almost certainly join the legions of shamed reporters of the McCarthy era as it becomes increasingly clear they are enablers of an obscene attempt to undermine the electoral process.[/font]
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In fact, no previous assault on a diplomatic outpost has received this kind of relentless expression of congressional outrage. There weren’t investigations that were anything on this scale about the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 (63 killed), on the U.S. Embassy annex northeast of Beirut in 1984 (24 killed) or on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2008 (18 killed). Republicans didn’t believe these exact same scenarios that took place under Republican presidents merited similar zeal to dig down to some unexposed, imaginary “truth.”
In fact, Benghazi was just one of 21 major assaults on an American diplomatic facility in the last 20 years; the personnel murdered there were among about 90 other Americans hired by the government to work in diplomatic outposts who were killed in terrorist attacks from 1998 through 2012, according to a State Department report. Apparently, their killings—like the deaths of thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor and in the World Trade Center—were seen as less important than murder of four people in a North African country in the midst of a government overthrow.
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Closed Sessions & Selective Leaks of Information
[font size="+1}However, while Gowdy has intoned that certain information was going to be treated “as if it was classified,” he is making that designation himself, with no authority to do so since classification is handled by the executive branch, not Congress. Staff members of the committee who do not have security clearance attended testimony that involved such supposedly top-secret information. The government did not authorize even the transcriber of the testimony to hear classified information.[/font]
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The other reason to keep the testimony secret has rapidly become clear: so that they can selectively—and often incorrectly—portray to reporters what was said in the statements. For example, prior to the committee’s interview with Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff asked to testify in public out of concern that the Republicans would leak and misrepresent details of what she said. Her request was denied, and the committee made one of its proclamations about treating the unclassified information as classified.
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Other false stories repeatedly found their way into the press. There was the “criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton” article that appeared in The New York Times; once the story was knocked down, the Times sheepishly acknowledged its sources included officials from Congress. (The “Clinton is under criminal investigation” story has continued; she’s not.) The Daily Beast falsely reported that Blumenthal testified he was in Libya on the day of the Benghazi attack.
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[font size="3"]Articles in other publications even falsely portrayed documents obtained by the committee.[/font] For example, on June 18, Politico ran an article stating that, based on information obtained from “a source who has reviewed the email exchange” that Clinton and Blumenthal were sending emails back and forth to utilize Media Matters and the White House to neutralize criticism of her about Benghazi. But the representation to Politico was a lie: The quoted emails had nothing to do with each other, but were literally different discussions about different topics conducted days apart. The article also stated that the “sources” claimed that a particular Clinton email had never been produced by the State Department, in one of many suggestions of a cover-up. In truth, the email had been turned over by the department four months earlier. It is marked with identification numbers STATE-SCB0045548-SCB00450.
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The Truth About Clinton’s Emails
Since March, the Benghazi committee has delved into another topic with almost zero relevance to the attack: Clinton’s use of a private email system. Emails that have been produced have done nothing to refute the conclusions by all of the other government investigations of the attack. Indeed, if the Benghazi committee truly believes that the private email issue is of such importance, it needs to pass the issue to another congressional committee for investigation so that the inquiry into the terrorist attack can resume.
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For example, the committee’s interim report from May included the false—and clearly political statement—describing Clinton’s use of a personal account as “the former secretary of state’s unusual email arrangement with herself.” No, this was an arrangement made with the State Department allowed under the rules listed in the Federal Register, which is why Colin Powell had the exact same set-up when he was secretary of state under former President George W. Bush. While that doesn’t mean the approach is wise, it’s hardly unusual given that a Republican who held Clinton’s job did it too.
[font size="3"]Senior White House staffers and presidential advisers did the same thing during the Bush Administration; at least 88 officials—including the White House Chief of Staff and Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser—used personal emails to conduct official business over a private internet domain called gwb43.com, which was maintained on a server at the Republican National Committee. More than 22 million of those emails were deleted.{NOTE: the 22 milllion emails were 'found' ... only after the Executive Office of the Presidency was sued by two private groups to release the emails_Bill_USA}[/font]
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By comparison, Clinton’s use of her personal email was more limited than Powell’s. In his book It Worked For Me, he wrote that he used a personal email account set up on a laptop to exchange information not only with his principal assistants and ambassadors but also with foreign ministers overseas. Like Clinton, he used a second email account for classified information. Powell has also said he did not preserve any of the emails from his personal account from the time, either by printing them or saving them on a storage device. None of this is to suggest that Powell did anything wrong. It does, however, raise a question Republicans have yet to answer: Why is Clinton’s use of private emails a controversy, much less a scandal, if Powell’s was proper?
Critics also rage that Clinton’s emails on the nonclassified personal system were not secure. Yet no one ever points out that hackers have proved that the State Department’s nonclassified system, which she otherwise could have been using, is one of the more insecure systems in government. In 2006, unknown foreign intruders hacked into the State Department system and downloaded terabytes of information, including emails and attached documents. This year, Russian hackers gained access to the State Department’s unclassified email system despite repeated efforts by American government experts to lock them out. The hackers used the State Department system as a “backdoor” to crack into the White House’s unclassified system, which allowed them to obtain documents like Obama’s nonpublic schedule. So if Clinton had used the State Department’s unclassified system for the emails she sent from her personal account, they almost certainly would now be in the hands of Russian hackers.
But government records show that no hacker has been found to have gained access to Clinton’s private server, something that is far easier to determine given the limited number of accounts it holds and the comparative ease of running security analytics through such a small system. Nor was there any other form of unauthorized intrusion into the email, and no one else had access to the account itself. In fact, after Clinton left government, multiple hackers tried to break into the system but failed. The server was located at Clinton’s home, which is guarded by the Secret Service. Numerous security consultants, IT specialists and government experts put systems in place to prevent breaches; those systems were continuously updated to account for new spyware, malware, viruses and related hacking techniques.
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Finally, despite the relentless yet failed effort to locate information sent through Clinton’s email system that was deemed classified at the time, one major point has been overlooked: The secretary of state had the power to declassify any department document she chose. Every modern president has issued rules regarding the authority to classify and declassify documents. During the Bush administration, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney held that authority, so he often decided on his own to declassify documents that his office then provided to members of Congress and the press.
The finalized public version of the rules under Obama was issued on December 29, 2009, through a document called “Executive Order 13526-Classified National Security Information.” Through that order, a senior official with the authority to deem a document in an agency or department as classified also had the power to declassify it. So the question is moot. Clinton could take a classified State Department document, declare it unclassified and send it to whomever she chose. Of course, that would not apply to classified information she received from, say, the CIA—but remember, if an intelligence organization deemed the material to be secret, it would have been sent to Clinton through the closed system at the State Department and not to her personal email.
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Then comes the controversy about Clinton erasing emails. The words sound terrible, but the reality is not.
[font size="3"]The State Department delivered the first request for emails on October 28, 2014, to several previous secretaries, including Clinton; this was done as part of an effort by the agency to update its record keeping to stay in compliance with federal requirements. Powell, as he publicly stated, had none to provide because they had all been deleted. Clinton instructed her lawyers at Williams & Connolly to review all of the emails on her behalf to determine which were work-related and which were not.[/font]
[font size="3"]Multiple methods were used. First, a computerized search was conducted of every email sent to an account ending with “.gov,” which would include all the documents sent to every official government email. That found 27,500 emails, all of which were already preserved in federal systems. Then another search was conducted using the first and last names of more than 100 officials with the State Department and others in the government. Next, manual reviews were performed in case there were unrecognized email addresses or typographical errors that would have prevented those documents from being located. In addition, the lawyers searched for a number of other specific terms, including the words Benghazi and Libya. These last three steps located more than 2,900 other emails. Printouts of the 30,490 emails were then provided to the State Department. Some critics have suggested there was something untoward about the fact Clinton sent paper records. But that is the procedure that is required by the State Department in a document called the Foreign Affairs Manual.
Once all of the reviews were completed, Clinton deleted all of the remaining emails deemed to be unrelated to her work. While at first that struck me as foolish, it is now clear it was necessary. The committee, which has leaked misleading information and publicly accused Clinton of wrongdoing, was demanding access to the server so it could decide, [font color="red"]contrary to the requirements of law[/font], which documents should be produced. It’s safe to assume that every personal, private detail of Clinton’s life that might have been captured in her emails would immediately appear as “scoops” in the morning newspaper or discussed by committee members on national television.[/font]
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