(Via Heritage)   Last week’s closed-door testimony by five CIA operatives who witnessed the attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi has finally created an opening for the congressional investigating committees.

The five CIA contractors, who testified in closed-door hearings before the House Intelligence Committee Thursday and Friday, were stationed at the “CIA annex” in Benghazi, about one mile from the U.S. special diplomatic mission. This was the facility that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tasked Ambassador Chris Stevens to turn into a permanent consulate, even though security staff there was totally inadequate.
The CIA contractors were among those who raced to the mission to the aid of Stevens and his staff as the attack occurred just before 10:00 p.m. on September 11. A myriad of well-armed and well-coordinated attackers had entered through the two security gates. The Libyan militias hired by the State Department ran for safety, and the terrified State Department personnel were cooped up in their “safe room,” a barely fortified communications center at the heart of the compound, calling on their cell phones for help.
The CIA operatives who arrived at the mission, said Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R–GA) in an interview with CNN, “could not believe those guys over there were as unprepared and unequipped as they were.”
Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R–CA) last week sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking nine critical questions relating to Benghazi, including, most importantly: Who made the decision not to deploy any U.S. military or diplomatic security assets outside Libya to come to the aid of the Americans under fire?
This question is directly tied to the narrative of events that night. The official version for a while included the ridiculous story that the attack was provoked by an anti-Muslim video. It also held, as per chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Dempsey and then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, that the attack on the special mission was over so quickly that there was no time to bring in outside reinforcements. Why the continued mortal risk to the 32 staffers at the CIA annex nearby was not considered important is inexplicable.
The official narrative, however, has been challenged by survivors of the attack. Specifically, it is still disputed whether the attack was continuous throughout the night. There appears to have been intermittent gunfire throughout the night, though the battle calmed down from about 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., at which time a barrage started up, including the mortar fire that killed the two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Dougherty. (continue reading)

(Meanwhile via NoQuarterUSA) Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers is a Republican and the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence aka HPSCI, but his actions with respect to Benghazi would make a first time visitor to our planet think that Rogers is a Democrat partisan. What the hell is going on with this guy?
Let’s take a careful look at what he said as Fox’s Megyn Kelly a couple of nights back:

KELLY: Thank you, sir. It’s great to have you here.
I want to ask you — let’s go through it piece by piece so the viewers can follow us. First of all, I want to ask you whether you believe it took 14 months to get witnesses in front of you. You were stone walled in getting access to them.
ROGERS: I don’t. Let me tell you why. We had a good base of interviews from the FBI who interviewed them fairly shortly. Not as close as I would have liked but very close to the event. So we had this base of interviews that we were using to try to determine what leadership discrepancies were in what events happened on the ground. At some point it worked at a logical point where we needed to bring witnesses in — even after they were interviewed by the FBI — so we would have at least some base and some comparisons to see where the discrepancies were and where the investigation should go next.

Rogers view of the FBI’s actions are very much at odds with other members of HPSCI. The facts are very clear–the FBI initially was prevented from interviewing the survivors of the Annex attack. The FBI arrived in Benghazi 30 days after the attack and none of the “victims” remained in Libya.
It is important that you understand what really happened before HPSCI last week.
Last Wednesday two gents from the CIA (guys eager to protect the Obama Administration’s story) came before HPSCI and broke no significant new ground. The real story came the next day–three other CIA contractors who had been on the ground in Benghazi during the attack, told a radically different story from the other two. Someone is lying and some members of HPSCI are genuinely perplexed.
Kelly next drills down on the timeline of the attack. The underlying premise of the question? Why did the Administration, specifically the Department of State and the National Security Council, not alert and activate the Counterterrorism Security Group (aka CSG), which is an interagency committee of terrorism experts with the specific mission of identifying potential policy and operational responses to a terrorist attack. Pay close attention to Rogers’ bullshit:   (continue reading)