DEVELOPING: Here Are the 2 Key Questions Trey Gowdy Is Trying to Answer About Benghazi Trey Gowdy, chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, promised a slow and methodical investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the diplomatic mission and nearby CIA annex that killed four Americans, and that’s just what he’s delivering. The South Carolina Republican has been holding meetings with State Department and Department of Justice officials behind closed doors in recent weeks in preparation for the committee’s next public hearings, expected in the coming weeks. In those meetings, it has apparently become clear that Gowdy has two important questions that he wants answered, according to The Daily Signal. First, he wants to know if Congress has heard from every actual witness who was in Benghazi during the attacks. Some government eyewitnesses have claimed that their employers have threatened them in order to keep them from testifying before Gowdy’s committee. Gowdy is determined to gain “access to all first-hand accounts from those on the ground that night,” regardless of that alleged intimidation, although he concedes that some portions of that testimony “must remain classified,” The Daily Signal reported. Second, Gowdy wants to know what Ambassador Christopher Stevens was doing in Benghazi on the night of the attacks. Theories abound regarding this question, many of them related to Stevens’ meeting earlier that evening with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akim. Investigators including former high-ranking U.S. military officers have concluded that Stevens was working illegally with Turkey to transfer arms to Syrian rebels fighting the Assad regime. But so far President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have said little about Stevens’ presence at the mission that night. “I think folks would tell you that we have to be in dangerous places because you have to balance the policy with the risk and then determine the presence,” Gowdy told Fox News, according to the report. “But you can’t debate risk versus policy if you don’t know what the policy was.” Deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli Greg Hicks testified that Stevens was in Benghazi under orders from Clinton, who had instructed him to open a U.S. Consulate there as soon as practical, the report stated. But the reasoning behind the opening of that consulate remains murky — which is apparently exactly how the Obama administration wants it. Given the tremendous number of facilities like the one at Benghazi run by the State Department around the world, it is imperative that Congress learn what went wrong in Libya in order to prevent similar occurrences elsewhere. The fact that the State Department was revealed to have enacted none of the recommendations of its own internal investigation after the Benghazi attacks — a fact revealed early in Gowdy’s public hearings — is clear indication that State cannot be trusted to right its own ship. In fact, it’s pretty conclusive evidence that it doesn’t even want to. Please share this article on Facebook and Twitter if you support Rep. Trey Gowdy’s attempt to get to the truth about what really happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Recommended For You
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:16:04 +0000
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