Secretary of State John Kerry is almost certain to be a witness in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, after being released from a subpoena to testify before the House Oversight Committee on June 12.
Never mind that he wasn’t the Secretary of State when more than 100 gunmen attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and killed four people, including Ambassador Christopher Stephens, on Sept 11, 2012. SecState on that day was potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The noisy fight between both parties over the necessity for Kerry’s testimony, exemplifies the one thing we know about Benghazi today: We’re no closer to the truth than we were 21 months ago.
Formally known as the Select Committee on Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, the House panel is the fifth congressional probe into the attack. The four already in existence have produced the requisite reports, yet partisan bickering and finger-pointing over the narrative is all we’ve been hearing from the mainstream press.
As we posited in an earlier article, there’s a possibility that what really happened in Benghazi is unflattering to both Republicans and Democrats, and is being covered up by both sides. Will the fifth Congressional committee’s investigation produce answers, or will it be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
We know what kind of questions the committee wants to ask, thanks to Republican Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia, who authored the bill creating the panel.
But what’s more interesting is the questions the committee won’t be asking, and why.
GAMING THE BLAME
The history of Congressional inquiries into national security issues provides a clear lesson—Congress is happy to look for blame anywhere but where it would reflect poorly on its own involvement and funding responsibilities.
Based on that history, and information that has emerged since the Benghazi attack, it is a good bet that Congress will not address the following two issues in their upcoming hearings:
The first issue likely to be avoided is the Benghazi-based CIA covert-action project, compromised by both the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Stephens, and the immediate political response of Congress following the attacks on the State Department complex – which we now know to have been a State Department cover for a covert CIA weapons interdiction operation run out of the “embassy annex.”
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