One news report after another is coming out into the massive Benghazi coverup perpetrated by people within the Obama administration as the congressional hearings are scheduled to start on Wednesday, May 8, 2013.
Earlier I wrote about the official Obama administration "Benghazi Talking Points" completely unraveling, with published copies of three different versions by The Weekly Standard and how even a Democratic Congressman acknowledged deliberate inaccurate reports coming from the Obama administration.
CBS News now releases a blockbuster report, showing that U.S. Special forces were told "you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now," causing them to miss a flight that could have saved the lives of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya on 9/11/12.
The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.
According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."
No assistance arrived from the U.S. military outside of Libya during the hours that Americans were under attack or trapped inside compounds by hostile forces armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.
The CBS News report also published excerpts from Hicks' April interview with congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee.
Read the whole report.
Due to the nature of the information finally being exposed about the events of September 11, 2012, before, during, and after the attack, and the Obama administration's subsequent lies told to the American people, even left-wing news sites are headlining with things like "Vindicated: Charges Of A Benghazi Cover-Up No Longer ‘Fox-Induced Hysteria’."
The emergence of a number of whistleblowers who have come forward to refute the claims made by some members of President Barack Obama’s administration relating to the September 11, 2012, attack on an American consulate in Benghazi does not directly implicate the White House in a cover-up. They do, however, demolish the politically-motivated allegations by a slew of commentators on the left who asserted that those reporters doggedly investigating the American response to the attack were onto something. Those left-of-center commentators who dismissed the investigation into the Benghazi attack as a right-wing delusion animated by a personal hatred of the president have never looked more vacuous.
An interim report from the House investigation into the administration’s response to Benghazi released in April is particularly damning. The report found that the decision to withdraw security assets from the region is likely to have come from the highest levels of the State Department. The report also found State’s talking points relating to the attack were altered to remove references to Al Qaeda’s involvement. These edits are unlikely to have been made to protect classified information, and may have been made to support the White House’s election year claim that the terror group had been effectively neutralized.
Some of the claims made by the Benghazi whistleblowers support the interim House report’s assertions.
The American Spectator addresses the initial investigation by the "Accountability Review Board," and the witness testimony they never bothered investigating:
Also yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said that the Obama administration had literally threatened one or more of the Benghazi whistleblowers and that hospital records had been tampered with to conceal the identity of at least one of the survivors of the attack.
So what is the Obama administration trying to hide? Pretty much everything.
Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.
Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.
More from CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash:
Hicks said that four U.S. Special Forces troops in Tripoli, led by Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, planned to hitch a ride on the Libyan plan to travel to Benghazi to help.
“We fully intended for those guys to go, because we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum,” Hicks recalled.
But the four were informed by someone with United States Africa Command – SOCAFRICA - that they didn’t have the authority to do so, Hicks said.
“So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C 130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can't go now, you don't have authority to go now,’" Hicks said. “And so they missed the flight.”
“They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it,” Hicks said. “I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, ‘I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.’ A nice compliment.”
There is no doubt that information will be coming out at a fast rate leading up to and during the hearings on May 8, 2013.
A couple of questions come to mind.
How soon before Obama throws former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton under the bus and how hard will the Clinton's come out swinging once he has?
Recent related WuA posts
White House Benghazi Spin Completely Unravels Ahead Of May 8 Hearings
Names Of Benghazi 'Whistle-blowers' Revealed; Chaffetz - More Will Talk; WH Spin 'Happened A Long Time Ago'
Report Embedded- Progress Report on Benghazi Terror Attack Investigation
Benghazi Review Panel Under Investigation By Inspector General
Benghazi Whistle-Blowers In State Department And CIA Threatened By Obama Administration
Why Is Obama Hiding The 9-11 Benghazi Survivors From Congress?
All Libya, 9-11 Attack WuA related posts found here.
