Townhall's Guy Benson Reviews 12 Damning Revelations from Yesterday's Benghazi Hearing

May 9th, 2013 1:00 PM

While many in the liberal media are doing their level best to spin and/or downplay yesterday's testimony at the Benghazi hearings, Guy Benson of Townhall.com has done a great job summing up a dozen damning revelations from the career Foreign Service staffers who testified yesterday.

You can read Benson's full story here. Below the fold I've excerpted from just the first five revelations from Benson's piece, "The Damning Dozen":


(1) Murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens' second in command, Gregory Hicks, was instructed not to speak with a Congressional investigator by Sec. Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills...

(2) When Hicks began to voice strenuous objections to the administration's inaccurate talking points with State Department higher-ups, the administration turned hostile...

(3) Secretaries Clinton and Rice (the president's hand-selected messenger on Benghazi to the American people) repeatedly stated that the attack arose from "spontaneous protests" over an obscure YouTube video.  This was never true.  Hicks called the YouTube a "non-event" in Libya...

(4) A small, armed US force in Tripoli was told it did not have the authority to deploy to Benghazi in the midst of the attack.  Twice. Flight time between the two cities is less than an hour. Members of the would-be rescue contingent were "furious" over this obstruction...

(5) The US' security chief in Libya, Eric Nordstrom, averred that Sec. Clinton "absolutely" would have been briefed on his (and Stevens') repeated requests for an increased security presence in Libya.  This claim undercut committee Democrats' nitpicking over whether Clinton's signature appeared on the memo denying those requests...

Even that handful of revelations in isolation should prove more than enough to keep the media interested in getting to the bottom of Benghazi. Here's hoping that proves to be the case, even as experience tells us it's the Guy Benson's of the world who will do the yeoman's work that the networks simply won't.