By Roger Aronoff ——Bio and Archives--February 20, 2013
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DAVID GREGORY: It’s striking though, Senator, because some members are saying, “Look, we need more time to look at his speeches, to see if he really is anti-Israel.” Others are saying, “No, we’re going to use this moment of leverage to get more information about Benghazi, about what the president said, who he called the night of the attack.” Or getting some of the emails about who changed the talking point. The president said this week on the issue of Benghazi, “You guys are running out of things to ask about.” So let me ask you, at the end of the day here on Benghazi, if the worst thing is true, what is that truth about how the president handled the crisis?
GREGORY: But a massive cover-up of what? Susan Rice said there was a lot of confusion.McCain then asked Gregory, “Do you care whether four Americans died? …the reasons for that? And shouldn’t people be held accountable for the fact that four Americans died?
GREGORY: Well, what you said was the cover-up…A cover-up of what? MCCAIN: Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans. The information has not been forthcoming. You can obviously believe that it has. I know that it hasn’t. And I’ll be glad to send you a list of the questions that have not been answered, including what did the president do and who did he talk to the night of the attack on Benghazi? And why was it that the people who were evacuated from the consulate the next day were not interviewed the next day. And then they would’ve known that it was not a spontaneous demonstration. Why did the president for two weeks, for two weeks during the heat of the campaign continue to say he didn’t know whether it was a terrorist attack or not? Is it because it interfered with the line of “al Qaeda has [been] decimated? And everything’s fine in that part of the world? Maybe. We don’t know. But we need the answers. Then we’ll reach conclusions. But we have not received the answers. And that’s a fact.David Gregory was just doing his job, which is, as part of the NBC team, to deflect any accusations that might be damaging to President Obama’s reputation or agenda. And to portray the Republicans as nefarious troublemakers who oppose anything and everything that Obama supports. The Hagel nomination may still be in trouble, though apparently not from the lack of transparency on the Benghazi scandal. Instead it may be the lack of transparency by Hagel, and the drip, drip, drip of information coming out about some of his previously unreported speeches. The latest revelation comes from Alana Goodman of The Washington Free Beacon. Goodman was previously with Commentary magazine, and before that, she was an intern with AIM’s American Journalism Center. As Commentary notes: “Our former colleague Alana Goodman broke last week’s story about a contemporaneous account of a 2007 speech given by Hagel at Rutgers University in which he made the outrageous charge that the U.S. State Department was being run by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Today Goodman is at it again as she reports that there was yet another Hagel speech at the same venue three years later in which he again offended Israel and its supporters: “Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel said Israel is on its way to becoming an apartheid state during an April 9, 2010, appearance at Rutgers University, according to a contemporaneous account by an attendee. “Hagel also accused Israel of violating U.N. resolutions, called for U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas to be included in any peace negotiations, and described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a ‘radical,’ according to the source.” The vote on Hagel’s nomination is supposed to occur when the Senate comes back next week. But if the revelations continue, it could spell trouble for Hagel’s confirmation. Bob Woodward was on Fox News Sunday this weekend, and hinted at the behind-the-scenes machinations: “I think there’s another dimension here and that is, what are Democratic senators really thinking about the Hagel nomination?” said Woodward. “I understand some of them have actually called the White House and said, ‘Is Hagel going to withdraw, would he consider withdrawing?’ The answer is an emphatic ‘no,’ but remember John Erlichman—Nixon’s aide—used to talk about twisting slowly in the wind. The factor here is time, and there is this twisting in the wind aura to all of this. I wonder whether [they] are kind of looking and asking what really is the fundamental question here: Is he really the best person to be Secretary of Defense?”
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Roger Aronoff is a member of Citizens Commission on National Security. Roger is the writer/director of Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope