Those are some of the questions expected to be at the heart of a hotly anticipated Congressional hearing on Wednesday that seems unlikely to shift the partisan battle lines on Benghazi.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hear from three State Department witnesses Republicans have described as “whistleblowers” eager to shed light on what really happened in the eastern Libyan city eight months ago.
That’s when heavily armed assailants stormed the U.S. facility and, in two separate attacks hours apart, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
The committee’s scheduled witnesses are Mark Thompson, the State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism; Gregory Hicks, the former deputy of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, a former regional security officer in Libya.
Republicans have waged an aggressive media campaign over the past week – releasing snippets of testimony and interview transcripts coupled with predictions that the hearing will offer blockbuster revelations.
There’s cause for skepticism, and not just because GOP lawmakers seem to make those kinds of predictions regularly.
First, because the independent investigation commissioned by the State Department has already delivered a blistering indictment of how top officials mishandled repeated warnings about extremist threats in Benghazi. That particular "system failure" has amply been documented.
Second, because charges that the Obama Administration could have deployed military assets that might have made a difference has been explored in previous hearings -- and dismissed by the Pentagon.
Hicks will reportedly testify that the military opted against sending a second special forces rescue team while the fighting raged. It's not clear that they would have arrived in time to make a difference -- and administration officials say that there were Blackhawk Down-style concerns about dropping more Americans into an uncertain conflict.
Still, Republicans argue, the people who made the decision about the deployment couldn't have known the gesture would be futile.
The "after" part, though, has gotten progressively more interesting.
Republicans have charged that the Obama Administration misled Americans by suggesting the Benghazi assault was tied to anger in the Muslim world over an Internet video denigrating Islam that was getting significant media attention at the time. The administration, Republicans insist, wrongly portrayed the attack as a demonstration that had gotten out of hand, rather than an act of terrorism. Why? To protect Obama's reelection campaign claim that al-Qaida was on the run.
The flap took U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice -- who took the claim of an unruly demonstration turned deadly to Sunday news shows -- out of the running to succeed Clinton. The White House has repeatedly dismissed GOP attention to Rice's TV appearances as an " As it happens, the administration knew the Benghazi assault was terrorism from the start, even though their public message changed several times. But the real problem with the Republican claim that the administration tried to cover up the terrorist nature of the Benghazi assault is that Obama himself called it terrorism in a Rose Garden appearance shortly after the assault. There, the president tied Benghazi in with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and said the country would never bow in the face of "acts of terror."
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