Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank caught an interesting tidbit
from yesterday’s House hearing on the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic
mission in Libya last month. The GOP — having spent months railing against
the Obama administration for allegedly leaking classified information —
yesterday revealed classified information. “When House Republicans
called a hearing in the middle of their long recess, you knew it would
be something big,” Milbank reports today, “and indeed it was: They
accidentally blew the CIA’s cover.”


Accompanying the State Department officials’ testimony was an areal
photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, which one of the officials
said was “entirely unclassified.” That is until Rep. Jason Chaffez
(R-UT) interrupted testimony to point out that the photo contained
secret information. Milbank explains:
In their questioning and in the public testimony they
invited, the lawmakers managed to disclose, without ever mentioning
Langley directly, that there was a seven-member “rapid response force”
in the compound [in Benghazi] the State Department was calling an annex.
One of the State Department security officials was forced to
acknowledge that “not necessarily all of the security people” at the
Benghazi compounds “fell under my direct operational control.”
And whose control might they have fallen under? Well, presumably it’s
the “other government agency” or “other government entity” the
lawmakers and witnesses referred to; Issa informed the public that this
agency was not the FBI.
“Other government agency,” or “OGA,” is a common euphemism in Washington for the CIA.
This “other government agency,” the lawmakers’ questioning further
revealed, was in possession of a video of the attack but wasn’t
releasing it because it was undergoing “an investigative process.”
Milbank noted that the New York Times had previously reported
that CIA operatives had been evacuated as a result of the attack, but
the paper “withheld locations and details of the facilities at the
administration’s request.”
Minutes after Chaffetz’s outburst, committee chairman Rep. Darrell
Issa (R-CA) ordered the photo be taken down. “Too bad he didn’t think of
that before putting the CIA on C-SPAN,” Milbank said.