Live Blog C-SPAN Noon ET * House Oversight Hearing, Benghazi Security Failures [Updates]
By Larry Johnson on October 10, 2012 at 10:30 AM in Current Affairs
From my post, “Obama White House in Meltdown over Benghazi (UPDATE)“: “TODAY’s hearing on murder of four American “diplomats” at the hands of Al Qaeda linked terrorists on the 11th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks will put the final nails in the coffin carrying the political corpse of Barack Obama. His Presidency is dead, done and finished. We have breaking news tonight (thanks, HelenK2) that two senior State Department officers informed the press (sans Fox News) that on the evening of 9-11 in Benghazi there was no protest or spontaneous riot. …”
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From the October 9, 2012 Washington Times article, “State Department creates own board to look at Libya security query“:
“There’s documentary evidence that requests came back to diplomatic security and Undersecretary Kennedy rejected them,” Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and State Department counterterrorism official, told The Washington Times.
“What is at issue here, this board is set up to review all of the decisions that were made prior to the attack on 9/11 that reduced security for the U.S. mission in Libya. Kennedy shouldn’t have had anything to do with this,” Mr. Johnson said. “He should have completely recused himself from the process.” [Continued below ...]
More from “State Department creates own board to look at Libya security query“:
Mr. Kennedy is slated to testify Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding hearings to investigate the State Department’s response to threats before the attack, among other issues.
John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the U.N. who is advising Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told The Times that the undersecretary for management typically handles the creation of special boards.
In this case, Mr. Bolton said, with so many officials facing scrutiny, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, it would have been better to hand the job to the independent inspector general for the State Department.
“It isn’t different than what they’ve done before,” he said. “Maybe the lesson here in the future, it ought to be the [inspector general] that takes this board to guarantee the independence of the members.”
Army Lt. Col. Andy Wood, a Green Beret who led a site security team in Libya, told CBS News that he and others had requested more security, but State Department officials in Washington turned them down and pulled them out of the country, along with a six-member force of elite security guards.
“We tried to illustrate to show them how dangerous and how volatile and just unpredictable that whole environment was over there. So to decrease security in the face of that really is it’s just unbelievable,” Col. Wood said.
Col. Wood said team members could have accompanied Mr. Stevens to Benghazi, the site of the well-coordinated assault by al Qaeda-linked extremists.
Last week, ABC News unearthed a May 3 memo. …
For the rest of the story on ABC News’s exceptional digging by Jake Tapper, see Larry Johnson’s “Media Not Letting Go on Libya.”
Read WT’s accompanying article: “State Department creates own board to look at Libya security query”
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UPDATE 2:
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