WASHINGTON - The seasoned diplomat who penned a highly critical report on security at a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, defended his scathing assessment but absolved then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“We knew where the responsibility rested,” Thomas Pickering said Sunday. “She had already stated on a number of occasions she accepted as a result of her job the full responsibility. On the other hand, legislation setting up our board made it very clear that they didn’t want a situation in which a department or agency had accepted responsibility and then nobody looked at where the decisions were made.
“They’ve tried to point a finger at people more senior than where we found the decisions were made,” Pickering, whose career spans four decades, said of Clinton’s critics.
The Accountability Re-view Board, which Pickering led with retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not question Clinton at length about the attacks but concluded last December that the decisions about the consulate were made well below the secretary’s level.
Pickering and Mullen’s blistering report found that “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels” of the State Department meant that security was “inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”
Pickering’s defense of his panel’s conclusions, however, failed to placate Republicans who have called for creation of a special select congressional committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
The top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said he wants sworn depositions from Pickering and Mullen, and promised to make that request today.
“This is a failure; it needs to be investigated. Our committee can investigate. Now, Ambassador Pickering, his people and he refused to come before our committee,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the panel’s chairman.
Pickering, sitting next to Issa during an appearance on one of Sunday TV news show, said the chairman was lying and that he was willing to testify before the committee.
“That is not true,” said the former top diplomat who has served in Republican as well as Democratic administrations.
Republicans and Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, have questioned why the military couldn’t move faster to stop the two nighttime attacks over several hours. Hicks, who testified before the House Oversight panel this past week, said a show of U.S. military force might have prevented the second attack on the CIA annex that killed security officers Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served several Republican presidents in various capacities, before staying on under President Barack Obama for 2 ½ years, called the suggestion that the Pentagon could have scrambled jets or special forces during the attack a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities.”
“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, think my decisions would have been just as theirs were,” he said on Face the Nation on CBS News. “Frankly, I’ve heard‘Well, why didn’t you just fly a fighter jet over and try and scare ’em with the noise or something?’ Well, given the number of surfaceto-air missiles that have disappeared from Gadhafi’s arsenals, I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft over Benghazi under those circumstances.”
At the hearing last Wednesday, Hicks and two other State Department witnesses criticized Pickering and Mullen’s review. Their complaints centered on a report they consider incomplete, with individuals who weren’t interviewed and a focus on the assistant secretary level and lower.
“I was surprised today that they did not probe Secretary Clinton in detail,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said of the review board.
The hours-long hearing produced no major revelation but renewed interest in the attacks that happened during the lead-up to the November 2012 presidential election.
Even so, Republicans showed little interest in dropping their investigation into what happened at the consulate, what might be done to prevent future such attacks and what political calculations went into rewriting talking points the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, used on news shows.
A series of e-mails that circulated between the State Department and the CIA led to weakened - and, in some cases, erroneous - language that Rice used to describe the assault during a series of five television interviews the Sunday after the attacks.
The newly revealed communications show that senior State Department officials pressed for changes in Rice’s talking points. These senior officials expressed concerns that Congress might criticize the Obama administration for ignoring warnings of a growing threat in Libya.
The White House has contended it only made stylistic changes to the intelligence agency talking points, in which Rice suggested that spontaneous protests over an anti-Islamic video set off the deadly attack. The new details suggest a greater degree of political sensitivity and involvement by the White House and State Department.
Rice and others eventually acknowledged that the Benghazi assault was a premeditated terrorist attack.
“I’d call it a cover-up,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who renewed his call for a select committee to investigate. “I would call it a cover-up in the extent that there was willful removal of information, which was obvious.”
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence committee, said he expects more State Department officials to step forward and testify.
One Republican considering a White House run, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, told an audience in Iowa that he thinks the Benghazi attack “precludes Hillary Clinton from ever holding office.”
Paul wrote in The Washington Times restating his view that Obama should have fired Clinton.
The conservative group American Crossroads released a 90-second video asking if Clinton was “part of a cover-up.” The video, like e-mails and letters from several other groups, asked for political donations.
Benghazi hands Republicans some political opportunities, although none without complications. It may be difficult for average voters to sift the chronology, assess blame or even follow the logic of GOP arguments.
For instance, claims that Clinton and others ignored calls for greater diplomatic security in Libya might be linked to the four American deaths.
But accusations about the post-attack talking points, which sometimes seem to dominate the current debate, have nothing to do with possibly preventing the deaths, thus robbing them of that moral heft.
Some strategists say the Benghazi narrative may prove more valuable for congressional Republicans in next year’s elections than in 2016. House Republicans, in particular, can seize on Benghazi to motivate their base and donors, and to fend off possible primary challenges from the right.
Democrats say Republicans are exploiting the Benghazi deaths, and voters won’t like it.
“Republicans are a desperate party right now, trying to do whatever they can to dirty up the president to make some gains in 2014, and to dirty up Secretary Clinton because they’re terrified she’ll walk into the White House,” said Democratic consultant Doug Thornell. “This is an attempt to keep their base together and motivated” after Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012.
Pickering declined repeated opportunities to criticize Rice’s now-debunked talking points.
“That was not in our mandate,” Pickering said. “We were looking at the security, security warnings, security capacity, those kinds of things.”
Democrats similarly did little to defend the mistaken talking points.
“This is one instance where you know it was what it was,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Pickering spoke with CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face the Nation. Issa and Feinstein spoke with NBC. McCain spoke to ABC’s This Week. Ayotte was on CBS.
Information for this article was contributed by Philip Elliott and Charles Babington of The Associated Press; by Peter Baker of The New York Times; and by Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/13/2013