washingtonpost
Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee largely exonerated
the U.S. military from responsibility for failures associated with the
Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, instead blaming the
White House and the State Department for ignoring heightened threats in
the area.
The committee majority’s conclusions, in a report to be
released Tuesday, do not differ significantly from those reached by
other congressional panels that have touched on the military’s role in
the Benghazi incident.
While the GOP lawmakers said that commanders could have pushed harder
to position forces to respond to threats in North Africa in general and
Libya in particular, they concluded that no U.S. military assets could
have arrived in Benghazi in time to affect the outcome of the attack,
according to committee staff members who briefed reporters on the
report.
“Armed drones and AC-130” gunships “weren’t within
reasonable flying distance,” said one staffer, who like the other staff
members spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report was not
yet released. Italy-based F-16 aircraft were not on alert status, and
“it is not at all certain that they would have been particularly helpful
in this instance.”
The report is one of several released in
recent months by the Republican-led House, which has continued to
criticize the Obama administration for what some lawmakers have called a
cover-up in the Benghazi attack, in which four Americans were killed,
including
J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
Democrats
have accused the Republicans of overkill, and two Democrats on the
Armed Services Committee said Monday that “this Republican-prepared
report clearly states that the Department of Defense responded
appropriately, quickly, to the best of its ability” to the attack.
“For
more than a year, we have watched Republicans desperately and
obsessively search for a scandal, which has not appeared. It is time to
move forward,” Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the committee’s senior Democrat,
and Rep. Niki Tsongas (Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the committee’s
oversight and investigations panel, said in a statement.
Last month, the Democratic-led Senate Intelligence Committee
faulted the State Department and the intelligence community for failing to increase security at the poorly protected temporary Benghazi compound.
The
Senate report also blamed the CIA, as did the House Armed Services
Committee, for failing to communicate effectively with the Defense
Department, where senior officials were unaware of an intelligence annex
that also came under attack the same night and where two of the four
Americans were killed.
Overall, the Armed Services Committee’s
conclusions, following nearly a year of investigation and both open and
classified hearings, differ little from an interim report released in
April by House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) for the Republican
majority.
While the findings are consistent, the House panel was
able to “go much further down the road of assessing hypotheticals”
regarding the Defense Department’s role, a staffer said. The report
found that there had been no order given to a six-man military group
based in Tripoli to “stand down” rather than rush to Benghazi, but
rather that the majority of the group was ordered to stay in the Libyan
capital to combat possible threats there.
Among the report’s top
conclusions are that the White House “either failed to comprehend the
situation in Libya,” despite intelligence warnings, or “ignored the
dramatically deteriorating security situation there” and did not
instruct the military to change its deployment and readiness.
The
report, staffers said, cites improved communication between the State
and Defense departments and says that military forces are now “arrayed
in a different way to make them more available and able to more readily
respond to potential crisis locations.”
