Rep. Trey Gowdy raises the decibels in questioning of witnesses at congressional hearing on Benghazi Wednesday.
In occasionally emotional congressional testimony Wednesday, Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, told representatives what unfolded during and after an attack in Benghazi on the U.S. consulate and a nearby CIA facility that evening. Hicks, who was in the capital of Tripoli at the time, said he was on the phone with Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador who was at the consulate. “Greg, we’re under attack," Hicks quoted Stevens as saying. Then the line went dead. It was the last time he talked with Stevens, who was killed in the attack, along three other Americans, and at least 10 Libyan militiamen fighting alongside them.
Hicks and two other witnesses testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee chaired by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California. The two others were Eric Nordstrom, the State Department's regional security officer in Libya at the time, and Mark Thompson, the acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the State Department. Their opening statements can be read here.
Outside some biting opening remarks by the ranking member of the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, and strong support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, questions and comments from Democrats on the committee were, to be generous, subdued. Cummings said the committee has a responsibility to investigate claims before making public accusations:
“In contrast, what we have seen over the past two weeks is a full-scale media campaign that is not designed to investigate what happened in a responsible and bipartisan manner, but rather to launch unfounded accusations and to smear public officials.”
Some of the witnesses' criticisms, especially those of Hicks, have been getting a major airing in the traditional media in the past several days as right-wing representatives and pundits make extravagant claims about the political damage the Benghazi attack—and what they claim is a White House coverup of what happened—will do to Obama and to Clinton's chances of winning the presidency in 2016.
Each of the three witnesses criticized aspects of the U.S. response to the attack, public statements made afterward regarding who was responsible for the attack and what their motive was, the inadequacy of security at the unfortified consulate, parts of the independent investigation by the State Department Accountability Review Board, the failure to interview Thompson as part of that investigation, and the two-and-a-half-week delay in the arrival of the FBI team sent to Libya to investigate the attack.
Hicks also said that he was essentially demoted by being assigned to a desk job because of his criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's public statements that the attack began when protesters motivated by a crude video attacking Islam showed up at the consulate gates. Please continue reading about the Benghazi hearing below the fold.
Hicks and the others pointed out that diplomats on the ground in Libya knew and told Washington that terrorists were behind the attack. Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina put into the record an email from Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs:
The September 12 email—disclosed for the first time on Wednesday—said Jones had spoken to Libya’s ambassador to Washington who said the attack was the work of former Gadhafi regime loyalists. Jones said she told the ambassador: “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
One claim the committee reviewed at some length was Hicks's previous assertion in written testimony to the committee that a Special Operations team in Tripoli was ordered to stand down rather than fly to Benghazi on a C130 and help defend American diplomats and CIA operatives under fire in the attack.
But:
Before Hicks appeared before the committee, two senior Pentagon spokespeople, George Little and Marine Col. Dave Lapan, worked to blunt his testimony. They confirmed that the four-man team was in Tripoli before and at the time of the hours-long assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya began. According to them, the four-man team was not only not kitted for battle, but their path to Benghazi did not reach the city until after the fighting had ended. [...]
The team, in Tripoli already to train Libyan forces, requested to hop on a Libyan C-130 cargo plane to head to Benghazi. But Special Operations Command Africa told them not to go, because “there was nothing this team could do to assist,” Little said, opting to tell the team to stay in Tripoli to assist with consular staff’s evacuation from Benghazi.
Hicks told the committee that when members of Congress came to Libya to investigate, a State Department lawyer sought to keep him from being interviewed by them. Hicks did it anyway, with the lawyer trying to interject himself in the conversation. Subsequently, Hicks said, he was contacted by Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, whose tone, he said, was one of reprimand. He has since been assigned a desk job stateside, which he views as a demotion.
One key claim of Clinton's critics is that she personally signed off on memos that Nordstrom said ignored his requests for better security in Libya, both at the embassy in Tripoli and at the "below-spec" consulate. Clinton has testified she did not handle that directly, that is was left up to underlings, including the regional security officer, which would be Nordstrom himself. He told committee members that he did not feel in charge because of being overruled on security matters. He said he was told at one point that putting his concerns for added security in an official cable would not be helpful.
Nordstrom, who said he has been given access only to the unclassified report released by the accountability board, said he found its conclusions and recommendations sensible.
“It is not what is contained within the report that I take exception to but what is left unexamined,” he said.
Whatever round this is in the fight over Benghazi, it's definitely not the last. As Issa called the hearing ended, he noted, “But this investigation is not over.”