Rancorous congressional hearings on Benghazi attack marked by partisan rift

The New York Times military analyst notes that the hearing never established what it might have taken to repel the 11 September attack on the compound in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, or even if the American military team might have played a role in defending the compound if it had been in Libya.

The committee hearings dealt with two topics: whether the State Department was insensitive to the security situation in Benghazi, and the manner in which the department handled the information it released to the public after the attack.

“We were fighting a losing battle. We couldn’t even keep what we had,” said Lt. Col. Andrew Wood of the Utah National Guard, former head of a 16-member U.S. military team that helped protect the U.S. embassy in Tripoli.

Fox News reports that the State Department’s former regional security officer in Libya, Eric Nordstrom, recalled a conversation he had with a State Department official when asking for more agents on the ground. After being told he was asking for too much, Nordstrom recalled telling the official: “‘You know what (is) most frustrating about this assignment? It’s not the hardships, it’s not the gunfire, it’s not the threats. It’s dealing and fighting against the people, programs and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me.’

“And I added it by saying, ‘For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.’”

“It was abundantly clear: we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident,” Nordstrom said. “And the question that we would ask is, again, how thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?”

State Department officials rejected the charges by Wood and Nordstrom, and dismissed the suggestion that additional security forces could have prevented what was described as an “unprecedented” attack on 11 September.

Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, insisted that Nordstrom’s request to extend the military team was, in fact, only a recommendation and that the State Department had been right not to heed it. The broader strategy of the United States was to phase out the use of the American military team and rely more on the Libyan militiamen who were protecting the compound along with a small number of American security officers.

Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, a long-serving civil servant who served in Democratic and Republican administrations, said he was surprised by Wood’s and Nordstrom’s assertions, and pointed out that Wood’s criticism was irrelevant to the 11 September events: the 16-member team led by Wood was based in Tripoli and not Benghazi, so augmenting it would have done nothing to make the Benghazi consulate more secure. Kennedy and other State Department officials said that while it was obvious that extending Wood’s team’s assignment, which ended earlier this year, was an issue unrelated to the Benghazi attack, it is also not clear that granting Nordstrom the additional agents he wanted would have made a meaningful contribution to preventing the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

“The Department of State regularly assesses risk and allocation of resources for security, a process which involves the considered judgments of experienced professionals on the ground and in Washington, using the best information available,” Kennedy said during the hearing.

“The assault that occurred on the evening of Sept. 11, however, was an unprecedented attack by dozens of heavily armed men,” he said (Nordstrom agreed with Kennedy that the attack on the consulate was unprecedented).

The New York Times writes that it was clear that there was a large gap between what security officers in the field in Libya believed was needed and what the State Department officials in Washington assessed was required. Kennedy and Lamb acknowledged that they had not visited Libya.

Handling public information
The second topic covered in the hearings was the public statements made by administration officials in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The attack in Benghazi took place during a 3-day period which saw demonstrations next to and assaults on U.S. consular facilities in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Pakistan, and other Muslim countries. Those demonstrations were triggered by the posting on YouTube of a crude anti-Islamic video. Administration’s officials told the committee that since the attack in Benghazi, although deadly, took place at the very same time as the demonstrations in other Muslim countries, the initial assumption was that the Benghazi events were also triggered by the video.

Administration officials — notably Susan Rice, the U.S. UN ambassador, in a 16 September TV interview — kept to this “spontaneous eruption” explanation for five or six more days. As more intelligence information came in, however, it became clear that, unlike the other demonstrations in Muslim capitals, the Benghazi attack was a pre-planned assault by an al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic militant organization based in eastern Libya.

Kennedy himself, in a behind-closed-door meeting with lawmakers on 12 September, a day after the attack, said that in his view it was a pre-planned, coordinated attack. During yesterday’s hearings, however, he stood by Rice.

“No one in the administration has claimed to know for certain all the answers. … For example, if any administration official, including any career official, were on television on Sunday, Sept. 16, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said,” Kennedy testified. “The information she had at that point from the intelligence community is the same that I had at that point.”

Fox news notes that this statement prompted a flurry of follow-up questions, since, as noted above, Kennedy himself had told lawmakers on 12 September that he thought the strike was coordinated.

Representative Darrell Issa (R-California), chairman of the oversight committee, said yesterday that it appeared the department was beginning “the process of coming clean.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney, at a separate briefing, gave an explanation similar to Kennedy’s. “Initial assessments in the immediate aftermath of the attack in Benghazi were made and it was a government-wide assessment that the foundation of what Ambassador Rice said, what I said, and what others said,” he said. “What we knew based on the limited facts we had available to us at that time.”

Referring to attack, Carney said that in hindsight there was “no question that the security was not enough to prevent that tragedy from happening.”