Posted on 05/06/2013 6:41:26 PM PDT by markomalley
U.S. special operations forces in Libya could have saved Americans killed in the attack last Sept. 11 on the consulate in Benghazi but were told to stand down, a State Department whistle-blower has told congressional investigators.
The testimony by Gregory Hicks, who will appear before a House panel on Wednesday, contradicts previous testimony by administration officials who have said all U.S. forces in Libya were deployed the night of the attack.
Hicks was in Tripoli during the attack and became the top U.S. diplomat in Libya when Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.
He said the special operations team was ready to fly after Stevens was killed but before a second attack killed two other Americans.
After Libya’s prime minister called to tell him Stevens had died, Hicks said: “The Libyan military agreed to fly their C-130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements.”
But as the special operations team headed to the airport, Hicks said, they got a phone call from Special Operations Command Africa saying, “you can’t go now; you don’t have authority to go now.”
The C-130 ended up leaving after the attack was over and the four Americans were dead.Hicks’s statements clash with assertions from the intelligence community last November in response to reports that CIA officers in Benghazi were told not to rush to the aid of Stevens and the other Americans.
“At every level in the chain of command, from the senior officers in Libya to the most senior officials in Washington, everyone was fully engaged in trying to provide whatever help they could,” a senior intelligence official said at the time.
“There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support.”
Hicks and two other career diplomats with direct knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2012, events are scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee in what’s shaping up to be the sharpest critique yet of how the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton’s State Department handled the attack.
Republicans on Monday released portions of an April 11 interview with Hicks ahead of the hearing.
Hicks said the administration could have saved lives that night and may have undermined the subsequent criminal investigation with talking points that contradicted accounts provided by the Libyan government.
Democrats sought to dampen the potential damage by accusing Republicans of seeking to score political points rather than working collaboratively to bring new evidence to light.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the panel, said Monday that panel’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), had “leaked snippets of interview transcript ... in a selective and distorted manner.”
“This is investigation by press release and does a disservice to our common goal of ensuring that our diplomatic corps serving overseas has the best protection possible to do its critical work,” he said.
State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said Monday he was unaware of the Republicans asking for anyone to testify. He said no one had been prevented from telling their story on Capitol Hill.
White House spokesman Jay Carney on Monday said an independent State Department commission conducted a thorough review of the events in Benghazi last year.
“There was an accountability review board led by two men of unimpeachable expertise and credibility that oversaw a process that was rigorous and unsparing,” Carney said.
The review board faulted the State Department for “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.”
The board did not recommend anybody be fired, however, because it “did not find reasonable cause to determine that any individual U.S. government employee breached his or her duty.”
Hicks said it “let people off the hook.”
In the April interview, Hicks said the administration could have saved its diplomats’ lives if it had dispatched just one aircraft. The naval base at Souda Bay in Crete is about an hour away.
“I believe that if we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split,” Hicks said.
During his interview with congressional investigators, Hicks also expressed outrage that Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on Sunday news shows five days after the attack that it may have been linked to a peaceful protest.
“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” he said.
He was particularly upset because Rice directly contradicted Libyan President Mohammed Magariaf, who told CBS that same day that the attack was “preplanned, predetermined” by militants with ties to al Qaeda.
Rice’s comments, Hicks said, may explain why it took the FBI more than three weeks to be able to set foot in Benghazi, possibly hampering the investigation.
Eight months after the attack, no one has been arrested.
“There’s a cardinal rule of diplomacy that we learn in our orientation class, and that rule is never inadvertently insult your interlocutor,” Hicks said.
“The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable.”
House Republicans have relaunched their investigation into the attack amid calls from more than half the GOP conference to create a select committee to investigate.
Hicks is scheduled to testify along with Mark Thompson, the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s Counterterrorism Bureau; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer who was the top security officer in the country in the months leading up to the attacks.
Nordstrom offered some of the most pointed criticism of the security deficiencies in Libya when he told Issa’s committee last year that State Department officials in Washington were denied repeated requests for more protection for the mission.
“The takeaway … for me and my staff, was abundantly clear — we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident,” Nordstrom testified in October.
Unresolved questions about the attack could also surface in the Senate when the Foreign Relations Committee holds a hearing Tuesday on President Obama’s nominee to replace Stevens.
Some senators have threatened to hold up nominee Deborah Kay Jones over the Benghazi controversy.
Anyone wanting on or off this ping list, please advise.
As I said on 9/12 or 9/13, this is a bigger coverup than Watergate - or it should be regarded as such.
The famous Hillary Clinton words, “what difference does it make”. will be as famous as Nixon’s ,”I’m not a crook”. in Watergate, no one died. The main deal with both is the coverup, only in Benghazi, people died.
It’s bigger than Watergate because this time the media is complicit in the coverup.
does anyone know the time,
when the ‘stand down’ order was given?
I think it is very important
we have armed drones flying all over that region. the earliest help was not an hour away
keep in mind, a laser designator doesn’t green light until something accepts the tasking. something was in the area and accepted the tasking...
then didn’t fire once the target was ‘painted’....
providing a laser beam back to the operator...
who was then killed
Amazingly we see that people were chomping at the bit to get to Benghazi and save Americans all while the politicians sat on their hands and didn’t even try.... So effectively how can Obama say everything was done that could have been done that is a proven lie if Africom told the Special Ops guys to stand down and not get on that C130, this needs a Special Prosecutor. The Commander of AFRICOM needs to be brought under oath on who told him not to allow the Specops boys in Tripoli to board the C-130 for Benghazi, no doubt this order came from the White House.... The problem with this 3 a.m. phonecall was both Hillary and Obama answered the phone and then promptly hung up.
About Barry’s traditional Party Night-Wednesday, May 8th...
I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve.
OPEN the presents, whistleblowers!!!!!
Americans (conservative ones) have been very, very good!
I hope security is extra tight with guards posted, independent surveillance, no walking through large crowds, no use of any cell phones registered in their names or email addresses where the IP addresses can be traced, etc... Use runners for communications. No food service to the hotel rooms and use private drivers that no one knows about. You know NSA is on 24/7 surveillance on the whistleblowers because that’s how 0 rolls. That’s how far we’ve come with the current “transparent” administration
They need to get their statements taken ASAP before they appear before Congress as well.
SeeBS Online actually has a pretty good article up:
This guy Hicks (Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks) appears to be willing to tell what he knows, which is quite a bit, and could be the key...
That said, it may be what he learned somewhat afterward that has pushed Hicks to testify. From the (recommended) Wikipedia article* (lots of details all in one place) which quotes the book “Benghazi: The Definitive Report,” by Jack Murphy and Brandon Webb: Deputy National Security Advisor John O. Brennan was running his own little private war on terrorists in Libya and NOT keeping Amb. Stevens OR the CIA in the loop. The book claims the attack on the compounds was a retaliatory attack, from a direction Stevens did not expect: Ansar al-Sharia.
Now, we know Amb. Stevens obviously WAS worried about the security situation, but perhaps he did indeed not expect an attack from Ansar al-Sharia, as, after all, they were supposedly working for the Libyan Gov’t to provide security in Benghazi.
Granted, Ansar al-Sharia may not have been the only actors on that side of it... But Deputy Chief Hicks would seem to have MANY reasons to be angry. I hope he has some Seals or trusted CIA as guardians. Though apparently his testimony has already been given, for the truth to really get out, this guy needs to be interviewed on TV, extensively.
*The link, BTW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack
The Wikipedia article does have omissions and biases. For example, it seems to attempt to exonerate some of Obama’s statements by referring to the video tapes of the attack being recovered after Obama made some of those statements (lies) about the nature of the attack, as if: None of the video was watched live or recalled, none of the phone calls from our people in Libya were recorded or recalled, no information was coming back from survivors or other persons closely involved (Deputy Chief Hicks, for example!!), and no one “heard” the Libyan President’s remarks on Sept. 16.
Uh-huh.
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