I listened to C-Span while driving yesterday. These two sounded merely mouthed. This is the first image I have seen of them. It’s nice to know that my imagination is still pretty sharp...although she looks more useless than she sounded.
I loved the part when one of the Reps asked these two if they had ever been on the ground in North Africa—and they hadn’t. Typical bureaucrats. They could be from any colonial foreign office throughout the ages.
The State Dept position was that they needed to transition away from military security assets to State Dept assets—and by that they meant poorly trained, unreliable local contract personnel who ended up abandoning the consulate. Lamb said they were using a “model” for the security arrangements that had worked elsewhere. LTC Wood subsequently said he felt as though a “cookie cutter” security plan was being foisted upon them, and that the realities on the ground were being disregarded. Lamb and Kennedy obviously had no clue, the whole hearing, that they had done anything wrong. They had followed the model. They adhered to protocol. In their words, “nothing” could have prevented that attack. They totally discounted the deterrence effect a well-armed, well-manned security detail can provide. To them it was just a matter of numbers, even if that meant replacing highly trained, highly skilled military personnel with marginally trained and unreliable local contract employees. By the way, the Yemeni in charge of US embassy security in Yemen was killed today.