Unasked questions fog facts on Benghazi
Pentagon sensed terrorism quickly
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The Washington Times
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Republican lawmakers have failed to pin
down senior military officials on how they characterized the Benghazi attack to
the White House
and President Obama on Sept. 11, 2012, the day terrorists stormed a U.S.
diplomatic mission and bombed a CIA
annex in the eastern Libyan city.
The issue gained importance in January
when Republican members of the House Committee on Armed Services released
former top-secret transcripts of senior officials testifying on the military’s
response to Benghazi.
For the first time, it was disclosed that retired ArmyGen. Carter Ham,
then head of U.S.
Africa Command, testified that he had told Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta
and Army Gen.
Martin E. Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs
chairman, that day that Americans in Benghazi were under attack by terrorists,
not demonstrators. He said both men agreed.
The Jan. 13 disclosure opened another
avenue of inquiry on Benghazi. It also spurred reports among conservative media
that the nation’s two most senior military leaders immediately knew the assault
was a terrorist attack and must have told the president that day.
A White House
reporter told presidential spokesman Jay Carney that
the House transcripts showed that Gens. Ham and Dempsey and Mr. Panetta
“believed within minutes of the attack” that it was “probably a terror attack.”
But a review of Gen. Ham’s June 26
testimony shows he never was asked precisely when he came to that conclusion.
Was it when he met with Mr. Panetta
and Gen.
Dempsey before they went to the White House and
spoke with the president? Or was it after they returned to the Pentagon a short
time later and the three gained more information as the CIA
annex attack began? A precise answer is not in the transcripts.
In addition, House Armed Services
Committee members did not ask Gen. Dempsey,
when he appeared, exactly how he characterized the attack to the president in
light of Gen. Ham’s
testimony.
Mr. Panetta
did not testify before Armed
Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which took the
testimony in closed sessions last year from Gens. Dempsey and Ham, and other
military leaders.
House Armed Services Committee
spokesman Claude
Chafin defended Republican
committee members’ work.
“I think it is
important to reinforce what this briefing series sought to do,” Mr. Chafin
said. “It was not to answer every question about Benghazi, or even every
question under DOD’s
jurisdiction. It was to look at the actions of the operational chain of command
from the lieutenant colonel on the ground in Libya all the way up to
Gen. Dempsey.
“In part, we wanted to better understand
the rationale behind a military posture that was clearly inadequate, given the
instability in the region in the run-up to the attack. Once we had been briefed
by the chain of command, we felt we had enough information to reach some
interim conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other questions
and other witnesses to hear from — including Panetta.”
When Republicans released the transcripts,
Mr. Carney went
on the attack.
“So I think there has been a lot of
reporting on this, and there has been a lot of inaccurate reporting on it,
generally speaking, not just this particular case of House Republicans
selectively releasing more testimony to outlets so that they can use it for
political purposes,” the White House
spokesman said.
Mr. Chafin said
Republicans did no such thing.
“We publicly released all of the
testimony, which DOD
declassified with the full knowledge of what we were going to do with it, at
one time, without any editorial comment,” he said. “We believe that these
transcripts speak for themselves.”
The matter of what was said at the White House on
Sept. 11 is important. For two weeks after the attacks, the White House told
the American public that the killings of Ambassador J.
Christopher Stevens and three other Americans resulted from spontaneous
protests over a U.S.-made
anti-Muslim video.
Republicans charge that narrative was a
cover story amid Mr.
Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. The White House, they
say, had ample evidence within hours that al Qaeda-linked
terrorists carried out a planned attack.
If the nation’s most senior military
leaders told Mr. Obama on Sept. 11 that the attackers were terrorists, not
demonstrators, it would strongly bolster the Republican case.
But a review of hearing transcripts
shows Republicans did not nail down the timeline.
Gen. Ham, who then
led Africa
Command based in Stuttgart, Germany, provided his
most extensive account of his actions Sept. 11 to the House Armed
Services subcommittee in June.
Gen. Ham happened
to be at the Pentagon
that day. When notified of the attack, he headed to Gen. Dempsey’s
office, and the two went to inform Mr. Panetta,
the defense secretary.
Gen. Dempsey
and Mr. Panetta
then went to the White
House for a previously scheduled meeting with the president. They returned
to the Pentagon
and again huddled with Gen. Ham to
discuss options for aiding Americans in Benghazi.
Gen. Ham told the House
subcommittee that “to me, it started to become clear pretty quickly that
this was certainly a terrorist attack and not just something sporadic.”
He testified that he told Gen. Dempsey
and Mr. Panetta
of his view and “we were pretty clear on, pretty shortly thereafter, the kind
of the nature of the attack.”
He said his first discussions with the
two “were less about the origins of the attack” and more on Stevens‘
whereabouts.
But lawmakers did not ask Gen. Ham to define
“pretty quickly” and “pretty shortly.”
No one asked if the generals reached
that conclusion before they went to the White House or
after they returned.
When committee Republicans released
their Benghazi report Feb. 11, the issue of what Gen. Dempsey
and Mr. Panetta
told the president that day was described this way:
“Upon arrival, the two discussed the
attack with the president for 15 to 30 minutes, at which time they presumably
shared all that was known about the unfolding events,” the report states.
The key word is “presumably.”
In October, four months after Gen. Ham
testified, Gen.
Dempsey appeared before the House
subcommittee for one hour and 17 minutes.
No congressman asked him precisely when
Gen. Ham told
him that the incident was a terrorist attack and when he agreed with that
assessment.
Nor did any lawmaker ask the four-star
general what he told Mr. Obama at the White House that
day or whether he told the president that terrorists or demonstrators had
attacked the diplomatic mission. By that time, the attack on the CIA
annex had not begun.
“Soon after I received the initial
reports of the Benghazi attack, I discussed the situation with the Secretary of
Defense Leon
Panetta and with President Obama in a meeting that we had already scheduled
that day on another topic,” Gen. Dempsey
said in the prepared statement part of his testimony.
In February 2013, Gen. Dempsey
appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services for a hearing devoted to
Benghazi.
Gen. Dempsey
testified that when he met with the president Sept. 11, a short time after he
had been briefed by Gen.
Ham at the Pentagon,
he did not know the origin of the attack. It could have been a planned
terrorist attack or an attack by demonstrators, he said.
“At that point I didn’t know,” he
testified of his meeting with the president.
“It could have been either one,
couldn’t it?” said Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.
“That’s right,” the general said.
Leon
M. Panetta
Mr. Panetta
also testified at the Senate committee
hearing in February 2013.
He said he did not know at first what
was going on that day, but “when I later found out that you had
[rocket-propelled grenades] and mortars and there was an attack on that second
facility, there was no question in my mind it was a terrorist attack.”
This timeline would mean Mr. Panetta
had not concluded it was a terrorist attack when he met with Mr. Obama on Sept.
11.
Gen. Ham’s
testimony was months away, so Mr. Panetta
was not questioned about the general’s Day One assessment.
Asked by Sen. Lindsey Graham, South
Carolina Republican, about meeting with the president that day, Mr. Panetta
testified: “I talked to him on Sept. 11 with regards to the fact that we were
aware this attack was taking place.” He did not specify the attackers as
demonstrators or terrorists.
“I think the biggest problem that
night, senator, was that nobody knew really what was going on there,” he said.
Mr. Panetta
made a point of disclosing that, when he appeared before the Senate committee
in a private session on Syria three days after the attacks — Sept. 14, 2012 —
“I said it was a terrorist attack.” After his private briefing, several
senators present told reporters there was no doubt the Benghazi incident was a
terrorist assault, based on the weapons used.
That was the Friday before Susan E. Rice,
then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, went on the Sunday TV talk shows to
give the public the administration’s assessment: The attack resulted from
spontaneous demonstrations.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” she said:
“Our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was, in fact,
initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo,
almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which
were prompted, of course, by the video.”
The first administration official to
publicly describe the attack accurately was Matthew Olsen, director of the
National Counterterrorism Center. He did so in testimony to a Senate committee
Sept. 19, three days after Ms. Rice’s TV
appearances.
Mr. Panetta
publicly declared Benghazi a terrorist attack at a Pentagon press
conference Sept. 28.
Various government reports on Benghazi
did not address the question of what Mr. Panetta
and Gen.
Dempsey told the president Sept. 11 as the first attack on
the diplomatic mission subsided. They include the State Department’s
accountability review board and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s
bipartisan report of Jan. 15, 2013.
A Republican interim report from four
House committee chairmen mentioned the White House
meeting but provided no details.
Gen. Ham was
interviewed by staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
in a classified session in March. The committee has not released details.
Citing Gen. Ham’s
testimony, Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly
asked Mr. Obama repeatedly during an interview that aired Super Bowl Sunday
whether Mr.
Panetta described the incident in Benghazi as an attack or a terrorist
attack during the Sept. 11 meeting at the White House.
Mr.
Obama: What he told me was, there was an attack on our compound.
Mr. O'Reilly:
He didn’t use the word “terror?”
Mr.
Obama: In the heat of the moment, Bill, what folks
are focused on is what’s happening on the ground. Do we have eyes on it? How
can we make sure our folks are safe?
Mr. O'Reilly:
Did he tell you it was a terror attack?
Mr.
Obama: What he said to me was, “We’ve got an attack on our
compound. We don’t know yet who’s doing it.” Understand by definition, Bill, when
somebody is attacking our compound, that’s an act of terror.
Mr. Obama continued to cite an
American-made anti-Muslim video as the cause of the attack for at least two
weeks after it happened.
There was no demonstration that day at
the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Neither the mission nor the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli
reported any demonstrations outside the compounds. Surveillance video showed no
crowd outside until 20 or so terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenades
broke down the gate at 9:42 p.m.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/2/unasked-questions-fog-facts-on-benghazi/#ixzz2urOOigzv
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