Updated 12:30 pm ET -- Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified Friday before the House Intelligence Committee as Congress seeks to find out why the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi occurred and why greater protection was not provided to the facility.
Petraeus also testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee Friday. Both sessions were held behind closed doors.
House Intelligence Committee member Peter King, R-N.Y. told reporters Friday after Petraeus testified that the initial “talking points” from the Obama administration to prepare officials for what they should say publicly in the first days after the attack had been changed to delete references to any al Qaida involvement in the event.
King said he and his colleagues now needed to hear testimony from officials in the State Department, the Defense Department “and also people at the White House – to see if anyone at the White House changed the talking points.”
In the attack Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans – Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Sean Smith – were killed.
King told reporters after Petraeus testified that “his testimony today was that from the start (immediately after Sept. 11) he had told us that this was a terrorist attack, that terrorism was involved from the start.”
But King said that he himself “had a very different recollection" of what Petraeus had told the panel in the initial aftermath of the attack.
"The clear impression that we (members of the House Intelligence Committee) were given (in the initial days after the attack) was that the overwhelming amount of evidence was that it arose out of a spontaneous demonstration and it was not a terrorist attack,” King said.
Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts after hearing from Petraeus that “I can’t agree that there was entirely an intelligence failure” in the days leading up to the attack.
He said, “The intelligence community did put people in the area of Benghazi and in Libya generally. It was a hot spot, it was an area where you had to be on high alert – they did not pick up the actual attack itself. So we’re evaluating whether or not it was or was not an intelligence failure.”
Another House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Tom Rooney, R–Fla., told MSNBC’s Roberts that he’d learned from the Petraeus testimony how inadequate the protection at the consulate was on Sept 11.
“We had less than a handful of security there for the ambassador,” Rooney said. “First of all, I don’t know why the ambassador was there on 9/11 to begin with, but that’s a whole other story. Second we were relying really on local Libyan militia who – if there was anything coordinated about the two attacks, at the compound and at the annex, it is that there was a coordinated absence by the people who were supposed to be protecting us.” He said the Libyan militia “were nowhere to be found” when the assault occurred.
In planning for threats to American embassies and consulates, Rooney said, “there has got to be some more guarantee that our ambassadors are going to have the kind of protection that’s not some Libyan-style militia that obviously doesn’t work.”
Rooney added that President Barack Obama has said “he did everything he could” to protect the consulate. “He may have done everything he could, but it wasn’t enough because our people are dead.”
The investigation into the Benghazi events has become a major focus for members of Congress returning to the Capitol after last week’s elections. The episode has political implications not only for Obama but for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.
Petraeus resigned one week ago after the revelation of his adulterous affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.
At issue in the investigation and the political scrimmaging this week has been the question of why, five days after the attack, the administration dispatched U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to speak on the Sunday news shows to offer a preliminary explanation of the attack, which she attributed to an anti-Islamic video that was circulated on YouTube. More >>
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario