By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored repeated warnings of what one security agent called their “suicide mission” in Benghazi, creating the opportunity that terrorists took on Sept. 11, 2012, to kill the ambassador to Libya, two Republicans on the Benghazi probe charged Tuesday.
As the Select Committee on Benghazi releases its long-awaited report, two of the panel’s Republican members, Reps. Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan, released their own additional views, taking firm aim at Mrs. Clinton, who they said must answer for why she was so insistent on keeping people in Libya’s troubled second city — creating a target for the terrorists.
“There was a very good chance that everyone was going to die,” one diplomatic security agent told the committee, recalling the troublesome security situation in the run-up to the attack.
And even as Americans were dying in the attack, the State Department seemed more focused on trying to expunge an anti-Islamic video and appeasing the Libyan government than in trying to get aid to those at the diplomatic outpost and a neighboring CIA compound.
Mrs. Clinton personally joined a high-level video meeting the night of the attack and that gathering spent an extraordinary amount of time focused on the video, the lawmakers said. Of 11 action items emerging from that meeting, five of them related to the video, according to an email recounting the meeting, which the committee unearthed.
“What has also emerged is a picture of the State Department eating up valuable time by insisting that certain elements of the U.S. military respond to Libya in civilian clothes and that it not use vehicles with United States markings,” the lawmakers said. “We will never know exactly how long these conditions delayed the military response but that they were even a part of the discussion is troubling.”