Washington: Hillary Clinton should have realised that extremists posed a risk to US officials in Libya before the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi, according to early excerpts given to CNN from a Republican-led report on the episode.
The intelligence available suggested that an attack was possible and Clinton and a top aide, Patrick Kennedy, should have realised the risks posed to the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, according to the report by a committee from the House of Representatives which looked into the Obama administration’s handling of the incident.
“It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either Kennedy or the secretary in understanding the Benghazi mission compound was at risk — short of an attack,” CNN cites the report as saying.
The Benghazi panel was created in May 2014 to investigate attacks on a US diplomatic compound and a CIA outpost on September 11, 2012, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and the episode continues to echo as an issue in her campaign.
The committee plans to issue its full final report Tuesday after more than two years of work and $7 million (Dh25.71 million) in spending. Committee members led by Chairman Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, will hold a news conference 10am in Washington.
Democrats on the committee say that Clinton did nothing improper. They released their own findings Monday saying that they expected the final report to be a politically motivated attack on Clinton.
“Far from honouring the four brave Americans who died, the Benghazi Committee has been a partisan sham since its start,” Brian Fallon, national spokesman for the Clinton campaign, wrote in a Tweet.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a June 22 speech that Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” The attack actually unfolded during the daytime and early evening in the US, and Clinton was involved in discussing how the US could respond.
The 800-page report examines whether the Obama administration misled the public about the events in Benghazi and fully cooperated with congressional investigators. It is also likely to discuss whether Clinton should be held personally accountable for inadequate security at the outposts and why the administration didn’t dispatch a force to Benghazi to help. The Defence Department has maintained that emergency aid was too far away to arrive on time.
“It remains unclear why a State Department presence in Benghazi was so important,” Republican committee members Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Pompeo of Kansas wrote in a separate analysis that was provided to Bloomberg. “No matter how important a presence was — to Secretary Clinton, to the State Department, to the United States — it should have become very clear that the risks of staying without more security outweighed any possible benefit.”
Clinton was even planning her own trip to Benghazi for October 2012 before the attacks occurred, Jordan and Pompeo said.
The Benghazi committee’s probe is one of eight that Congress has conducted into the incident in addition to an Accountability Board investigation that Clinton herself set up after the attack.
Previous investigations have criticised the State Department for inadequate security at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi and intelligence sharing flaws before the attack, but largely place the blame further down the chain than Clinton. The House Intelligence Committee in 2014 rejected the idea of a cover-up by the Obama administration.
Panel Republicans have responded to criticism of their work by saying they have looked at issues that go far beyond Clinton and her actions.
“This is not about one person. This investigation is about the four brave Americans we lost in Libya,” committee spokesman Matt Wolking said in a statement Monday. “We look forward to revealing the new information we have uncovered to the families and the American people.”
