By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--June 28, 2016
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Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.So the Times leads with the best spin it can possibly come up with to cover Hillary's #. But as The Hill tells us, the fullness of the report is a devastating indictment of Hillary's performance as Secretary of State, and of just about everyone else in the Obama Administration concerning the decisions that led up to this attack, and the actions taken in its aftermath:
Clinton and other officials did not adequately heed concerns about the growing extremism in Benghazi and other parts of Libya, the report concluded. “It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either [Undersecretary of Management Patrick] Kennedy or the secretary in understanding the Benghazi Mission compound was at risk — short of an attack,” the report claimed. “The intelligence on which Kennedy and the secretary were briefed daily was clear and pointed—Al Qa’ida, al Qa’ida like groups, and other regional extremists took refuge in the security vacuum created by the Libya government and its inability to take command of the security situation.” After the violence occurred, the report accuses her of knowing that it was sparked by extremist militia members but nonetheless blamed it on an anti-Muslim video responsible for other protests. The day after the violence, Clinton told Egypt’s prime minister that U.S. officials “know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.
Military orders also appeared to have gotten lost or misinterpreted on their way down the chain, the report claims. And details were lost about which responsibilities fell to the Pentagon, which were in the hands of the State Department and who — if anyone — needed to be evacuated. “The response to the attacks suffered from confusion and misinformation circulating between the agencies,” the report claims, “underscoring that no one effectively took charge of the U.S. government’s response.” Troops remained motionless for hours after then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ordered forces deploy to the scene of the violence. At one point, a platoon of U.S. Marines changed into and out of their uniforms four different times as they waited to be deployed, due to changing orders about “the image that would present” of having uniformed U.S. forces marching through the city.
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