Chairman Trey Gowdy first thanked the Benghazi heroes for their sacrifice at a Tuesday press conference on Capitol Hill to present the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s final report. Their 800-page document includes detailed information provided by over 100 witness interviews.
“Read the report,” Gowdy urged.
If you do read it, he said, you’ll find two very different images of what occurred the night of September 11, 2012. On one side, you see what was happening in Benghazi. You will see the “urgency” among the GRS agents in the CIA annex. You see the “franticness” with which they entered and reentered burning buildings. You see the “ingenuity” of the team in Tripoli who got their own aircraft and deployed themselves because fellow Americans needed their help. In addition, you read about ambushes and firefights at both the U.S. compound and annex.
Meanwhile, at the State Department, officials were hesitating to act and even debating for hours over what kind of attire to wear.
“Nothing was ever headed to Benghazi,” Gowdy said. No U.S. military asset was ever deployed, despite an order by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. “Not a single wheel” on a single aircraft had even turned toward Libya.
“Washington had access to real time info, but they thought fighting had subsided,” the chairman said.
The committee’s report exposes this stunning contrast, as well as how the Obama administration knowingly misled the American people to insist the ambush was the result of a YouTube video, when they knew it was a terror attack. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emailed her daughter telling her it was an “Al Qaeda-like attack.”
It was all about politics, the committee members concluded.
Gowdy said their report includes recommendations to make sure this failure of leadership doesn’t happen again.
Again, Gowdy urged his fellow Americans to read the committee’s report – it will take less time than our fellow Americans were under attack in Benghazi, he said.
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