GOP critical of review of Benghazi attack

Combined News Services

WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are strongly criticizing the review board that investigated last year's Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Yesterday's report from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa faults the Accountability Review Board for questioning senior State Department officials insufficiently, or not at all. It claims the reviewers had conflicts of interest.

Issa's committee will hear from the board's chairman and vice chairman this week. Both were top officials in Republican governments. Thomas Pickering was President George H.W. Bush's UN ambassador; Adm. Mike Mullen was Joint Chiefs chairman under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

State Department spokesman Douglas Frantz defended the Benghazi review as "thorough and transparent." He said facts were being twisted to "advance a political agenda."

The report, prepared by majority staff for Issa (R-Calif.), focuses on what it calls "shortcomings" in the Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigation of the attack in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three security officials were killed.

Most pointedly, it asks why the ARB, which was convened by then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton but acted independently of the State Department, held only four midlevel officials accountable for security lapses at the Benghazi site and "downplayed the importance of decisions made at senior levels of the Department," including by Clinton herself.

Virtually all the issues raised in the report have been examined at previous hearings, although Issa has alleged that both the State Department and the CIA, in charge of a second Benghazi facility attacked the same night, have withheld key documents and prevented some officials from testifying or speaking in private to committee investigators.

The administration has said that no one has been coerced not to testify, although it has resisted allowing diplomatic security agents present on the night of the attack to appear before Issa's committee on the grounds that it would compromise their testimony in future criminal proceedings against the perpetrators.

The FBI has said it is carrying on an active investigation of the attacks and has issued several sealed indictments against Libyans it believes were involved. But no arrests have been made.