Since the appearance of three State Department whistleblowers, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa and former Ambassador Thomas Pickering have engaged in a public war of words over the investigation into Benghazi. Issa wanted Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, who co-authored the Obama administration’s supposedly independent review of the handling of the consulate in Benghazi and the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, to meet with investigators for depositions. Pickering refused to do so and demanded instead that he be called to testify in public session. Issa responded by subpoenaing Pickering for the deposition.
As Wilford Brimley says in the 1981 film Absence of Malice … “Wonderful thing, subpoenas“:
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has lifted a subpoena against retired U.S. ambassador Thomas Pickering after the Benghazi investigator agreed to a closed-door transcribed interview with lawmakers about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack at the U.S. post in Libya.
Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen were behind the State Department’s own probe into the attack, in which U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Republicans and others have criticized the findings of that report as not laying enough blame on President Barack Obama’s administration — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Ambassador Pickering reached an agreement with the Oversight Committee to voluntarily appear for a transcribed interview and answer all questions posed by Committee investigators. As such, I have lifted his legal obligation to appear [Wednesday] for a deposition,” Issa said in a statement, according to Foreign Policy’s The Cable.
The White House has hotly defended the Pickering-Mullen Accountability Review Board as entirely independent and the two co-chairs as beyond reproach. That, however, was not the assessment of career State Department analyst Eric Nordstrom, who ripped the ARB as nothing more than an attempt to push responsibility for top-level decisions on security before and during the attack onto the careerists rather than the political appointees:
Nordstrom suggested the board’s report attempted to protect higher-ranking officials, and specifically faulted it for not looking at the key role played by Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy in failing to deliver the request for more security to Clinton.
He said a similar failure occurred in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, which killed 19 Americans.
“[The ARB] has decided to fix responsibility on the assistant secretary level and below,” said Nordstrom. “And the message to my colleagues is that if you’re above a certain level, no matter what your decision is no one’s going to question it.
“I look back and I see the last time we had a major attack was East Africa. Who was in that same position, when the unheeded messengers … were raising those concerns? It just so happens it was the same person. The under secretary for management was in that same role before.
“There’s something apparently wrong with the process of how those security recommendations are raised to the secretary.”
Pickering will have some explaining to do about Kennedy. Although the White House has insisted that the ARB was the last word on the matter, last week they began backing away from Kennedy in leaks to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. Suddenly, Kennedy’s name got linked to the specific decision not to send the FEST team to assist the survivors:
Now, more than eight months later and nine days after State Department whistleblowers embarrassed the White House, administration officials are beginning to admit that they botched Benghazi before, during, and afterward:
Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: “I wish we’d sent it [FEST].”
Mark Thompson, who ran the counterterrorism unit at State, testified last week that after he insisted on dispatching FEST, he got excluded from any further meetings on the immediate response. Who shut him out? Wouldn’t that have to have come from the highest levels of the department? Well, that depends on who you ask:
The official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Patrick Kennedy, quickly dispensed with the idea. A senior State Department official Thursday told CBS News, “Under Secretary Kennedy is not in the decision chain on FEST deployment” but would not directly confirm whether Kennedy or somebody else dismissed the FEST.
But:
As soon as word of the Benghazi attack reached Washington, FEST members “instinctively started packing,” said an official involved in the response. “They were told they were not deploying by Patrick Kennedy’s front office… In hindsight… I probably would’ve pushed the button.”
Don’t forget that another whistleblower, Eric Nordstrom, claimed that the ARB board deliberately protected Patrick Kennedy. Looks like those days may be over.
Shouldn’t that have been something that the ARB would have found — had it truly been doing an independent review? Pickering had better explain how the ARB managed to miss that in its assessment of blame below Kennedy’s level.
ZitatOne reason for this incompetence was that the people making the decisions were, er, idiots when it came to understanding FEST capabilities. Why? State never convened the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) — even though the Benghazi situation is exactly why CSG exists. Tommy Vietor, who was in the e-mail chain on the talking points, told CBS in October that “I don’t know what [FEST] is… it sounds antiquated.”
But once again, the question is why Thompson got shut out of the meetings. Had he been included, he could have explained FEST to Vietor and everyone else.
The issues aren’t just confined to the White House, either. Who made this brilliant decision?
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Thu May 23, 2013 8:58 am
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