President Barack Obama on Sunday called security issues that led to the deaths of four Americans in the Benghazi consulate attack "a huge problem," although he continued to defend U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as a victim of political scapegoating by Republicans who have suggested an administration coverup of the situation.

"We're not going to be defensive about it," Obama said of the State Department review of the attacks during an exclusive interview on NBC's Meet the Press. "We're not going to pretend that this was not a problem. This was a huge problem. And we're going to implement every single recommendation that's been put forward."

Saying that some State Department officials "have been held accountable," Obama said that the review of the September 11 attack showed there was "sloppiness" in terms of security measures but that mistakes were not intentional.

But he defended U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who withdrew from consideration to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Republicans vigorously opposed her for her role in discussing the attacks after the raid.

"She appeared on a number of television shows reporting what she and we understood to be the best information at the time," Obama said. "This was a politically motivated attack on her. I mean, of all the people in my national security team, she probably had the least to do with anything that happened in Benghazi."

Obama indicated that intelligence officials have "good leads" as to who carried out the attack.

"With respect to who carried it out, that's an ongoing investigation," he said. "The F.B.I. has sent individuals to Libya repeatedly. We have some very good leads, but this is not something that I'm going to be at liberty to talk about right now."

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/...em?ocid=twitter

"With respect to who carried it out, that's an ongoing investigation," he said.

I understand such a complex investigation could take years, ho hum.......

Former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering

Obama’s Benghazi Investigator: An Iran Sympathizer

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/obamas-benghazi-investigator-an-iran-sympathizer/

State Dept. Issues Whitewash Report on Benghazi Embassy Attack

Sun, December 23, 2012

On December 19, 2012, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Chairman of the State Department (DoS) Accountability Review Board (ARB) delivered the ‘White-Out” report on Benghazi that he’d been selected to provide. “White-Out” is the perfect term for this report, as Diana West notes, because the entire senior national security leadership of the U.S. is completely missing from it. There is simply no mention whatsoever of President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or the disgraced former CIA Director David Petraeus.

According to Pickering, who was hand-picked by the Obama administration to head the ARB, none of these officials had anything to do with the failure to provide the reliable armed, trained security that the Benghazi Mission asked for repeatedly and was denied, or for the catastrophic outcome of the terror assault on the mission the night of September 11, 2012 that took the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEAL CIA security contractors, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Instead, four lower-ranking State Department officials took the fall: Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security; Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security; Raymond Maxwell, the deputy assistant secretary of state for North Africa; and an unidentified official in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security all resigned on December 19, after the Pickering report cited a “grossly inadequate” security posture at the Benghazi mission.

This is very convenient, of course, because none of those truly responsible for what happened at Benghazi that night is called to account in the Pickering White-Out for establishing the policies in the first place that sent Americans to work with treacherous Al-Qaeda militias in Libya that ultimately turned on their long-time comrade-in-arms, Christopher Stevens, and killed him.

http://www.radicalislam.org/analysis/whi...t-issues-report