There was little media attention
Which is all the more surprising when you consider what just happened this month.
Sharyl Attkisson
Secy Kerry tells congress he will not honor the request to make Benghazi survivors available for questioning.
That's rather shocking -- especially when you consider what Secretary of State John Kerry promised Congress April 17th.
Chair Ed Royce: This Committee has been frustrated in obtaining documents and other information from the Department concerning the Benghazi terrorist attacks. Of course, our investigation pre-dates your tenure so I am hopeful we will be able to resolve this as you get your team in place so that we can move forward on this important issue.
Secretary John Kerry: On the subject of Benghazi, look, I-I -- I'm -- I was on the other side of the podium the day, just a short time ago, when that was a big issue and we held hearings in the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate and we wanted materials and we got a lot. In fairness, I think the administration has testified 8 times, has briefed 20 times, Secretary Clinton spent five hours answering questions for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 25,000 documents have already been turned over, video of the actual event has been made available to members to see. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to see it because it is enormously helpful in understanding events and the flow of what happened. And the people who were all involved have all been interviewed and not only interviewed, but those FBI interviews were made part of the record and in an unprecedented way have been made available to the Congress in order to read those-those testimonies. So if you have addition questions or you think-think there's some document that somehow you need, I'll work with you to try to get it and see if we can provide that to you --
But now information will not be provided.
It's as appalling as what happened last month.
Daily Press Briefing - August 20, 2013
August 20, 2013That's when State Department spokesperson Marie Harf delivered the news that no one was being fired for Benghazi. Excerpt.
QUESTION: Can we just ask quickly about the State Department employees before we get to Egypt? Because I know this could take a long time.
MS. HARF: I think both could take a while, but let’s start with that, and then we’ll go to Egypt, yes.
QUESTION: Okay. Is it true that Secretary Kerry has not issued any kind of disciplinary action – formal disciplinary – against the four employees who were criticized in the investigative report? And are they back at work?
MS. HARF: The State Department has determined that the four officials who were placed on administrative leave following the independent Benghazi Accountability Review Board’s report should be reassigned to different positions within the Department, and they will be returning to work.
Saturday Julian Pecquet (The Hill) spoke with Thomas Pickering who co-chaired the Accountability Review Board for the State Department's handling of Benghazi and he stated, "Our report recommended two people should leave their jobs, nothing more, nothing less."
No one was fired -- but at least attackers were arrested, right? Uh, no. Sharyl Attkisson (CBS News) reporteds: last week, "One year after the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, no arrests have been reported [. . .]"
No one was fired, no one was arrested.
And, worst of all, the families of the fallen have no answers. Barnini Chakraborty (Fox News) reports:
“When I was there in Washington, when this first started, the FBI had me in a room to tell me what they were doing,” Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of the Americans killed in the terror attacks, told Fox News.
Smith says President Obama, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the FBI promised her that finding out who killed her son Sean, an information specialist working in Benghazi, would be a top priority.
But it’s a commitment Smith says the president hasn’t kept.
“The government is not doing what they should do,” she said. “Everybody knows this. They lie to you. They tell you what they want you to know. It may or may not be correct. And in my case, it’s always been lies.”
Maybe if John Kerry could stop trying to start a war, he could actually do the job he was appointed to? (Reminder, that job wasn't Secretary of Defense, it was Secretary of State.)
