CIA Director Pledges to Make Benghazi Survivors Available to Talk
1:00 AM, Sep 11, 2013
• By STEPHEN F. HAYES
One year after the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, the survivors may finally begin to talk.
In
a three-page letter to the chairman of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers, CIA director John Brennan says
that his agency will provide the “relevant information” to Rogers in
order to facilitate meetings between CIA-affiliated personnel in
Benghazi and congressional oversight committees. The offer of
cooperation, dated September 3, 2013, comes as four committees of
jurisdiction in the House of Representatives prepare to reinvigorate
separate inquiries into the events of September 11, 2012, and their
aftermath. In the next two weeks, the House Foreign Affairs, Armed
Services, Government Oversight and Reform, and Intelligence Committees
will all hold hearings looking into different aspects of the Benghazi
attacks – beginning with an Intelligence Committee hearing later this
week on the lack of progress in the investigation and apprehension of
the perpetrators of those attacks. 60 Minutes is planning to air its investigation into the Benghazi attacks later this fall.
In his letter to Rogers, Brennan responded to
several specific questions the Intelligence Committee chairman had posed
in a letter dated August 2, 2013, denying that CIA officers on the
ground during the attacks had been subjected to polygraphs or required
to sign non-disclosure agreements. He also denied that any CIA officers –
“either staff or contractor” – had been told not to speak to Congress
about the attacks or threatened with consequences for any such
cooperation. “To the best of my knowledge after inquiry, I am unaware of
any officer who has been threatened with reprisals,” Brennan wrote.
“Nor would I tolerate such behavior. To retaliate or threaten
retaliation would be a violation of law.”
But the most important part of Brennan’s letter was
the brief section on the possibility of meetings with Benghazi
survivors. “Finally, you asked that CIA provide a list of all officers
in Libya on 11 September 2012 and arrange for the committee to speak to
any of those officers regardless of their current location,” he wrote.
“Information identifying those officers is classified. We will work with
the Committee to provide the relevant information via classified
channels.”
The request from Rogers for access to survivors
came after considerable debate among Republicans in the House. One group
of lawmakers expressed concerns about demanding access to the Benghazi
survivors. Doing so, they argued, would set a bad precedent for
intelligence officials in the field. CIA officers have to be risk takers
to do their jobs effectively, this group maintained, and calling them
back to Washington after a debacle like Benghazi could well make them
more risk-averse.
But others argued that any CIA officials in
Benghazi that night who wanted to talk were unlikely to do so without
the protection that a congressional demand – or, more formally, a
subpoena – would provide. CIA officers, they reasoned, wouldn’t
volunteer to share details about the events of that night that could
damage the Obama administration, particularly since the CIA director had
been a close adviser to Barack Obama since his 2008 campaign. The only
way these officials would talk is after a demand from Congress that they
do so.
The request from Rogers to Brennan comes after
months of persistent reports and rumors that Benghazi survivors had been
threatened into silence. Sources claiming to speak for some of the
survivors have claimed that these officers were forced to sign
additional non-disclosure agreements and, in some cases, take additional
polygraph tests as part of campaign to keep them from sharing their
stories. “While we may never be able to stop the rumors and
misstatements regarding the events of that night,” Brennan wrote, “I
appreciate the opportunity to refute some of them directly.”
The meetings between survivors and the intelligence
oversight committees have already started. Two survivors met with
staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this summer.
Those individuals will meet with the House committee in the coming
weeks.
The lack of information from U.S. government
officials on the ground in Benghazi that night is the largest hole in
the narrative surrounding the attacks. Until now, members of Congress
have had to rely largely on the accounts of people who were in touch
with individuals in Benghazi – reports that were, by definition,
secondhand. But with the apparent commitment of Brennan to help make
available CIA personnel who survived the attacks, the public may begin
to learn firsthand—after a full year—some of many of the outstanding
details of what actually happened in Libya that night.
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