The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials briefed
Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest
Published
January 14, 2014
Minutes after the
American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the
nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a
previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed
that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show.
The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom
was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama
administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for
two weeks afterward.
Gen. Carter Ham, who at
the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with
jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that
it was him who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to
then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing -- in which it was already known
that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had
gone missing -- occurred just before the two senior officials departed the
Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.
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According to declassified
testimony obtained by Fox News, Ham -- who was working out of his Pentagon
office on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- said he learned about the assault on the
consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42 p.m. Libya
time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command Center.
"My first call was
to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say, 'Hey, I am headed down
the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told lawmakers on the House
Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26 of last
year. "I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with
Secretary Panetta."
Ham's account of that
fateful day was included in some 450 pages of testimony given by senior
Pentagon officials in classified, closed-door hearings conducted last year by
the Armed Services subcommittee. The testimony, given under "Top
Secret" clearance and only declassified this month, presents a rare
glimpse into how information during a crisis travels at the top echelons of
America's national security apparatus, all the way up to the president.
Also among those whose
secret testimony was declassified was Dempsey, the first person Ham briefed
about Benghazi. Ham told lawmakers he considered it a fortuitous
"happenstance" that he was able to rope Dempsey and Panetta into one
meeting, so that, as Ham put it, "they had the basic information as they
headed across for the meeting at the White House." Ham also told lawmakers
he met with Panetta and Dempsey when they returned from their 30-minute session
with President Obama on Sept. 11.
Armed Services Chairman
Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., sitting in on the subcommittee's
hearing with Ham last June, reserved for himself an especially sensitive line
of questioning: namely, whether senior Obama administration officials, in the
very earliest stages of their knowledge of Benghazi, had any reason to believe
that the assault grew spontaneously out of a demonstration over an anti-Islam
video produced in America.
Numerous aides to the
president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly told the
public in the weeks following the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other
Americans that night -- as Obama's hotly contested bid for re-election was
entering its final stretch -- that there was no evidence the killings were the
result of a premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were the result of a
protest gone awry. Subsequent disclosures exposed the falsity of that
narrative, and the Obama administration ultimately acknowledged that its early
statements on Benghazi were untrue.
"In your discussions
with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta," McKeon asked, "was there
any mention of a demonstration or was all discussion about an attack?" Ham
initially testified that there was some "peripheral" discussion of
this subject, but added "at that initial meeting, we knew that a U.S.
facility had been attacked and was under attack, and we knew at that point that
we had two individuals, Ambassador Stevens and Mr. [Sean] Smith, unaccounted
for."
Rep. Brad Wenstrup,
R-Ohio, a first-term lawmaker with experience as an Iraq war veteran and Army
reserve officer, pressed Ham further on the point, prodding the 29-year Army
veteran to admit that "the nature of the conversation" he had with Panetta
and Dempsey was that "this was a terrorist attack."
The transcript reads as
follows:
WENSTRUP:
"As a military person, I am concerned that someone in the military would
be advising that this was a demonstration. I would hope that our military
leadership would be advising that this was a terrorist attack."
HAM:
"Again, sir, I think, you know, there was some preliminary discussion
about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at the command, I
personally and I think the command very quickly got to the point that this was
not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack."
WENSTRUP:
"And you would have advised as such if asked. Would that be
correct?"
HAM:
"Well, and with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta, that is the nature
of the conversation we had, yes, sir."
Panetta told the Senate
Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was him who informed
the president that "there was an apparent attack going on in
Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at
that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?" asked Sen. Jim
Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question in my mind that this was a
terrorist attack," Panetta replied.
Senior State Department
officials who were in direct, real-time contact with the Americans under
assault in Benghazi have also made clear they, too, knew immediately -- from
surveillance video and eyewitness accounts -- that the incident was a terrorist
attack. After providing the first substantive "tick-tock" of the events
in Benghazi, during a background briefing conducted on the evening of Oct. 9,
2012, a reporter asked two top aides to then-Secretary Clinton: "What in
all of these events that you've described led officials to believe for the
first several days that this was prompted by protests against the
video?"
"That is a question
that you would have to ask others," replied one of the senior officials.
"That was not our conclusion."
Ham's declassified
testimony further underscores that Obama's earliest briefing on Benghazi was
solely to the effect that the incident was a terrorist attack, and raises once
again the question of how the narrative about the offensive video, and a
demonstration that never occurred, took root within the White House as the explanation
for Benghazi.
The day after the
attacks, which marked the first killing of an American ambassador in the line
of duty since 1979, Obama strode to the Rose Garden to comment on the loss,
taking pains in his statement to say: "We reject all efforts to denigrate
the religious beliefs of others." As late as Sept. 24, during an
appearance on the talk show "The View," when asked directly by
co-host Joy Behar if Benghazi had been "an act of terrorism," the
president hedged, saying: "Well, we're still doing an
investigation."
The declassified
transcripts show that beyond Ham, Panetta and Dempsey, other key officers and
channels throughout the Pentagon and its combatant commands were similarly
quick to label the incident a terrorist attack. In a classified session on July
31 of last year, Westrup raised the question with Marine Corps Col. George
Bristol, commander of AFRICOM's Joint Special Operations Task Force for the
Trans Sahara region.
Bristol, who was
traveling in Dakar, Senegal when the attack occurred, said he received a call
from the Joint Operations Center alerting him to "a considerable event
unfolding in Libya." Bristol's next call was to Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, an
Army commander stationed in Tripoli. Gibson informed Bristol that Stevens was
missing, and that "there was a fight going on" at the consulate
compound.
WESTRUP:
"So no one from the military was ever advising, that you are aware of,
that this was a demonstration gone out of control, it was always considered an
attack -"
BRISTOL:
"Yes, sir."
WENSTRUP:
"-- on the United States?"
BRISTOL:
"Yes, sir. ... We referred to it as the attack."
Staffers on the Armed
Services subcommittee conducted nine classified sessions on the Benghazi
attacks, and are close to issuing what they call an "interim" report
on the affair. Fox News reported in October their preliminary conclusion that
U.S. forces on the night of the Benghazi attacks were postured in such a way as
to make military rescue or intervention impossible -- a finding that buttresses
the claims of Dempsey and other senior Pentagon officials.
While their investigation
continues, staffers say they still want to question Panetta directly. But the
former defense secretary, now retired, has resisted such calls for additional
testimony.
"He is in the
president's Cabinet," said Rep. Martha Roby R-Ala., chair of the panel
that collected the testimony, of Panetta. "The American people deserve the
truth. They deserve to know what's going on, and I honestly think that that's
why you have seen -- beyond the tragedy that there was a loss of four
Americans' lives -- is that the American people feel
misled."
"Leon Panetta should
have spoken up," agreed Kim R. Holmes, a former assistant secretary of
state under President George W. Bush and now a distinguished fellow at the
Heritage Foundation. "The people at the Pentagon and frankly, the people
at the CIA stood back while all of this was unfolding and allowed this
narrative to go on longer than they should have."
Neither Panetta's office
nor the White House responded to Fox News' requests for comment.
James Rosen joined
Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1999. He currently serves as the chief Washington
correspondent and hosts the online show "The Foxhole."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/14/benghazi-transcripts-top-defense-officials-briefed-obama-on-attack-not-video-or/