I naively thought that hindsight was 20/20, and that it was a mistake they would learn from. And at least thought the Obama Administration would do everything to find out what went wrong so it wouldn't happen again...but they seem to be directly obstructing the truth and punishing those that speak out. This guy is a fairly credible witness and carries more weight with me than the reflexive Obama hating Republicans using it as a political tool, and I think his testimony is pretty damning if its all true.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/us/po ... anted=1&hp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Official Claims Questions on Benghazi Led to Demotion
By JEREMY W. PETERS and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 8, 2013
WASHINGTON — A State Department official on Wednesday offered the first public testimony from an American diplomat who was on the ground in Libya the night last September when the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi was attacked. And he said he was later demoted for raising questions about how the attack was handled.
The official, Gregory Hicks, described a frantic series of phone calls from the American Embassy in Tripoli, where he was stationed, to Washington and, ultimately, to J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, who was in Benghazi. He only heard Mr. Stevens utter, “Greg, we’re under attack,” before the line went dead.
Mr. Hicks was serving at the time as the embassy’s second-ranking official, but he said that since returning to Washington he felt he had been punished for speaking out.
“I’ve been effectively demoted from deputy chief of mission to desk officer,” he said during a six-hour hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Mr. Hicks described asking in vain for air support from Italy and being told that it could not make it there in time. Then, later, he pleaded for men who would never come. Fearing that armed Islamic militants might storm the embassy in Tripoli, staff members there hurriedly dismantled their sensitive communications equipment and got ready to evacuate to a more secure annex operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. One aide started smashing hard drives with an ax.
“None of us should ever experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks said.
Mr. Hicks and two other State Department officials who were witnesses said they felt that the investigation of the episode undertaken by the department was inadequate because many people who were directly involved in the attacks — including some of them — were not interviewed.
“They stopped short of interviewing people who I personally know were involved in key decisions,” said Eric Nordstrom, an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
The hearing into the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi episode became a political spectacle well before the panel’s chairman, Darrell Issa of California, gaveled it to order on Wednesday morning. Republicans promised damning revelations that could ultimately undo the Obama presidency. “Every bit as damaging as Watergate,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said this week.
The Benghazi inquiries have drawn the White House into a tense standoff with Congressional Republicans, who are threatening to subpoena witnesses, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations.
“This is a subject that has, from its beginning, been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans,” the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Wednesday as the hearing was under way.
Mr. Hicks testified that his relationship with his superiors began to sour after he started asking questions about why Ms. Rice initially blamed a YouTube video, not terrorism, for the attack. “The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning,” he said.
And when Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, visited Libya to investigate further, Mr. Hicks said his bosses told him not to talk to the congressman. When he did anyway, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from one meeting because he lacked sufficient security clearance, Mr. Hicks said he received an angry phone call from Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
This revelation made the Republicans on the committee take note. “So this goes right to the person next to Secretary of State Clinton. Is that accurate?” asked Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Mr. Hicks responded, “Yes, sir.”
