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House panel clears CIA on Benghazi attack

'The CIA officers were heroes,' said panel leaders, who largely supported the White House version of events.

By Mary Papenfuss
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens to opening statements before testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last year on the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi (UPI/Molly Riley).
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens to opening statements before testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last year on the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi (UPI/Molly Riley). | License Photo

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Following a two-year investigation the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee has cleared the CIA of any faillure in the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The CIA "ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi and ... bravely assisted the State Department," the report concluded.

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There was no delay in sending a CIA rescue team and no missed opportunity for a military rescue, the panel said.

"We concluded that all the CIA officers in Benghazi were heroes," said a statement by the ranking Republican of the committee, Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, and the ranking Democrat, Maryland Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger. "Their actions saved lives."

But the committee also found that the U.S. diplomats' temporary facility "was not well-protected, and that State Department security agents knew they could not defend it from a well-armed attack."

The panel also acknowledged that the White House's "initial public narrative" that the attack was a protest that got out of hand and not a terrorist attack was "not fully accurate."

In fact, there "was no protest," said the report. But the CIA only changed its assessment of what had happened after analyzing television footage days later, after Ambassador Susan Rice had characterized the violence as a protest.

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Rebuffing charges of any White House coverup, the panel concluded that members found "no evidence that any officer was intimidated, wrongly forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement or otherwise kept from speaking to Congress."

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