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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’
not video or protest
by Jammie
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.
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.” |
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