Lies, lies and more lies: Benghazi Lasted ‘8 Hours’ But Was ‘Over in ... 30 Minutes’

 

The chairman and the vice chairman of the State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, made dramatically different statements on Wednesday about the duration of those attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.

The relevant duration of the event shrunk from "almost eight hours" to "only about 20 or 30 minutes" when a reporter asked this "accountability" team why the U.S. military had not been sent to Benghazi to help that night.

During his opening statement at a State Department briefing, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who chaired the ARB, said the terrorist attacks occurred over a span of almost eight hours.

“What happened on September 11th and 12th in Benghazi was a series of attacks in multiple locations by unknown assailants that ebbed and flowed over a period of almost eight hours,” Pickering volunteered.

About 20 minutes later in the same briefing, as Ambassador Pickering nodded his head in agreement, retired Admiral Michael Mullen, the vice chairman of the ARB, put the Benghazi terror event in a very different timeframe. He said it lasted only about 20 or 30 minutes.

Mullen, who formerly served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was responding to a reporter who had asked why the U.S. military never became involved.

“Why such a passing reference to military involvement?” the reporter asked. “Can you explain why they couldn’t have done more?”

“We looked at the force posture very specifically, and while we had a lot of forces in Europe both at sea and on land, it is not reasonable that they could have responded … in any kind of timely way,” said Mullen. “This was over in a matter of about 20 or 30 minutes with respect to the Special Mission specifically. And we had no forces ready or tethered, if you will, focused on that mission so that they could respond, nor would I expect we would have.”

Mullen not only narrowed the length of the terror attack to 20 or 30 minutes, but also defined it as only those events at the “Special Mission” compound, which was the State Department's facility in Benghazi.

However, a CIA timeline of the Sept. 11 events, which was provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official, and which generally comports with the description of events in the ARB’s own report, shows that about one hour and fifty minutes elapsed between the time the State Department’s “Special Mission” compound first came under attack and the moment when a rescue team from the nearby CIA “Annex” was able to extract the surviving U.S. personnel from that mission.

But even that was not nearly the end of the terror attacks on the Americans in Benghazi that night.

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