Former UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who led the State Department’s Accountability Review Board investigating the Benghazi attack, said his interest is piqued by new information in the case but in the same breath said he’s seen nothing to alter his conclusions.
When asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday what he might have done differently in the review, Pickering called it “a very interesting question.”
“I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective,” he added.
“What I have been hearing is the promises of new startling developments. What I have been seeing is some of the questions we have reviewed. I’m very open to the idea that nobody can do in two months the absolutely perfect job, that nothing new will arise,” Pickering said.
“So far, I have, with all honesty, not seen any development related to the report and the mandated scope, which is in the law of that report, essentially, the security focus of the report, that would cause me to change my view on the conclusions we reached or the recommendations we made.”
When asked why then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was never interviewed on the report, Pickering said “we felt we had fully developed the answer to the question of where the decisions were made, where the failures and performance had taken place, where those decisions were reviewed.”
“And they did not touch on her,” he added.
“Now, with hindsight, don’t you think it would have been important to ask her about that conversation and other decisions she made that night? Because she was intimately involved,” Blitzer asked.
“We did. We did. We interviewed the senior staff members…”
“But why not her?” Blitzer pressed.
Pickering replied that they “felt that everything that we saw was fully and competently taken care of.”
“We didn’t have a reason in any way at all to suggest there was anything that she might have known that was not already relayed to us. It was straightforward. We thought they did an excellent job the night of. There were many different pieces of testimony we put together with respect to that,” he continued.
When asked if the ARB was trying to protect Clinton, Pickering said, “Well, the criticism may be the criticism. We will have to live with that, but the truth is that we didn’t feel there was a need to do that on the basis of all the evidence we had accumulated to date.”
“And knowing what you know now, was that the right decision?” Blitzer continued.
“Yes, of course it was the right decision.”
“To avoid any serious questioning with the secretary of state?”
“Well, if we had started down that line, where would it have ended?” Pickering asked.
“Well, she says she takes the responsibility. The buck stops with her,” Blitzer said.
“Of course she did. And that was very clear, and she made it very clear,” Pickering said.
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