Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said this morning that the latest CBS report about the administration’s advance warning of an al-Qaeda attack on Benghazi adds weight to continuous calls in Congress for a select committee to investigate Sept. 11, 2012.
“There had been four to five additional security requests for Benghazi and Tripoli that were denied by personnel in Washington D.C,” Graham said, noting previous testimony by Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya.
“But we need to know why his request was never allowed to go to Washington. And we need to know the person who said he couldn’t send it. That’s classified. It shouldn’t be classified. Much of the information about Benghazi is classified, I think, for political reason, more than anything else,” the senator added.
Graham said on Fox that it’s indisputable that “the four Americans were murdered by Al Qaida in a pre-planned coordinated terrorist attack.”
“Why was Chris Stevens going to Benghazi in light of all this information? And how could someone in Washington, given the level of threat that was being reported continuously by Chris himself, not approve additional security request? How did the consulate become a death trap?” he said. “And now we know that this was a result of a pre-planned Al Qaida attack, with some very high-level operatives involved at leading the attack. It was never a protest as the result of a video gone bad.”
“…If we don’t have a joint select committee to get out of this stovepiping problem, we’re never gonna get the truth. The Congress should form a committee. The State Department is blaming the CIA, the CIA is blaming the State Department. Where was the Department of Defense? So I am calling for a joint select committee, but for God sakes, let the House have a select committee where you get three or four committees together to look at this situation as one unit, rather than stovepiping.”
Graham added that 14 months after the attack “the survivors, the people who survived the attacked in Benghazi, have not been made available to the U.S. Congress for oversight purposes.”
“So I’m gonna block every appointment in the United States Senate until the survivors are being made available to Congress. I’m tired of hearing from people on TV and reading about stuff in books. We need to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
“And to my House colleagues — Darrell Issa has done a great job. To Speaker Boehner, please, for God’s sake, form a joint committee to get away from this blame game and find out exactly what happened.”
“We’re just beginning on Benghazi,” Graham promised. “And to the families, we’re not gonna let this go. Congress needs to up its game.”
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