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WASHINGTON, Sept 20, 2012 (AFP)
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday announced she was setting up an official review of security at a US mission in Libya following a militant attack which killed four Americans.
“I will advise Congress… I am launching an accountability review board that will be chaired by ambassador Thomas Pickering,” Clinton told reporters, ahead of a classified briefing to lawmakers about the attack.
Clinton was heading up to the US Capitol to address first the House of Representatives and then the Senate about the September 11 attack in which heavily-armed militants laid siege to the US consulate in Benghazi as protests raged over an anti-Islamic film.
US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed in the four-hour attack, along with three other Americans on a diplomatic mission to Benghazi.
Clinton said her briefing to lawmakers would cover the US “security posture, before and during the events and the steps we have taken since to do everything we can with host governments to protect our people and consulates.”
Pickering, who will head up the review board, is a retired diplomat who served in the foreign service for four decades, notably as ambassador to the United Nations from 1989 to 1992, as well as envoy to Israel and Jordan.
Clinton will be accompanied at her closed-door briefings by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and Sandy Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along by experts from the FBI and State Department.
However, the top US diplomat rejected outright rumors that Stevens had said in the weeks before his death that he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list.
“I have absolutely no information or reason to believe there’s any basis for that,” she said.
“I will also talk about the importance of the broader relationships with these countries in the light of the events of the past days,” Clinton said.
“There are obviously very real challenges in these new democracies, these fragile societies.
“We are concerned first and foremost with our own people and facilities, but we are concerned about the internal security in these countries. Because ultimately that puts at risk the men, women and children of these societies on a daily, ongoing basis if actions are not taken to try to restore security and civil order.”
