WASHINGTON, Dec 12, 2012 (AFP)
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify next week to Congress about the findings of an investigation into a deadly attack on a US mission in Libya, a senior US lawmaker said Wednesday.
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said Clinton would appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on December 20 to discuss the conclusions of the State Department probe into the Benghazi attack.
Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American staff were killed in the September 11 assault by dozens of heavily armed militants on the US consulate, which has since been linked to elements with Al-Qaeda ties.
“The Foreign Affairs Committee will hear testimony from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the State Department’s findings of the Accountability Review Board and how to prevent attacks from happening again at other frontline posts,” Ros-Lehtinen, the committee chairwoman, said in a statement.
The much-anticipated hearing will start at 1:00pm (1800 GMT) and will be closely followed after Republicans accused the administration of failing to provide proper security, and seeking to cover up the Al-Qaeda links.
The review, headed by veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering, was set up in the days after the attack. It is not yet known whether the report will be publicly released before the hearing. Clinton has said she takes responsibility for what happened in Benghazi and called the attack her “worst time” during her four years as secretary of state.
“It’s something that is certainly terrible,” she told ABC News’s Barbara Walters in an interview airing Wednesday.
“We take risks in the work we do. The people who do this work, are often in very threatening environments, whether it’s our military or our civilian people around the world, I have just the most extraordinary admiration for them.”
