Hillary Clinton emerges intact as Republicans release report into the Benghazi tragedy

Hillary Clinton has been absolved of wrongdoing in a long-awaited report from the US Congress into the circumstances of the 2012 attack on a US consular complex in Benghazi.

At the same time, the report points an accusing finger at the US government, especially the Defence Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to grasp the dangers facing American personnel in the Libyan city and not putting sufficient assets in place to protect them.

After an investigation that lasted for months and became a point of bitter partisan warfare in Washington, the 800-page report that was released by Republicans on Tuesday deplores the inability of the Pentagon to react even when it became clear that US lives were being lost.

The panel's chairman, Republican congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, said “nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost eight hours after the attacks began.”

The tragedy occurred in September 2012 and was instantly politicised because of the proximity to the presidential election in November of that year. Four US personnel were killed when extremists overran the poorly protected US outpost in the city, including the US Ambassador to Libya at the time, Christopher Stevens. The attack and the response to it was the subject of a lengthy investigation by the State Department's own watchdog body.

At a campaign stop in Denver, Ms Clinton asserted that after more than two years, the committee “found nothing - nothing - to contradict the conclusions of the independent accountability board,” at the State Department. “I'll leave it to others to characterize this report, but I think it's time to move on."

In a statement, a Clinton spokesman, Brian Fallon, repeated the allegation that the Benghazi Committee's main goal had been to politicise the tragedy, “in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign.”

Democrats issued their own report on Monday that concluded that the sequence events on the night of the sacking was so rapid the US military had no chance to launch any sort of rescue effort or counter-attack. And it accused Republicans of continuing to try to make political hay out of the tragedy.

Their report, the House Democrats said in a statement, is a “a conspiracy theory on steroids – bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever…Republicans promised a process and report that was fair and bipartisan, but this is exactly the opposite.”

The State Department was largely dismissive of the Republican report noting that various reviews of the events have already been completed and ensuing recommendations adopted.

“We have made great progress toward making our posts safer since 2012,” Mark Toner, a spokesman, said in a statement. “Our priority continues to be carrying out our national security mission while mitigating the risks to our employees.”

While Tuesday’s report accepts also that getting US troops to Benghazi speedily enough to have made a difference would have been impossible, it questions why the US allowed outposts like the one in Benghazi to exist if there was no way to protect them and why also no plans had been put in place to deploy protective forces there in the event the security situation deteriorated.

“The assets ultimately deployed by the Defence Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive before the final lethal attack,” the investigating committee wrote. “The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world’s most powerful military was not positioned to respond.”

“What was disturbing from the evidence the committee found was that at the time of the final lethal attack,” the panel added, “no asset ordered deployed by the Secretary had even left the ground."

For all the political tumult created by the probe, which included a now famous day-long grilling of Ms Clinton when she was at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, it was a tangential finding that she had been using a personal and private server of her emails while in that office that has caused her far more political pain than anything related directly to the attacks.

While Mr Gowdy insisted in a press conference that the report was specifically not about apportioning blame to Ms Clinton, some other Republicans on the committee publicly differed. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman, called Ms Clinton's actions “morally reprehensible” and suggested to reporters, “you have every right to be disgusted” by the response from her and others.

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