US Diplomats in Libya asked for more security SEVERAL times - DC said NO

HOUSE COMMITTEE: SECURITY REQUESTS DENIED IN LIBYA

Leaders of a House committee said Tuesday that U.S. diplomats in Libya made repeated requests for increased security for the consulate in Benghazi and were turned down by officials in Washington.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz said their information came from “individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya.”

Issa, R-Calif. and Chaffetz, R-Utah said the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months before Sept. 11.

The lawmakers said they plan a hearing on Oct. 10. They asked Clinton whether the State Department was aware of the previous incidents, and whether the level of security that was provided to the U.S. mission met the security threat, and how the department responded to requests for more security.

Referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, the letter said, “It was clearly never, as administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest.”

They might as well have painted a target on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. During the spring and summer, militants attacked the American diplomatic outpost and other symbols of Western influence over and over again, according to a new letter from top congressional investigators. Yet security at the consulate remained light, with only a small coterie of contract guards assigned to defend it. No wonder guerrillas — widely assumed to be connected to al-Qaeda — were able to overwhelm the consulate, and kill the American ambassador there.

On April 6, two Libyans who had been fired as unarmed guards for the consulate “threw a small IED [improvised explosive device] over the Consulate fence,” explains the letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Rep. Darrel Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who heads the subcommittee on national security. The improvised bomb didn’t hurt anyone. Nor did it cause any damage. But it was a harbinger of things to come.

Two months later, the congressmen write, “under cover of darkness, assailants placed an IED on the north gate of Consulate Benghazi, blowing a hole in the security perimeter that was described by one individual as, ‘big enough for forty men to go through.’” Four days after that, the British ambassador’s two-car convoy “was attacked in broad daylight” by a militant with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG.

Militants made clear that the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stevens, was next on the target list.