Sen. Marco Rubio wants the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which he sits, to investigate why the State Department didn't prevent the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Rubio, R-Fl., made the call on
Fox News Channel's "Hannity" on Wednesday after a report earlier in the day from the
Senate Intelligence Committee that the attack could have been prevented. The Sept. 11, 2012, attack killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
The Foreign Relations Committee, which has jurisdiction over the State Department, has done nothing on Benghazi except hold a hearing in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" what the motivation was for the attack.
There was a steady stream of information that the Benghazi facility was in grave danger, Rubio noted. There had already been attacks on the compound, and the British ambassador and the Red Cross had already pulled out of Benghazi because of attacks and threats.
The United States probably shouldn't have still been there at that point, Rubio said.
"Who's responsible for that? The buck stops with Hillary Clinton," he said. No plan was in place to rescue people if there was trouble, he said, even though intelligence reports said the danger was growing.
Rubio accused the Obama administration of having political motives for saying the attack was a result of an out-of-control protest over an anti-Muslim video even after administration officials knew it was a planned attack.
"You don't bring shoulder-fired rockets, you don't bring the kind of armaments they had, to a spontaneous protest," he said.
But Obama, in the middle of a tough re-election campaign,
had said the terrorist group al-Qaida was "on the run." To admit the attack was terror-related would have been politically disastrous, Rubio said.
Even now, al-Qaida is re-forming in places such as north Africa, Syria, and Iraq, he noted.
"It shows a blind spot this administration has," he said.
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