WND Commentary May 14 2013
Ambassador Thomas Pickering
It was just on May 8 that former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, criticized those who accused the Obama administration of a cover-up in the Benghazi scandal.
“I think the notion of a quote, cover-up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” Pickering said on MSNBC.
He rebutted claims his review board tried to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the way it conducted its investigation.
“I saw no evidence of it,” he said. “She did publicly take responsibility for what happened below her and indeed one of the things the Congress did in preparing the legislation that established the Accountability Review Board was to say we don’t want a situation where heads of agencies take responsibility and then nobody who made the decision in the chain has to suffer any consequences for failure for performance. I believe in fact the Accountability Review Board did its work well.”
But wait just a minute.
Only a few days later, on Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” even Pickering was scampering for the tall grass, saying his review only looked at what led up to the Benghazi attack with an eye toward security concerns. He said the review board did not examine the spin that followed the attack. In other words, all the changing talking points, after the fact, were not part of his review.
So how could he have said a few days ago there was no cover-up, which, by definition, is what occurs after an attack, if his investigation didn’t look at that?
What’s particularly distressing about Pickering’s role in the Benghazi scandal is his own personal history.
