Posted By Josh Rogin
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) compromised the
identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their
lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications
Friday, according to Obama administration officials.
Issa posted 166
pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department
communications related to Libya on the committee's website afternoon as part of
his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the
administration's statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission
in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
"The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation from
this administration about these events, including why the repeated warnings
about a worsening security situation appear to have been ignored by this
administration. Americans also deserve a complete explanation about your
administration's decision to accelerate a normalized presence in Libya at what
now appears to be at the cost of endangering American lives," Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) wrote today in
a letter to President Barack Obama.
But Issa didn't bother to redact the names of
Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with
the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says
that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and
exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in
attacking the U.S. consulate.
"Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of
documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences," an
administration official told The Cable
Friday afternoon. "This does damage to the individuals because they are named,
danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we
work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because
these people could help us down the road."
One of the cables released by Issa names a woman
human rights activist who was leading a campaign against violence and was
detained in Benghazi. She expressed fear for her safety to U.S. officials and
criticized the Libyan government.
"This woman is trying to raise an anti-violence
campaign on her own and came to the United States for help. She isn't publicly
associated with the U.S. in any other way but she's now named in this cable.
It's a danger to her life," the administration official said.
Another cable names a Benghazi port manager who is
working with the United States on an infrastructure project.
"When you're in a situation where Ansar al-Sharia is
a risk to Americans, an individual like this guy, who is an innocent civilian
who's trying to reopen the port and is doing so in conjunction with Americans,
could be at risk now because he's publicly affiliated with America," the
official said, referring to the group thought to have led the Benghazi attack.
One cable names a local militia commander dishing
dirt on the inner workings of the Libyan Interior Ministry. Another cable names
a militia commander who claims to control a senior official of the Libyan armed
forces. Other cables contain details of conversations between third-party
governments, such as the British and the Danes, and their private interactions
with the U.S., the U.N., and the Libyan governments over security issues.
"It betrays the trust of people we are trying to
maintain contact with on a regular basis, including security officials inside
militias and civil society people as well," another administration official
told The Cable. "It's a serious
betrayal of trust for us and it hurts our ability to maintain these contacts
going forward. It has the potential to physically endanger these people. They
didn't sign up for that. Neither did we."
One administration official accused Issa of doing
harm to the investigation for the sake of creating negative news stories days
before the final presidential debate, which will focus on foreign policy. In
previous investigations, Issa has acknowledged and respected the need to
protect information that could be important to completing the administration's own
investigations, the official noted.
"He's trying to gather all the facts, but he's
blurting out all the evidence before the State Department and FBI investigation
is done," the official said.
Frederick
Hill,
a spokesman for the Oversight Committee, defended the release of the documents
in a Friday afternoon interview with The
Cable. He said some of the documents had been released by the committee
after the Oct.
10 hearing Issa held with State Department officials and the
State Department has not directly complained to the committee so far.
Hill said it was the administration that had
endangered lives by failing to put adequate security measures in place before
the attack.
"Certainly there are people who made reckless
decisions and put lives in danger in this situation and these people have
motivations to discredit efforts to hold them accountable rather than having
their true motivations be the security of people on the ground," he said.
The administration failed to protect sensitive
information when it fled the compound during the attack, so its complaints
about Issa's release are hypocritical, Hill argued.
"This is the administration that had all sorts of
information sitting around the consulate. Where was their outrage and urgency
when all that was happening?" he said.
Hill discounted the administration's official's
assertion that the public outing of U.S. government sources and contacts on the
ground in Libya places those people in any danger.
"None of these folks would seem to be surprising
folks to be talking to U.S. officials considering the organizations they
represent and the types of activities they were involved in," he said.
The
Cable pointed out that even WikiLeaks had approached the
State Department and offered to negotiate retractions of sensitive information
before releasing their cables. Hill confirmed that Issa did not grant the State
Department that opportunity but said it was the State Department's fault for
not releasing the documents when they were first requested.
"We gave them the opportunity to have them present
us with documents and have them tell us at that time what they were concerned
about," he said.
Committee ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD) responded to Issa's letter late
Thursday, writing that Issa's letter "completely ignores sworn testimony
provided to the Committee, recklessly omits contradictory information from the
very same documents it quotes, irresponsibly promotes inaccurate information,
and makes numerous allegations with no evidence to substantiate them."
UPDATE: A senior State Department official wrote in to The Cable
to contest Hill's assertion the State Department had an opportunity to
work with the committee to identity sensitive information in the
documents before they were released by Issa.
"Many of the documents the committee posted weren't provided by State.
So there wasn't any discussion about their sensitivity prior to the
committee revealing them for all to see," the official said. "Had State been given that
opportunity, we'd have taken it and pointed out what documents needed to
be handled with extreme care so as not to endanger anyone."
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