Republican and Democratic senators have called for scandal-plagued CIA ex-director David Petraeus to testify about the deadly September 11 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“I believe he will (testify). I think he’s a responsible person, and I believe he will come,” Democrat Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on CNN yesterday.
“So we are going to try to set that up today because his view as someone who was actually there... I think that’s important for us to hear.”
In the first congressional work week since the re-election of President Barack Obama, lawmakers had expected all eyes to be focused on several year-end fiscal challenges such as expiring tax breaks and across-the-board budget cuts.
But Benghazi — and scandals that have rocked Obama’s national security team — are suddenly on the front burner. There are no fewer than five congressional hearings this week, most of them closed-door sessions, on what happened in Libya.
Feinstein and the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, Saxby Chambliss, had met yesterday with CIA acting director Michael Morell, who arrived in the US Capitol with a large security detail that prevented reporters from approaching him.
Morell was expected to replace Petraeus in a number of hearings, and CBS News reported that he was to attend a House Intelligence Committee briefing on the FBI investigation that led to Petraeus’s departure.
Petraeus’s resigned last week when he admitted to having an affair with a married military reservist and author of a fawning biography of the general.
Despite that scandal, lawmakers see Petraeus as potentially vital to their probe into exactly what happened in Benghazi on September 11 when four Americans were killed including US ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Republican Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate’s intelligence and foreign affairs committees, emerged from a classified briefing by the latter body to say there were many unanswered questions and that he hoped Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would testify on the Libya attack.