The State Department was at fault for failing to have a clear emergency response plan in the hours following the Benghazi attack, which might have otherwise saved the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans who died in the incident on Sept. 11, 2012.
That is the conclusion of Brandon Webb, a former Navy SEAL after reviewing Fox News' claims that a special ops team wasn't called in to help even though it was stationed less than six hours away.
"I don't disagree with anything that that anonymous special operations operator said on Fox News. The issue is all along that the State Department is at fault," said Webb, co-author of "Benghazi: the Definitive Report."
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Webb said that a trained military team would have come in to help if called but the State Department didn't have a clear emergency response plan to trigger the alert.
"You get into a situation where all of a sudden the flag goes up and people are dialing numbers when no one's home," he said.
He added, "I really place a lot of fault on the State Department for not having their act together and we continue to see no accountability at the Department of State."
Webb said the agency failed to put the appropriate resources in place to protect the consulate even though it was high on an internal State Department list that identified facilities facing high or critical threat. He also suggests the department may have deliberately suppressed the document during the investigation into the incident.
"You have a document which was never brought up in the congressional hearings," he said. "No one's talking about that document, it was never talked about in the internal investigation that State did on themselves, which again is kind of funny."
Webb said the Benghazi incident indicates the need for the government to answer major questions about its foreign policy strategy, which he says has been a "mess" throughout the Middle East.
"The big question is, for me in Benghazi, is and the American people need to ask, is what is our foreign policy strategy? Because, right now, if you ask anyone, you'll get a different answer from each person and the American people are owed a very coherent foreign policy strategy," he said.
"It has to do with over a decade of failed foreign policy," Webb added.
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