Kerry Picket
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) criticized State Department Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy at the Committee’s hearing on Benghazi for Kennedy’s responses regarding the Accountability Review Board’s lack of impartiality.
“We’re here today, because at the end of the day, no one is held accountable. And so that’s contradictory to the thesis that you’re advancing here. No one is held accountable,” Royce said.
“Mr. Chairman, I respectfully disagree about the subject of accountability. Four employees of the State Department were relieved of their senior positions as Assistant Secretaries or Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State and are no longer holding those senior positions,” Kennedy answered. “I submit, Mr. Chairman, that accountability includes being relieved from your job and assigned to other positions. To me that is serious accountability.”
“Well, the reassignment–no one missed a paycheck–alright? No one has been held accountable and the board did not take this to the upper levels of management,” Royce countered.
Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the head of the investigation into the attack in Libya, told The Hill he wanted two of the State Department employees in question fired but left the decision to do so to personnel at the State Department.
“Serious Accountability” is not “relieving the person from the job , moving them to another office, quietly keeping the person on the payroll and allowing them to keep their pay rate and seniority. no, that’s protecting them by moving them away from the public eye so that they can continue to make stupid errors. “Serious Accountability” is firing them for their incompetence/failures and putting them on the unemployment line. This protecting government screw-ups needs to be stopped. The private sector doesn’t protect such incompetence and poor judgment unless it’s via family nepotism.
I would like Issa to ask the democrats to imagine that Benghazi happened under Bush’s administration. Then ask them to tell what they think Bush and his Secretary of State should have done during and after the attack. I would like to know what they would say.