White House accused of misleading American people over Benghazi attack

The US House of Representatives voted on Thursday to create a select committee to investigate the attacks in Libya that left the US ambassador and three other Americans dead.

The vote, mostly along party lines, rewards an 18-month mission by Republican lawmakers to fully probe the Obama administration's response to the 11 September 2012 assault on the US mission in Benghazi.

The Republican House Speaker John Boehner called for the panel to be created after what he called months of "stonewalling" by the White House.

Republicans say the White House, at the height of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, misled the American people on the nature of the attack and the US response.

Boehner called for the committee after a public information request by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, revealed a newly declassified email of a White House official from three days after the attack. The email suggested that administration officials sought to interfere with how the attack was explained to the public.

A Politico article on Sunday, raising questions about the political motivation of the probes, said Judicial Watch's release "was followed, like clockwork in a timebomb, by yet another hearing held by Republican Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee. Pursuing their standard playbook dating from the Whitewater years, leading Republicans called for a whole new round of probes."

Democrats have vigorously argued that the panel - which Boehner has signalled will be dominated by Republicans - was unnecessary, given that 11 investigations of different kinds into events in Benghazi have already taken place.

After the announcement of the vote, Boehner faced questions about whether the Republican party was using the Benghazi committee to fundraise ahead of upcoming presidential elections in 2016.

“Our focus is on getting the answers to those families who lost their loved ones. Period,” Boehner told a room of journalists, as seen in the video below.

In the final months of her tenure as US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016, faced attacks from rightwing advocates who accused her of covering up mistakes within the State Department that had led to the attack. In January 2013, just days before her tenure ended, Clinton gave testimony before congress, defending her course of action.

"When America is absent," she said, "especially from unstable environments, there are consequences. Extremism takes root, our interests suffer, and our security at home is threatened. That's why I sent Chris Stevens to Benghazi in the first place ... Our men and women who serve overseas understand that we accept a level of risk to protect the country we love. And they represent the best traditions of a bold and generous nation. They cannot work in bunkers and do their jobs."

The 2012 Benghazi attack, and the way the situation was handled subsequently, has already led to two reports from the US Senate and eight from the House of Representatives, as well as a review by the State Department.