A pair of congressmen who served on the congressional panel tasked with investigating a terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, blasted the Obama administration Tuesday for failing to launch a timely military response.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, one of the victims of that assault, managed to place a final phone call as terrorists stormed into the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The call was to Tripoli, where Gregory Hicks, the deputy in charge of mission in Libya, was stationed.

“We are now convinced, contrary to the administration’s public claim … that the administration never launched men or machines to help directly in the fight.”

“Greg, we are under attack,” Hicks later quoted Stevens as saying. Then the phone went dead.

Pleading for help during the firefight, a diplomatic security agent described the situation in starker terms: “If you guys don’t get here, we’re all going to f***ing die.”

The quoted conversations come from the official House Select Committee on Benghazi report released Tuesday. But the report shows that as the battle raged for more than seven hours in Libya, no help ever arrived — or was ever dispatched. The Obama administration has vociferously insisted that U.S. military assets simply were too far away to have saved Stevens and the other three victims. But Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo disputed that assertion in a report supplementing the official committee findings.

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“We are now convinced, contrary to the administration’s public claim that the military did not have time to get to Benghazi, that the administration never launched men or machines to help directly in the fight,” the representatives wrote. “That is very different from what we have been told to date. And the evidence is compelling.”

Drawing on documents and testimony from the committee’s exhaustive investigation, the Benghazi report suggests that administration officials at the highest levels wasted time discussing talking point strategy centered on an irrelevant internet video, while Americans were still endangered. At one point, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta even called an American pastor asking that the video be taken down.

The report lays out the following timeline:

  • The attack began at 9:42 p.m. local time, or 3:42 p.m. Washington time.
  • At 4:32 p.m., the Pentagon’s National Military Center as notified of the attack.
  • At 6:34 p.m., terrorists began attacking the CIA annex.
  • At about 7 p.m., roughly 2.5 hours after the National Military Center was notified, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ordered three different units deployed: The Marine Fleet Anti-Terrorism Support Team, or FAST; a Commanders In Extremis Force, or “CIF;” and a hostage rescue team based in the United States.
  • At 10:15 p.m., terrorists killed Stevens.
  • At 10 a.m. the next morning — 18 hours later after the attack began — the FAST Platoon finally took off from Spain.
  • At about 11 a.m., the CIF took off.
  • At about 2 p.m., the CIF arrived at a staging base.
  • At 2:56 p.m., the FAST team arrived in Tripoli.
  • At 3:28 p.m., a Special Operations Force deployed from the United States arrived at a staging base.
This is a timeline developed by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of the attack in Benghazi, Liibya.
This is a timeline developed by Reps. Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan of the attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The report describes discussions about how military personnel should respond. The FAST platoon sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours and changed in and out of their uniforms four times as officials vacillated on minute details. The State Department insisted the military respond in civilian clothing and in vehicles without military markings — out of an apparent concern for offending the Libyan government.

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The report by Jordan and Pompeo notes that as of September 2012, FAST platoons typically were used to reinforce embassy security. But the FAST team was not sent to help in the fight at the nearby CIA annex.

“The question then became what was sent,” the report states. “And the answer appears to be nothing.”

Pompeo and Jordan also questioned why authorities did not try to arm and send unmanned drones.

“We will never know exactly how long these conditions delayed the military response but that they were even a part of the discussion is troubling,” they wrote on the uniform debate and the internet video discussions.

The Benghazi report also depicts high administration officials as oddly detached from President Obama and one another as the crisis unfolded. The report indicates that Panetta met once with the president, at about 5 p.m., and then did not speak with him again until after the attack was over. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had one phone conversation with then-CIA Director David Petraeus at 5:38 p.m and did not speak with Obama until 10:27 p.m.

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“It is hard to accept that the commander-in-chief and the secretary of defense had no further contact during the entire unfolding crisis,” Pompeo and Jordan wrote. “Possibly just as startling is that Secretary Panetta and Secretary Clinton did not speak at all.”

The Benghazi report describes a lack of cooperation from the Obama administration and the Pentagon. Their stonewalling prevented the committee from learning all of the facts surrounding the attack, members of the committee said.

“Our committee’s insistence on additional information about the military’s response to the Benghazi attacks was met with strong opposition from the Defense Department, and now we know why,” Rep. Martha Roby said in a statement. “Instead of attempting to hide deficiencies in our posture and performance, it’s my hope our report will help ensure we fix what went wrong so that a tragedy like this never happens again.”