Benghazi facility lacked 'man-traps' State guidelines called for

Washington Times:

The U.S. mission in Libya where a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack lacked special security barriers that the State Department’s inspector general recommended three years ago for diplomatic facilities in danger zones, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said Thursday.

The State Department inspector general recommended in 2009 that U.S. diplomatic facilities in danger zones have special holding areas for visitors called “man traps,” but the U.S. consular facility in Benghazi did not have them, Sen. Susan M. Collins of Maine told reporters after a four-hour, closed-door briefing from senior intelligence and defense officials on Capitol Hill.

“While there were improvements made for security, those specific recommendations for man traps were not built in Benghazi,” she said.

The “man traps” that the inspector general recommended were “an enclosed area for pedestrian and vehicular inspections a walled- or fenced-off area for pedestrian visitors, hence ‘man trap’,” an official in the inspector general’s office said.

...

Benghazi certainly qualified as in a danger zone.  This disclosure ads just one more element of failure on the part of the administration at a facility that they knew from reports of the Ambassador was under threat.