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In her daily press briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland admitted that she provided false information Friday about the State Department's hiring of private security firms for the American mission in Benghazi attacked on September 11th:
QUESTION: You also said there was no contract with a private security firm in Libya, and yet apparently some British security guards were hired. Is that your way of saying you didn’t contract with a firm but you did hire individual security guards?
MS. NULAND: Thank you for that, because there was an error in what I said. The external security, external armed security, as we have been saying, outside of the perimeter, was fully handled by the Libyan side. There was no contract – contracting out of that. There was a group called Blue Mountain Group, which is a private security company with permits to operate in Libya. They were hired to provide local Libyan guards who operated inside the gate doing things like operating the security access equipment, screening the cars, that kind of thing.......
Only four days earlier, at her daily press briefing on Friday, Nuland emphatically denied that the State Department had hired any private firm to provide security at the American mission in Benghazi:
QUESTION: (Inaudible) the claim was made yesterday that a company that is a spinoff of Blackwater, in fact, proposed or contracted the United States Government for this particular kind of eventuality, and it was caught up in some sort of bureaucratic --
MS. NULAND: Completely untrue with regard to Libya. I checked that this morning. At no time did we plan to hire a private security company for Libya.
QUESTION: Toria, I just want to make sure I understood that, because I didn’t understand your first question. You said – your first answer. You said that at no time did you have contracts with private security companies in Libya?
MS. NULAND: Correct.
We have provided security solutions and training services in more than 20 countries around the world (across Europe, Africa, the US and Asia), for clients that have included: Barclays Bank; General Motors; Romec; Jaguar Land Rover; ING Barings; Google; the United Nations; International Monetary Fund; and Lloyds Bank.
They were hired to provide local Libyan guards who operated inside the gate doing things like operating the security access equipment, screening the cars, that kind of thing.......