Libya attack: Not a problem of intelligence (+video)
Questions linger about the way the Obama Administration presented intelligence information following a violent attack in Benghazi, Libya last month. It appears now that from very early in their investigation U.S. officials had information implicating organized militants.
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"It seems increasingly clear that the briefings provided to Congress and the public about the Benghazi attack were at best incomplete and at worst misleading," Senator Saxby Chambliss, the Republican vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Reuters.
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"Within hours of the attack, intelligence assessments highlighted the role of al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, but the administration focused instead on a video that appears to have had little, if anything, to do with the violence in Benghazi," Chambliss said.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also appeared to use information contained in the talking points on Sunday Sept. 16 when she made five appearances on TV talk shows.
On CBS' "Face the Nation," Rice said the Benghazi attacks were triggered by a "hateful video," which prompted a "spontaneous protest" that "spun from there into something more violent." Regarding militants, she said only that it was "clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence."
Congressman Peter King, a New York Republican, has urged Rice to resign over the issue, a call the State Department has rejected.
A role for anti-muslim film?
The Daily Beast website reported last week that in the hours after the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies monitored communications between members of Ansar al-Sharia and AQIM. Ansar al-Sharia operatives "bragged" about their attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission and acted as if they were "subordinate" to AQIM, it quoted a U.S. official as saying.
It now appears questionable that the anti-Muslim film, which sparked a violent protest against the U.S. Embassy in Cairo earlier on Sept. 11, played a significant role in the Benghazi attack. Some U.S. officials have not foreclosed that possibility.
But Rogers, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, said he had never seen intelligence reporting to support such an assertion.
"I haven't seen anything that shows that the intelligence community said on the day of, or the immediate day following, that this was a spontaneous event," he said.
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