Multiple right wing sources have reported that within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya reported that militants were involved in the attack in Benghazi. They fail to note that there was no motive ascribed to the attack, whether anyone other than militants were involved and just which militants were involved. It appears that we are geting more information. David Ignatius fleshes out some details.
“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”
The CIA document went on: “This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.” This may sound like self-protective boilerplate, but it reflects the analysts’ genuine problem interpreting fragments of intercepted conversation, video surveillance and source reports.
The senior intelligence official said the analysts’ judgment was based in part on monitoring of some of the Benghazi attackers, which showed they had been watching the Cairo protests live on television and talking about them before they assaulted the consulate.
“We believe the timing of the attack was influenced by events in Cairo,” the senior official said, reaffirming the Cairo-Benghazi link. He said that judgment is repeated in a new report prepared this week for the House intelligence committee.
Here’s how the senior official described the jumble of events in Benghazi that day: “The attackers were disorganized; some seemed more interested in looting. Some who claimed to have participated joined the attack as it began or after it was under way. There is no evidence of rehearsals, they never got into the safe room . . . never took any hostages, didn’t bring explosives to blow the safe room door, and didn’t use a car bomb to blow the gates.”
The CIA had been monitoring the local militants, good to know, and there was no evidence of a pre-planned attack. However, it does appear that we know more details about exactly who was involved, and it appears that the local militants have been communicating with each other.
“It was a flash mob with weapons,” is how the senior official described the attackers. The mob included members of the Ansar al-Sharia militia, about four members of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and members of the Egypt-based Muhammad Jamal network, along with other unarmed looters.
The official said the only major change he would make now in the CIA’s Sept. 15 talking points would be to drop the word “spontaneous” and substitute “opportunistic.” He explained that there apparently was “some pre-coordination but minimal planning.”
While CIA analysts seem certain that this was not a centrally directed al Qaeda attack, they remain uncertain about motivation. They knew that militants were watching the Cairo demonstrations, which may have lead to their conclusions in their early reports, which they heavily qualified by noting that they did not have enough information to reach a definite conclusion, just like the State Department officials who first reported on the issue.
We should note that in the CIA’s report, they had no indication of an imminent attack. As we know from the State Department report linked to many right wing writers, including on this blog, it was apparent that the security forces on the Benghazi compound were not expecting an attack. Claims that we knew an attack was coming, but did not plan for it appear, so far, to be unsubstantiated. More CIA reports are being released to the Congress. We should soon have a timeline for what happened and what we knew. If Ignatius is correctly reporting the initial CIA report, it appears that the David Petraeus lead CIA believed that the Cairo demonstrations were a factor in the report. They still appear to believe that.
So when Congressman Thornberry suggests there was political motivation in the CIA report, do we , again, have Petraeus betray us? If it was despicable for the Move ON group to cast aspersions on a man who has honorably served his country, and it was truly despicable, does that not also hold true when a sitting US Congressman does it?
Claims that we knew an attack was coming, but did not plan for it appear, so far, to be unsubstantiated.
My good Steve,
See widespread testimony to the contrary, below. While the Ignatius column has instantly spread like wildfire across the liberal blogosphere, it and it alone and nothing in the way of any more original sourcing than Ignatius’ crafting of the topic is cited as the source of your thrust in this post. If you can reproduce anything of the actual original, selectively chosen CIA “talking points”, that is, those selectively chosen “talking points” referred to by Ignatius which do not include the September 12 report by the CIA station chief on the ground in Libya at the time, please do so. However,
says The Weekly Standard’s Steven Hayes:
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Bret Baier’s comprehensive, 41-minute long timeline of the White House’s Libya scandal:
* * *
By way of contrast, David Ignatius’ target audience:
* * *
Finally, since the entire thrust of your post is to portray any possible repudiation of Ignatius’ political column as a “betray us Petraeus” strawman which you yourself have already, as is the case with straw man arguments, pre-dispatched, no mention of Petraeus is thus necessary.
We are still left, though, with the unanswered question as the why these supposedly pivotal CIA “talking points”, prepared and disseminated over a month ago on September 15 (though not including the conclusions of the Libya station chief himself immediately after the attack), are only now on the brink of the final Presidential debate on foreign policy this coming Monday, October 22 being given such emphatic attention, by Ignatius or any others.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
1) Nothing in your citations, or in anything I have read, supports pre-planning of the attack. We have communications occurring during the attack and after.
2) The attacks on the British embassy and the Red Cross were nothing like the attack on our consulate.
3) Assuming that Ignatius has given us what is really in those reports, which we should know pretty soon, the CIA thought, and still thinks, the Cairo demonstrations were a primary influence. Even Hayes in your quotes cites this belief. The Cairo demonstrations were pretty clearly an event organized by salafist elements in Cairo. As part of their effort, on the Saturday before the attack they broadcast the infamous video. I think you can make a strong case that they used the film to do what they wanted to do anyway, but then the film is still part of the causal chain. Stevens was in Libya for a year and a half. They did not attack him last year.
Steve
Oops, forgot. The CIA’s reputation is being impugned by some on the right. Petraeus is its director. Do you think the CIA is politically motivated in their, apparent, belief that the Cairo demonstrations were a primary motive for the attack?
Steve
My good Steve,
First, you would have to establish that the CIA “belie[ves] that the Cairo demonstrations were a primary motive for the attack”. Good luck doing so.
Second, I have no trouble believing Petraeus would suck Barack Obama’s dick twice a day if he thought that was necessary to maintain his position. Fortunately for him, as anyone who has watched Colin Powell maneuver over the years already knows, telling superiors what they want to hear in terms that are at the same time ambivalently deniable is the first skill required of a fully political military professional at that level.
Again, Steve, this woobie was created to give you the latitude to believe what you wish to believe. Just enjoy it. Others are interested in the truth, as vile and unpleasant to contemplate as it turns out to be, but that need not ruin your experience.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
“First, you would have to establish that the CIA “belie[ves] that the Cairo demonstrations were a primary motive for the attack”.”
From your own citation.
” The talking points only say that the “demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired” by Cairo.”
“Second, I have no trouble believing Petraeus would suck Barack Obama’s dick twice a day if he thought that was necessary to maintain his position. ”
Hence, Betray us Petraeus. He was the right’s hero, until he wasn’t.
” Others are interested in the truth, ”
I see no evidence of that in your writings. You seem to want to believe that we knew everything there was to know about an event that occurred at night, in a foreign country in a confusing milieu within the first 24 hours. You are convinced that your side’s narrative is absolutely correct. I am merely quoting the current CIA assessment, plus adding in what has come from the State Department, from a piece many on the right, yourself included, cited. TBH, I dont even think you read what you post. You quote Eli Lake saying this.
” “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US diplomatic post in Benghazi and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the demonstrations.”
Then this.
“But for days, the Obama administration blamed it on an out-of-control demonstration over an American-made video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.”
What your sources have proven, is that the White House was repeating what the CIA was telling them. As further CIA reports have come out, they have verified that there was some al Qaeda involvement, though no central influence (see Hayes). So, the case you guys are making is that the CIA deliberately gave misleading information early in the process to help the White House, but is now releasing information that could hurt them. Possible, but the simpler, more probable explanation is that this is like every other attack that takes place in a foreign country. It takes a while to sort out what really happened.
Steve
1) Nothing in your citations, or in anything I have read, supports pre-planning of the attack.
My good Steve,
Actually, they do. When the CIA reports coordinated, multi-team assaults on multiple locations with RPG’s and mortars as “opportunistic”, that’s what that means: a pre-equipped, pre-planned attack launched at a chosen best opportunity.
We also know that the final CIA talking points were cherry-picked even in their ambivalence in order to give the White House the options to formulate any subsequent talking points they desired.
Steve, face it, Ignatius has handed you the woobie you desperately want and need. Embrace it, curl up around it in a corner and rock yourself back into comfort. That’s what he wrote it for, that’s the most it offers: the voluntary chance to disbelieve a tsunami of damning facts to the contrary long enough to get Obama through the final foreign policy debate and, ideally, reelected. After that, nothing short of impeachment would matter anymore.
Unfortunately, though, from a factual and a logical standpoint outside Ignatius’ politically opportune column there are simply too many people from too many separate sources and too many reports contradicting it, beginning with the basic, flawed foreign policy of “normalization” in post-revolutionary Libya then compounded via twin paths of failed implementation, ignoring or discounting intel of increasing Al-Qaeda and related efforts while minimizing all means to defend against it when those plans long in the making finally manifested themselves.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Your definition of opportunistic is, unique.
“Unfortunately, though, from a factual and a logical standpoint outside Ignatius’ politically opportune column there are simply too many people from too many separate sources and too many reports contradicting it, beginning with the basic, flawed foreign policy of “normalization” in post-revolutionary Libya then compounded via twin paths of failed implementation, ignoring or discounting intel of increasing Al-Qaeda and related efforts while minimizing all means to defend against it when those plans long in the making finally manifested themselves.”
Stevens had been in Libya for a year and a half. It has been reported by multiple sources that he felt secure enough to go running outside of the compound. It was reported in the State Dept. piece you cited that they were not really expecting an attack. They were not watching outside the compound. They were wearing their khakis and carrying sidearms. No one was wearing body armor and carrying their M4s. There remains no evidence of anything other than minimal pre-planning, a truly opportunistic attack. They brought no explosives, hacksaws, bolt cutters or crow bars. When the security people barricaded themselves, the attackers could not get in. The State Dept. guy noted watching the attackers from the dark when they could not get into the safe house area. It appears they even forgot to bring flashlights, at night. If they had respirators in the safe area, Stevens would likely still be alive.
Steve
My good Steve,
The flaws corrupting your entire post – one I have already explained was ultimately nothing more than an elaborate straw man offering – are your suggestions that
a) the only source of legitimate information concerning Benghazi was “the CIA”, that is to say, only part of the CIA, those selective talking points offered by Petraeus (whom you believe you have somehow immunized from criticism with your “Betray us Petraeus” straw man, a trap I admittedly walked into voluntarily and one which I can avoid in the future);
b) the White House only had access to information from “the CIA” which you have chosen as representative and could only make its prior foreign policy choices and the choices disastrous for Benghazi it made following those poor foreign policy choices based on information from that one source
Those notions, that is, the entire rationale surrounding your straw man offering, are risible on their faces: that is precisely why, Ignatius’ eleventh-hour lifeline notwithstanding, a Congressional committee and just about every news organization extant continue to probe, not any alleged mysteries surrounding one night in Benghazi nor the imminently foreseeable climate leading up to it, but rather the ongoing, compounding mendacious and corrupt errors and omissions of the Obama White House to the entire situation.
More simply put, you are arguing for Nixon in Watergate, and not on the basis of any facts or understanding of the situation (did you really not know, or simply dismiss that a hole big enough to drive a truck through had previously been blown through an entire wall of the Benghazi edifice?), but only because it feeds your anti-Republican psychological needs.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Leon Panetta says it was a planned attack.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/27/world/africa/libya-consulate-attack/index.html
According to the Washington Times, U.S. intelligence is still saying it was a planned attack.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/21/defiant-insider-benghazi-attack-clearly-planned/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
In addition to Lt. Colonel Andrew Wood
this man knew it was coming as well:
http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DEI-to-BHO-10-19-2012-attachments.pdf
Neither kept their on-the-scene intelligence a secret from others, and neither a video nor Cairo was any sort of factor whatsoever in the eventual attack both men knew was actively stalking them.
Entirely separate from that reality in country, however, actively resisted by Washington, when President Obama needed a policy synchronization, David Petraeus, hands as clean as Pilate’s, then served him James Clapper to use at his pleasure, as if he were a peasant’s daughter.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I watched this special on FNC, narrated by Brett Baier.
LTC Andy Wood, who had been the SST [Site Security Team] team leader in Libya spoke of the timeline. Wood’s team was scheduled to leave the country in February and Amb. Stevens requested a four month extension for them, which was granted. The 16 guys on the team were US MILITARY SPECIAL FORCES – and were NOT costing the State Department a dime. As their August PCS approached, Ambassador Stevens again requested that they remain. THE TEAM WANTED TO STAY! Steven’s request for another extension was denied and the team left Libya on August 14. LTC Wood was on the verge of tears as he talked to Baier about the attacks.
The bottom line is – these deaths did NOT have to happen. And it doesn’t really matter what Obama called the attacks or when, or who invented the ‘YouTube’ story. What DOES matter is that this was a complete and utter failure of the foreign policy of this president. Another bump in the road…. Not optimal.
What every voter SHOULD take away from this tragedy is this president’s priorities. He did NOT MEET with his national security advisors after this attack [tho he said he was on the phone with them.] He went to BED after learning that four Americans had died. He got up on the 12th, someone handed him a speech, he went into the Rose Garden and read it – and then he got on AF-1 and flew to Las Vegas for a fundraiser. THAT WAS AND IS HIS PRIORITY – his re-election.
The clock is ticking…..
I heard a former CIA agent on the radio talking about WHO was watching the attack in REAL TIME… as broadcast by the drone circling above …. EVERYONE THAT MATTERED – Defense, State and the WHITE HOUSE – was watching in real time. There were troops on the tarmac in Italy waiting for the ‘go command’ for the hour flight to Libya – that command never came. Only the CinC could give that command. The truth will get out. The intelligence community, much like the Navy S.E.A.L.S., will not sit idly by and take the blame for shoddy work. If Romney wins, I fully expect his Attorney General to investigate this to the fullest extent. The truth WILL only come out if Romney wins.
“The official said the only major change he would make now in the CIA’s Sept. 15 talking points would be to drop the word “spontaneous” and substitute “opportunistic.” ”
What about the claim about “demonstrations in Bengazi”? Apparently, there were no demonstrations, this was a direct unequivical terrorist attack organized by an Al Qaeda affiliated group.
BTW, is Obama’s administration so dysfunctional and incompetent, that they don’t know what is happening around the US consulate in Bengazi, a terrorist-infected city? Even though they have viode-cameras and drones there?
It is absolutely amazing that some blogs are still holding on to the fantasy that this was anything but a precision attack executed by highly trained Al Qaeda terror cells. Worse yet, they vacantly ignore the inconvenient fact that video from drones and consulate cameras was being feed directly into the White House Situation Room and to highly placed officials at the State Department… They knew exactly what was happening, who was attacking, and most importantly – that it had nothing to do with Internet Videos or Protests. Before the attack, they pulled out the Site Security Teams (even when the British and Red Cross were being attacked). The consulate its self was attacked twice before this event – but they pulled out the security anyway (as opposed to beefing it up). During the attack, three times – they told the security agents that were left to stand down – even when they had spotted a mortar team lobbing shells into the consulate and wanted to attack it… But the most egregious offense was the President and Hilary Clinton’s behavior after the attack. They lied to us, and directed their underlings to tell us more lies. They concocted the video internet trailer story – knowing it wasn’t true. And then, the very next day (after our Ambassador was slaughtered) the President went to Las Vegas to PARTY AND FUND RAISE WITH JAY-Z and BEYONCE!!!!
Come on, open your mind. THEY ARE INCOMPETANTS AND LIARS – AND THEY GOT PEOPLE KILLED!!! They also are responsible for America’s humiliation…
OPEN YOUR EYES
There was no reaction at all to any “anti-Muslim video.”
The 14 minute trailer on YouTube (turns out that there is NO 2hr movie, just a trailer) was not widely seen outside the USA and virtually no one saw it in the Arab world.
A full three weeks after 9/11/12 there was a protest over that trailer in Yemen…and the organizers there THEMSELVES admitted to “never having seen the video” that they were protesting.
The best article I’ve seen in the West on the Benghazi attack was written by Doug Hagmann of the Canada Free Press;
“According to the U.S. government, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed during a spontaneous protest at the consulate office in Benghazi by a frenzied crowd of Muslims outraged over an obscure internet video. Recently released “sensitive but not classified e-mails” from Stevens to the U.S. Department of State painted a picture of poor security for U.S. personnel and the embassy, which was obviously true but had little to do with the events of September 11, 2012. The failure to dispatch an extraction team or otherwise rescue the men during a firefight that lasted upwards of nine grueling and tortuous hours was not the result of any intelligence failure, but caused by our unwillingness to widen the conflict and expose the nature and scale of our true mission in Benghazi.
“Based on information provided by my source and corroborated elsewhere, the official account by administration officials is a mosaic of lies that were necessary to cover the unpalatable truth of covert actions taking place in Libya, Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The primary objective of our covert actions was to secretly arm anti-Assad “rebels” in Syria by funneling arms from Libya to Syria via Turkey, with other destinations that included Jordan and Lebanon. Regarding the threat to Stevens and the other murdered Americans, the truth will reformat the persistent question posed to government officials, from UN Ambassador Susan Rice to White House Spokesman Jay Carney and others from “how could you not have known” to “how could you have done these things?”…
“…First, it is important to understand that Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Dougherty and Tyrone Woods were not killed at a consulate office in Benghazi — as there is no such office there. They died at one of the largest CIA operations centers in the Middle East, which was located in Benghazi and served as the logistics headquarters for arms and weapons being shipped out of the post-Qaddafi Libya.”…
“…Russia was fully aware of this operation and warned the U.S. not to engage in the destabilization of Syria, as doing so would endanger their national security interests. Deposing Assad, as despotic as he might be, and replacing him with a Muslim Brotherhood-led regime would likely lead to unrestrained Islamic chaos across the region.”…
“…According to my source, Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 to meet with his Turkish counterpart, who reportedly warned Stevens that the operation was compromised. They met in person so that Stevens could be shown overhead satellite images, taken by the Russians, of nefarious activities taking place in Turkey. But just what were these nefarious activities?”…
“…While the administration asserts that the attack in Benghazi was conducted by a group of rebels acting alone, the facts seem to indicate otherwise. The level of coordination was such that we did not deploy military assets, located just an hour or two away by air, to rescue Stevens and the others at the CIA operations center in their time of need. If, as the administration contends, that the attack was perpetuated by a group of frenzied rebels, our military could have easily handled them in short order. So why was there no rescue operation?”
SEE: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/49761
We’d react violently (and justifiably so) IF China, Russia or any other nation took actions in Central or South America that we felt might destabilize that region and since we were clearly NOT prepared to confront Russia directly over this issue, we probably should’ve acceded to Russia’s very legitimate demands to “stand down” on Syria. After all, it IS “their neighborhood,” just as we consider the Western Hemisphere “ours.”
But the idea that there was ever any truth or backup for the false (“video”) narrative is laughable. Susan Rice has since yelped, “I was only joking!….Can’t anyone take a joke now-a-days?” I’m surprised that hasn’t garnered anything near the scrutiny that Obama’s “not optimal” comment or “Rodeo Clone” Joe Klein’s insipid, “It (Benghazi) was no big deal…” comments got.
I’ll say this, until Klein flatulated those putrid comments out there into the already foul air around all this, I’d happily thought he’d passed away. I’ll admit it – I’m quite disappointed to find that this bleeting half-wit is still alive…at least semi-alive, albeit STILL, apparently hopelessly brain-dead.