
A Senate report on the Benghazi attack that
killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans bolsters Obama
administration critics who suspected from the start that al-Qaeda was
involved and that it was not a spontaneous protest that went out of
control.
The report, released Wednesday by the committee’s Democratic majority, said individuals
affiliated with groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were in on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack
on the U.S. compound.
Whether the attack was ordered by a
high-level al-Qaeda chief or planned on short notice by people on the
ground remains unclear, the report said. But the report left no doubt that it was an organized terror attack — a fact denied for days after the deaths by President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Months of investigation by The New York Times,
centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had
direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no
evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any
role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had
benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support
during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by
some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an
American-made video denigrating Islam.
The White House and Clinton have said that
no one was sure it was a terror attack or that al-Qaeda was involved
until well after the incident. But within 24 hours the CIA station chief
in Libya reported that it was a terror attack, and the CIA advised the
White House that it appeared likely that al-Qaeda-linked terrorists were
involved.
The report alluded to “contradictory”
intelligence accounts it said came out in the immediate aftermath of the
attack that may have confused the picture of how the attack happened.
But Gen. Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM at the
time of attack, said Defense officials did not believe the attack was
from an out-of-control demonstration and had no evidence of it,
according to declassified testimony released this week by House
investigators.
Ham said a U.S. military surveillance drone
was sending back to Washington real-time video of the attack within
minutes of its start.
“When we saw a rocket-propelled grenade
attack, what appeared to be pretty well-aimed small-arms fire — again,
this is all coming second- and third-hand through unclassified, you
know, commercial, cellphones for the most part, initially,” he told
House Armed Services.
“To me, it started to become clear pretty
quickly that this was certainly a terrorist attack and not just not
something sporadic.”
There were two explanations, one accurate, one inaccurate. The accurate explanation had all kinds of bad repercussions for the White House and State Department – a wild overestimation of the stability of post-Qaddafi Libya, a blind dismissal of security concerns on the ground, an embarrassing inability to mount a rescue in a region adjacent to a host of NATO bases, and a humiliating refutation of Obama’s reelection year boast that “al-Qaeda is on the run.”
The inaccurate one put the blame on some YouTube filmmaker. (Click link below to read more)
READ MORE Sphere: Related Content
No comments:
Post a Comment