Lack of answers over Libya attack puts Obama government in a spot
With 40 days left until presidential elections pitting the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama against Republican rival Mitt Romney, the dramatic events of Sept. 11, 2012 are pulsating through the campaign.
At its core are allegations that the State Department, and by implication the Obama administration, failed to protect its diplomats caught up in an hours-long siege of the US consulate in Benghazi.
In the latest twist to the evolving story, the US intelligence community said Friday that the deadly assault was an organized attack linked to Al-Qaeda. But it stressed that “many unanswered questions” remained. “We do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to Al-Qaeda,” Shawn Turner, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement.
But he said it was “unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack.”
Initially, State Department officials spoke of a “complex attack” triggered by anger at an anti-Islam Internet video, although they cautioned that the full facts of what had happened were not known.
The diplomatic corps was in shock after the loss of US ambassador Chris Stevens in the attack — the first serving ambassador killed on duty since the late 1970s — and three other American personnel working for the mission. Within hours, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was the work of “a small and savage group” and denounced the video said to have sparked a demonstration outside the mission, which then turned into a full-scale attack.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, that weekend described it as a “spontaneous attack” — that occurred on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America.
Her response led Republican Congressman Pete King to call for Rice to resign, charging she misled Americans over the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi by dismissing suggestions that it was a planned terror operation.
As more questions were raised about the attack — in which the US compound was set ablaze and a nearby annex to which most of the staff had been evacuated came under sustained fire — officials spoke of a “coordinated” assault.
Libya for its part pointed the finger at foreigners from Al-Qaeda who were mixing with loyalists of Muammar Qaddafi.
The initial version of events laid out in Washington began crumbling, even as the State Department said the consulate was now an FBI crime scene and it could not answer any more questions relating to the investigation. Clinton has also opened an official review, headed by veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering, to determine whether security measures were fully implemented.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Sept. 17 refused to characterize it as a terrorist attack, saying “I don’t think we know enough.” But two days later, the director of the US government’s National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, told lawmakers that, despite many unanswered questions, he was prepared to call the killings “a terrorist attack.”
He cautiously evoked a link with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), while Fox News suggested former Guantanamo detainee Sufyan Ben Qumu, transferred to his native Libya in 2007 and freed a year later, was involved.
Questions emerged whether Stevens himself had suggested he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list, and whether intelligence of a threat against the Benghazi mission had been ignored.
Both suggestions were dismissed by Clinton, who said there had been no such indications in the days prior to the attack.
With questions lingering, and after new revelations that Stevens’ diary was found in the ruins of the Benghazi compound, White House spokesman Jay Carney this week reiterated Obama’s view that the assault was a terrorist attack.
n Agence France Presse
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