Papers Blast Obama Over Benghazi
The lead editorials in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal today offer stinging critiques of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi
Among those unanswered questions:
“Why
did the U.S. not heed warnings about a growing Islamist presence in
Benghazi and better protect the diplomatic mission and CIA annex?”
“What
exactly happened on the day of 9/11? During the over six hours that the
compounds in Benghazi were under siege, could the U.S. have done more
to save lives?”
“What was President Obama doing and ordering his subordinates to do in those fateful hours?
Why has the Administration's story about what took place in Benghazi been so haphazard and unclear?”
These questions, and many others, need answers.
The
administration has managed to avoid providing them for nearly eight
weeks, with a much needed assist from a suddenly lack of curiosity among
the truth-seeking journalists at many of America’s most influential
news outlets. Perhaps after the election that curiosity will return.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
What we now know—and still don't—about President Obama's 9/11
“The
President may succeed in stonewalling Congress and the media past
Election Day. But the issue will return, perhaps with a vengeance, in an
Obama second term. The episode reflects directly on his competence and
honesty as Commander in Chief. If his Administration is found to have
dissembled, careers will be ended and his Presidency will be severely
damaged—all the more so because he refused to deal candidly with the
issue before the election.”
The Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered September 11 in Benghazi. That we know. But too little else about what took place before, during and after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission is clear.
The White House says Republicans are "politicizing" a tragedy. Politicians politicize, yes, but part of their job is to hold other politicians accountable. The Administration has made that difficult by offering evasive, inconsistent and conflicting accounts about one of the most serious American overseas defeats in recent years. Unresolved questions about Benghazi loom over this election because the White House has failed to resolve them.
• Why did the U.S. not heed warnings about a growing Islamist presence in Benghazi and better protect the diplomatic mission and CIA annex?
From the start of the Libyan uprising in early 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency built up an unusually large presence in Benghazi. By this September, two dozen or so operatives and contractors monitored Ansar al-Shariah and other militant groups. Deteriorating security after the war was no secret. U.S. intelligence noted militant camps in the mountains near Benghazi, including "al Qaeda leaning" fighters, according to Tuesday's New York Times.
Damage inside the burnt US consulate building in Benghazi on Sept. 13
Over
the summer, the Red Cross and the U.K. closed their offices in Benghazi
after attempted terrorist attacks and assassinations. A bomb went off
outside the U.S. mission on June 6 but hurt no one. Ambassador Chris
Stevens told his superiors in an August cable about a "security vacuum"
in Benghazi. A different classified State cable sent in August, and
obtained by Fox News this week, noted the growth of al Qaeda training
camps and expressed concern about the Benghazi mission's ability to
defend against a coordinated attack. It said it would ask for
"additional physical security upgrades and staffing."
In
a House hearing last month, career State Department officials said
various requests for security reinforcements to Libya were turned down. A
16-member special security team in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, was
pulled out in August. The inability of Libya's weak central government
to protect American diplomats was overlooked. These revelations came
from the career staff at State.
Mr.
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have claimed
"responsibility" for Benghazi, without saying precisely for what. During
the second Presidential debate on October 16, Mr. Obama was asked: "Who
was it that denied enhanced security and why?" He changed the subject.
•
What exactly happened on the day of 9/11? During the over six hours
that the compounds in Benghazi were under siege, could the U.S. have
done more to save lives? What was President Obama doing and ordering his
subordinates to do in those fateful hours?
An
October 9 State Department briefing offered the first precise timeline,
nearly a month later. There was no demonstration outside the consulate
the evening of the 11th—"nothing unusual during the day at all outside,"
a State official said.
That
may not be right. Early that morning, Embassy guards noticed a Libyan
police officer in a building across the street "photographing the inside
of the U.S. special mission," according to a letter dated September 11
from the Embassy to the Libyan government, calling it "troubling." The
letter was discovered last week at the still unsecured compound by two
journalists and published on Foreign Policy's website Thursday.
At
9:40 p.m. local time (3:40 p.m. EST), a security officer at the
Benghazi consulate heard "loud noises" outside the gate and "the camera
on the main gate reveals a large number of people—a large number of men,
armed men, flowing into the compound," according to the State
Department timeline.
Within
half an hour, the consulate was on fire. At about 10:45 p.m., help
arrived from the CIA annex about a mile away. The CIA offered its first
account of that evening this Thursday night, nearly two months after the
fact. Agency personnel were dispatched within 25 minutes of the initial
attack on the consulate. By 11:20, they evacuated the consulate.
Stevens and Sean Smith, a State employee, were dead.
The
fortified annex then came under steady small-arms fire for 90 minutes
starting around midnight, according to the CIA timeline, but it was
never breached. The fighting lulled for four hours. Before dawn, a
sudden mortar attack killed two CIA security officers on a rooftop,
according to CIA officials. By then, a Quick Reaction Force had arrived
from Tripoli to evacuate the annex. The CIA briefers said the agency did
not deny aid to the consulate. But the Journal reported on Friday that
the CIA and State "weren't on the same page about their respective roles
on security" in Benghazi.
The
latest account also leaves unanswered what other options Mr. Obama and
his security team considered. The U.S. failed to bring armed drones,
gunships or other close air support to defend the annex from the
militias who were outside its gates for over four hours. The fighting at
the consulate may have taken place too quickly to bring in outside
military support. According to officials who spoke this week, fighter
jets in Italy would have created too much collateral damage in a
civilian neighborhood.
An
unarmed U.S. drone was diverted to Benghazi but had trouble
distinguishing between the terrorists and U.S. allies who came to the
compounds' aid. An armed drone wasn't in the area. A large special
operations force from Fort Bragg arrived in Sicily too late to help,
according to a National Public Radio report Thursday.
Mr.
Obama was informed of the attacks at around 5 p.m.—11 p.m. in
Libya—during a previously scheduled meeting with his military advisers,
and he ordered military assets moved to the area, according to ABC News.
During the attacks, however, the Administration didn't convene the
Counterterrorism Security Group, which was created to coordinate a
response to a terrorist attack, according to a CBS News report.
Late
last week, Mr. Obama was twice asked by a local Denver television
anchor whether Americans who asked for help in Benghazi were turned down
by the chain of command. He didn't answer.
Lacking
"real-time information," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week,
"you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going
on." Officials this week insisted military intervention was either too
risky or impossible to organize in time.
Yet
it's still reasonable to ask why the U.S. wasn't prepared for such a
contingency. Since 9/11 (of 2001) the U.S. has been at war with the
people who attacked in Benghazi, even though many liberals don't like to
say so. One of them is the current Commander in Chief, who still
refuses to talk about his Administration's response to his 9/11.
• Why has the Administration's story about what took place in Benghazi been so haphazard and unclear?
In
his September 12 Rose Garden statement, Mr. Obama said "no acts of
terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that
character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for." He
said this at the end of his remarks, well after his specific comments
about Benghazi.
Unnamed
Administration officials that same day told Reuters that an al Qaeda
regional offshoot and members of Ansar al-Shariah were probably
involved. "It bears the hallmarks of an organized attack," one U.S.
official said. Intelligence officials briefed Members of Congress later
that week that terrorism was the likeliest culprit.
Yet
by the end of that week, the White House offered a different account:
That the Benghazi attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration against
an anti-Islam video on YouTube. On September 14, Obama spokesman Jay
Carney said, "We don't have and did not have concrete evidence to
suggest that this was not in reaction to the film."
Two
days later, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on a tour of the Sunday
talk shows to repeat the video-caused-the-protest story. On CBS's "Face
the Nation," she contradicted Libya's President Mohamed Magarief, who on
the same show blamed a "preplanned" attack by "foreign" terrorists. The
White House and Ms. Rice have since claimed they were merely following
talking points provided by the "intelligence community."
Yet
Reuters revealed last week that government officials saw a possible al
Qaeda connection even as the attacks were taking place. Emails from
State's regional security officer to the White House Situation Room, the
Pentagon, the FBI and others noted that Ansar al-Shariah had taken
responsibility. The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reported that FBI officers
who interviewed security officers who worked at the consulate knew as
early as September 14 that the attack was no protest.
It
took eight days for the Administration to formally declare that the
four Americans "were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our
embassy," in the words of Matt Olsen, director of the National
Counterterrorism Center. But six days later Mr. Obama was asked by Joy
Behar on "The View" if "it was an act of terrorism"? He said the
government didn't know. In his September 25 U.N. address, Mr. Obama made
several general references to the YouTube video but made no mention of
terrorism in the context of Benghazi.
His
campaign stump speech to this day includes the lines that "al Qaeda has
been decimated" and the U.S. is "finally turning the page on a decade
of war to do some nation-building right here at home" (Thursday in Las
Vegas).
***
Mr.
Obama has made the defeat of al Qaeda a core part of his case for
re-election. Yet in Benghazi an al Qaeda affiliate killed four U.S.
officials in U.S. buildings, contradicting that political narrative.
The
President may succeed in stonewalling Congress and the media past
Election Day. But the issue will return, perhaps with a vengeance, in an
Obama second term. The episode reflects directly on his competence and
honesty as Commander in Chief. If his Administration is found to have
dissembled, careers will be ended and his Presidency will be severely
damaged—all the more so because he refused to deal candidly with the
issue before the election.
America
has since closed the Libya diplomatic outpost and pulled a critical
intelligence unit out of a hotbed of Islamism, conceding a defeat. U.S.
standing in the region and ability to fight terrorist groups were
undermined, with worrying repercussions for a turbulent Middle East and
America's security. This is why it's so important to learn what happened
in Benghazi.
A
version of this article appeared November 3, 2012, on page A14 in the
U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Fog of
Benghazi.
A security breakdown in Benghazi
“Sooner
or later, the administration must answer questions about what
increasingly looks like a major security failure — and about the
policies that led to it.”
By Editorial Board, Published: November 2
NEWS REPORTING about the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya,
has moved from the political and mostly pointless issue of when the
Obama administration had publicly acknowledged that a terrorist attack
had taken place to more essential questions:
Why
was there a security failure at the consulate, and how did U.S. forces
in Libya and outside the country respond to the emergency?
The result is a host of unanswered questions.
Following
a single background briefing, the State Department has mostly refused
to respond to inquiries about Benghazi, citing an ongoing investigation
by a review board.
But considerable evidence has emerged that Ambassador J. Christopher
Stevens, who died in the attack, and his security staff were deeply
concerned about what they considered to be inadequate security. Fox News
reported
this week that a secret cable described an Aug. 15 “emergency meeting”
at the consulate, at which the State Department’s regional security
officer “expressed concerns with the ability to defend Post in the event
of a coordinated attack due to limited manpower, security measures,
weapons capabilities, host nation support and the overall size of the
compound.”
Fox
reported that the cable, dispatched to Washington, said the emergency
meeting included a briefing about al-Qaeda training camps in the
Benghazi area and Islamist militias, including those that allegedly
carried out the Sept. 11 attack. In another cable on Sept. 11, hours
before the attack, Mr. Stevens described “growing problems with
security” in Benghazi and “growing frustration” with the local militias
and police, to which the State Department had entrusted the consulate’s
defense. Separately, according to a report
on ForeignPolicy.com, Mr. Stevens may have dispatched a letter to
Benghazi authorities, complaining that a policeman assigned to guard the
consulate was photographing it on the morning of Sept. 11.
Fox’s
aggressive reporting, though undercut by blustery and often scurrilous
commentary, nevertheless seems to have prompted the CIA and Pentagon to
provide reporters with their accounts of Sept. 11 — even as the State
Department and the White House insist that all should await the official
investigation results. From these, and a report
Friday by the Wall Street Journal, it emerges that the CIA mission in
Benghazi was considerably larger than the consulate and may have been
partly responsible for its defense. According to the CIA account, on the
night of Sept. 11 a six-member paramilitary force set out to rescue
consulate personnel, arriving some 50 minutes after the attack began.
Surviving Americans were evacuated to the CIA station, which itself came
under attack hours later.
The Pentagon and CIA accounts describe a reaction to the attack that, while inadequate, was the best that could be mustered.
Even if so, that leaves the question of why the various agencies were
not better prepared for such an emergency, given the clear warnings. Did
the Obama administration’s political preoccupation with maintaining a
light footprint in Libya lead to an ill-considered reliance on local
militias, rather than on U.S. forces? Given the region’s instability,
why were no military rapid-reaction assets — such as Special Forces or
armed drones — within reach of Northern Africa?
While the agencies separately defend themselves — or not — the White House appears determined to put off any serious discussion of Benghazi until after the election.
Sooner or later, however, the administration must answer questions
about what increasingly looks like a major security failure — and about
the policies that led to it.
An election for President and Commander in Chief of the Military must strive to be above reproach. Our public institutions must give the public confidence that a presidential candidate has complied with the election process that is prescribed by our Constitution and laws. It is only after a presidential candidate satisfies the rules of such a process that he/she can expect members of the public, regardless of their party affiliations, to give him/her the respect that the Office of President so much deserves.
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