Israel Matzav

Within hours, Obama had dozen reports that al-Qaeda behind Libya attack

Within hours of last month's terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration had a dozen reports that al-Qaeda was behind the attack.

Despite these reports, in public statements and private meetings, top U.S. officials spent nearly two weeks highlighting intelligence suggesting that the attacks were spontaneous protests against an anti-Muslim film, while playing down the involvement of organized militant groups.

It was not until last Friday that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's office issued an unusual public statement, which described how the picture that intelligence agencies presented to U.S. policymakers had "evolved" into an acknowledgement that the attacks were "deliberate and organized" and "carried out by extremists."

The existence of the early reports appears to raise fresh questions about the Obama administration's public messaging about the attack as it seeks to fend off Republican charges that the White House failed to prevent a terrorist strike that left a U.S. ambassador and three others dead.

"What we're seeing now is the picture starting to develop that it wasn't a problem with the intelligence that was given, it's what they did with the intelligence that they were given," Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on Tuesday.

"This picture is still a little fuzzy but it is starting to come into focus and it appears that there were, very early on, some indications that there was jihadist participation in the event," he said.

Alana Goodman adds:

A dozen intelligence reports pointing to al-Qaeda within 24 hours of the attack is not a narrative that “evolved.” If the administration didn’t want to get into the details of the attack until more information came in, that would have been understandable. But that’s different from them spending nearly two weeks blaming the attack on a protest over an anti-Islam video that they knew didn’t cause it.

It also raises another issue. If the administration had a dozen immediate reports of al-Qaeda involvement, then obviously the scapegoats in the intelligence community were not responsible for the changing narrative. Did the White House put pressure on intelligence officials to provide knowingly false conclusions to Congress and the public in the days following the attack? And what exactly would the implications of that be?

Indeed.

The Republicans should be all over this story. The Obama administration is trying to convince everyone that since they killed Osama Bin Laden (which they didn't - the Navy Seals did that), the war on terror is 'over.' Sadly, that is far from true. There is no shortage of Islamist terrorism in the world. The Obama administration would prefer to ignore it.

What could go wrong?

Labels: al-Qaeda, Barack Hussein Obama, Benghazi, Islamic terrorism, Libya

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:49 PM