WORLD_ Libya Attack Probe Unfolds as U.S. Politicians Pin Blame

Debris is strewn on the ground inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 13, 2012. Photographer: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images


Libya Attack Probe Unfolds as U.S. Politicians Pin Blame

By Christopher Stephen on October 03, 2012


The U.S. ambassador to Libya died in a smoke-filled tomb while his colleagues escaped the American diplomatic post in Benghazi when it was attacked by Islamist gunmen, according to a reconstruction of his final hours.

On that, and little else, there is widespread agreement.

At home, politicians are dueling over who is to blame for the deaths of Chris Stevens and three other Americans. With the election 34 days away, Republicans are faulting President Barack Obama’s administration over its security preparations and its reaction to the attack, seeking to reverse their presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s deficit in national polls.

“Their response was slow, it was confused, it was inconsistent,” Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said Sept. 30 on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is part of a bigger picture of the fact that the Obama foreign policy is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens.”

Two Republican lawmakers said yesterday that U.S. officials in Libya sought more security in Benghazi before the attacks and were spurned by counterparts in Washington. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa of California and Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying their information came from “multiple U.S. federal government officials” they didn’t name.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declined to discuss the issues raised by the letter, which she said will be reviewed by an accountability review board led by former senior U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering, as well as by Congress. The U.S., she said yesterday, is still working with the information at hand, which another State Department official with knowledge of the incident called incomplete at best.


Revised Account

Much about the Sept. 11 attack remains unknown, including why some Libyan agents of the Central Intelligence Agency were unable to reach their American contacts that night, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information. While intelligence officials probe that question, a team from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is preparing to investigate the jumble of events.

The Obama administration initially called the assault a spontaneous protest that turned violent, then later revised its account to characterize the incident as a terrorist act organized by extremists with possible ties to al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate.

In interviews, Libyan police and local residents, some of whom witnessed the attack, described a series of ominous signals in the days and months beforehand, chaos during the assault, and a veteran envoy who perished while others were rescued.


‘Americans’ Fault’

Libyan police who arrived to evacuate Americans soon after the attack began on the night of Sept. 11 weren’t told that Ambassador Stevens was missing or injured, Fawzi Younis Qaddafi, head of the Special Security Committee in Benghazi, Libya’s national gendarmerie, said in an interview. With looters entering the compound, Qaddafi decided to help the U.S. staff leave and abandon the compound, he said. “We didn’t know the ambassador was there,” he said.

“It was the Americans’ fault.”

Home video recorded by an unknown person and posted on the Internet shows young Libyan men pulling Stevens, his white shirt over his shoulders, through the open window of his bedroom into the yard.

Stevens was brought to the city’s largest hospital, Benghazi Medical Center, in a private car driven by unknown Libyan civilians some time after 1 a.m. on Sept. 12, hospital director Dr. Fathi al Jehani said in an interview. He was dead.


Dangerous Place

Before the attack, Benghazi was well known as a dangerous place for U.S. and Western citizens, and the two U.S. officials said intelligence had warned that an Islamic extremist group posed a threat to Americans in the city. Between February and June, a series of attacks took place, beginning with the desecration of 200 British and Commonwealth World War II-era graves in the city.

They escalated to bomb attacks against the United Nations head of mission in April, the International Committee of the Red Cross office in May and the U.S. consulate in June.

Later that month, a rocket hit an armored jeep in a convoy carrying Dominic Asquith, the British ambassador to Libya, and injured two of his bodyguards. While the British and the Red Cross subsequently left the city, the U.S. stayed on.

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-03/libya-attack-probe-unfolds-as-u-dot-s-dot-politicians-pin-blame





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