January 17, 2014 | Quote

Can Hillary Clinton Survive Benghazi?

The Post reports, “A long-delayed Senate intelligence committee report released Wednesday spreads blame among the State Department and intelligence agencies for not preventing attacks on two outposts in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The bipartisan report lays out more than a dozen findings regarding the assaults on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, on a diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in the Libyan city of Benghazi. It says the State Department failed to increase security at its diplomatic mission despite warnings and faults intelligence agencies for not sharing information about the existence of the CIA outpost with the U.S. military.”

It is a repudiation of nearly every White House talking point used at some point in the aftermath of the murder of four Americans in Libya. Contrary to White House and Hillary Clinton spin, this was from the outset known to be an al-Qaeda operation, one that could have been preventable. Especially egregious is the lack of preparation for the anniversary for Sept. 11 and the State Department’s repeated denials of requests for security. The Democratic talking point that the security failure was due to sequester cuts is false.

National security analyst Thomas Joscelyn tells me, “The report confirms that terrorists from multiple parts of al-Qaeda’s international network were directly involved in the attack. The report says that terrorists ‘affiliated’ with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Muhammad Jamal Network, and Ansar al Sharia all ‘participated’ in the attack.” He continues, “ AQIM and AQAP are official branches of al-Qaeda. Muhammad Jamal has been a subordinate to al-Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri since at least the 1990s, and was trained by al-Qaeda in the late 1980s. Ansar al Sharia in Derna is headed by a longtime al-Qaeda operative named Sufian Ben Qumu, and some of his men were involved in the attack.” In other words, White House spin conveyed with stenographic precision in a highly criticized New York Times piece is flat out wrong. As Joscelyn puts it, “The U.S. government has desperately tried to avoid saying that al-Qaeda was responsible.”

Read the full article here.

Issues:

Al Qaeda Libya