Ignatius: CIA documents supported Susan Rice’s description of Benghazi attacks

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Confirming the New York Times report I posted earlier, Election-Year Stakes Overshadow Nuances of Benghazi Investigation – NYTimes.com, the Washington Post's national security pundit David ignatius writes today that CIA documents supported Susan Rice’s description of Benghazi attacks:

The Romney campaign may have misfired with its suggestion that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice
about the Benghazi attack last month weren’t supported by intelligence,
according to documents provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official.

“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day
that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of
the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger
about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to
the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the
demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests
at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against
the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications
that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”

The CIA document went on: “This assessment may change as additional
information is collected and analyzed and as currently available
information continues to be evaluated.” This may sound like
self-protective boilerplate, but it reflects the analysts’ genuine
problem interpreting fragments of intercepted conversation, video
surveillance and source reports.

The senior intelligence official
said the analysts’ judgment was based in part on monitoring of some of
the Benghazi attackers, which showed they had been watching the Cairo
protests live on television and talking about them before they assaulted
the consulate.

“We believe the timing of the attack was
influenced by events in Cairo,” the senior official said, reaffirming
the Cairo-Benghazi link. He said that judgment is repeated in a new
report prepared this week for the House intelligence committee.

Here’s how the senior official described the jumble of events in
Benghazi that day: “The attackers were disorganized; some seemed more
interested in looting. Some who claimed to have participated joined the
attack as it began or after it was under way. There is no evidence of
rehearsals, they never got into the safe room . . . never took any hostages, didn’t bring explosives to blow the safe room door, and didn’t use a car bomb to blow the gates.”

* * *

The political debate has focused on whether the attack was spontaneous
or planned, but the official said there’s evidence of both, and that
different attackers may have had different motives. There’s no dispute,
however, that it was “an act of terror,” as Obama described it the next
day.

The [CIA] official said the only major change he would make now in the CIA’s
Sept. 15 talking points would be to drop the word “spontaneous” and
substitute “opportunistic.” He explained that there apparently was “some
pre-coordination but minimal planning.”

* * *

The Benghazi attack produced a swirl of intelligence reporting, some of
it contradictory. The Associated Press reported Friday that within 24
hours of the assault, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled headquarters
that eyewitnesses said the attack had been carried out by militants.
But the analysts evidently didn’t feel that they had any single report
that allowed them to make a definitive determination about the nature of
the attack.

A memo prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center on Sept. 14
illustrates the fragmentary nature of the evidence: “As time progresses,
we are learning more, but we still don’t have a complete picture of
what happened,” noted the analysts. “At this point, we are not aware of
any actionable intelligence that this attack was planned or imminent. . . .
We are very cautious about drawing any firm conclusions at this point
with regard to identification and motivation of the attackers.”

The
analysts seem confident that al-Qaeda’s new leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
played no direct role in the Benghazi events, even though he called on
Sept. 10 for revenge attacks against the United States."

* * *

Ironically, the Sept. 15 talking points that were the basis for Rice’s
televised comments were requested by the House intelligence committee.
Ideally, the congressional oversight committees would provide bipartisan
support for intelligence officials who are probing the attack. But in
the heat of the final pre-election weeks, the murky details of what
happened in Libya have instead become political assault weapons.

The attempts by the Neocon chickenhawks in the right-wing noise machine,
e.g., FAUX News contributor Charles Krauthammer, as well as by super-chicken Vietnam draft
dodger Willard "Mittens" Romney Willard 'Mittens' Romney had better things to do during the Vietnam War and
his Neocon chickenhawk boy wonder Paul Ryan, to conflate the attack on
the consulate office in Benghazi, Libya as "what we see in front of us
is the absolute unraveling of the Obama administration's foreign policy"
as Ryan did yesterday, is complete and utter nonsense.

This is the most vile form of propaganda from the right-wing noise machine — politicizing the deaths of Americans overseas. And Romney started it before anyone knew that Ambassador Stevens had been killed. He is shameless, and this should be disqualifying from the presidency.