Senate report: Attack on U.S. compound in Benghazi could have been prevented

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GEEZER

Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:36 PM

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long-delayed Senate intelligence committee report released on 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 the diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in the Libyan city of Benghazi. It says the State Department failed to increase security at the sites despite warnings, and faults intelligence agencies for not sharing information about the existence of the CIA outpost with the U.S. military.

The committee determined that the U.S. military command in Africa didn’t know about the CIA annex, and the Pentagon didn’t have the resources in place to defend the diplomatic compound in an emergency.

“The attacks were preventable, based on extensive intelligence reporting on the terrorist activity in Libya—to include prior threats and attacks against Western targets—and given the known security shortfalls at the U.S. Mission,” the panel said in a statement.

The report also notes, chillingly, that the FBI’s investigation into the attacks has been hampered inside Libya, and that 15 people “supporting the investigation or otherwise helpful to the United States” have since been killed in Benghazi. The report says it is unclear whether those killings were related to the investigation.

Much of the document recounts now-familiar facts about deteriorating security conditions in Benghazi in 2012, a year after the fall of longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi. It fills in new details about the relationship between the CIA building and the State Department compound about a mile away, and details the rising concern among many intelligence specialists about the growing potency of Islamist militants in the city.

“In spite of the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi and ample strategic warnings, the United States Government simply did not do enough to prevent these attacks and ensure the safety of those serving in Benghazi,” said Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report is based on dozens of committee hearings, briefings and interviews—including with survivors of the attacks—and on thousands of pages of intelligence and State Department materials collected between September 2012 and December 2013.

The account sheds little light on the most politicized aspect of the incident — questions about whether the Obama administration deliberately played down the terrorist origins of the attacks. The committee described the attacks as opportunistic, and said there was no specific, advance warning that they were about to be carried out.

The report says that on Sept. 18, 2012, the “FBI and CIA reviewed the closed circuit television video from the Mission facility that showed there were no protests prior to the attacks.”

But it took six more days for intelligence officials to revise their chronology of events and state “there were no demonstrations or protests” at the diplomatic compound “prior to the attacks.”

The report says it was problematic that the CIA and State Department were not working out of the same facility together in the dangerous Benghazi environment. That meant the CIA and its well-trained contractors, who had served in elite U.S. forces, were not on location at the diplomatic outpost in case of a crisis.

Six armed CIA employees and a linguist responded to the attack on the diplomatic compound, the report says. About 30 minutes passed before the CIA team arrived on the scene and “exchanged fire with the attackers.” They neither asked permission to come to the aid of the diplomats nor were told to stand down.

Detailed accounts provided to the committee describe a harrowing attack and U.S. personal scrambling to survive the assault.

Attackers used “diesel fuel to set the main building ablaze, and thick smoke rapidly filled the entire structure,” the report said. According to

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