The New York Times says al Qaeda was not involved in the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans. In sharp contrast, two key members of the House Intelligence Committee, one a Democrat and one a Republican, insist evidence the Times did not see demonstrates al Qaeda was involved.
We’ll just add this: If the Times is better informed than Congress, Benghazi is a bigger mess than even we thought.
The 7,000-word article by Cairo bureau chief David Kirkpatrick includes some impressive color and detail. That’s not surprising, especially given Kirkpatrick’s statement that the Times had a reporter “on the scene talking to the attackers during the attack.”
Still, we take away three things from this story and the debate it has provoked.
First, the sweeping conclusion that al Qaeda was not involved is simply not supported by the Times story — and is contradicted by some of the Times’ other reporting. Six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, another Times dispatch said the State Department had determined that Muhammad Jamal al Kashef’s Egyptian network, which both the US and UN have designated an al Qaeda affiliate, was directly involved. Yet nowhere in the Kirkpatrick article is he even mentioned.
Second, the man the Times identifies as the ringleader of the attack, Abu Khattala, is strutting freely around Benghazi today.
And finally, as former House Intel chairman Pete Hoekstra put it in National Review, Benghazi “should not be a debate about whether the attackers were directly or indirectly connected” to al Qaeda but what the attack says about the failure of Obama’s foreign policy across the Middle East and Africa.
We’re still waiting for that story.