How is the Obama White House going to fit the entire State Department and the intelligence community under the bus?
Last month’s Benghazi fiasco saw four Americans — including our ambassador to Libya — murdered by elements of al Qaeda in a military-style assault timed to coincide with the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
The weeks afterward saw the administration blaming a video that, even the White House now admits, had nothing to do with it. And the months before the attack saw Washington adamantly reducing security in Benghazi — despite pleas for reinforcements from the folks on the ground.
Yet President Obama’s top spokesman — and Vice President Joe Biden, in last week’s debate — have been busy pointing fingers of blame at State and the IC.
It won’t work. Neither Foggy Bottom nor the intel community’s legion of spooks, analysts and secret-keepers is likely to go quietly.
Indeed, State has already started the pushback. It has pointedly released the transcript of an Oct. 9 media briefing in which Brad Klapper of the Associated Press asks what “led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?”
Someone described only as “Senior State Department Official Two” answers, “That is a question you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion.”
Of course, Biden and Obama spokesmen like Jay Carney have been claiming that “the intelligence” the White House received at first had blamed the attack on the video.
This part of the blame game will fail because it just doesn’t make any sense. The American IC is not infallible, but what part of it — the CIA? The National Security Agency? State’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research? — would have leaped to such a ridiculous conclusion?
Mere hours after the attack, the nation’s spooks knew this was terrorism, not amateur movie criticism. There had been ample warning — including an assault on the British ambassador as well as earlier attacks on our consulate — that something was coming.
And yet the White House — which as recently as Oct. 8 was still insisting that a resurgent al Qaeda is “on its heels” — has chosen to stick to another exonerative fairy story: that it was unaware that Ambassador Chris Stevens had begged for more security at the beleaguered Benghazi compound.
The reasons for this denial may be best known to campaign guru David Axelrod. After all, the administration’s only indisputable foreign-policy triumph — the killing of Osama bin Laden — would be in serious jeopardy were Obama and Biden to publicly admit that the Libyan attacks were in part retaliation for bin Laden’s death and the ongoing US drone strikes in Yemen and elsewhere.
But it’s simply untrue that the government was unaware of the deteriorating security conditions in Benghazi. In last week’s congressional hearing, security officials testified that Washington repeatedly turned a deaf ear to their urgent requests for beefed-up forces at the Benghazi compound and CIA “safe house.”
Indeed, two separate security teams had recently been withdrawn from Libya after their temporary assignments had expired. And last week’s testimony made it plain that this was according to policy — a policy set by just what higher-ups, we still don’t know.
There’s more bad news to come. It now appears that the CIA “safe house” in Benghazi — which was tasked with tracking down the lethal weapons looted from the collapsed Khadafy regime — was also stripped of valuable information in the Sept. 11 attack.
That intelligence likely included the names of Libyans and others who’d been cooperating with the Americans, as well as possible double agents within Ansar al-Sharia (the al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula branch behind the Benghazi attack) and al Qaeda itself. This may explain why, on Thursday, masked gunmen shot and killed a local security officer in Yemen who’d been working with the US Embassy.
So the Benghazi attacks may well prove to be an intelligence disaster of the highest order, seriously compromising scarce US assets in the region.
Yet the White House response seems to be utterly political — a concerted effort to shift blame, even if it means risking a break with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and payback from husband Bill. (Not to mention the chance of embarrassing blowback from the spooks who keep the secrets).
Maybe Team Obama can manage to dodge all the way to Nov. 6 — but they’re going to need a bigger bus.