U.S. ambassador to Libya killed in rocket attack - Page 44

In the possible first sign of a major climbdown, "60 Minutes" announced Thursday night that it is "reviewing" its controversial report on the Benghazi attacks after finding what reports say is further evidence that one of its main sources changed his account of events repeatedly.

The CBS program came under repeated criticism after it was revealed that the source—a security officer named Dylan Davies who provided correspondent Lara Logan with an eye-popping, made-for-TV account of the tragic events in Benghazi—had previously lied about his whereabouts on the night of the attack, throwing into question whether the story he told to "60 Minutes" could be trusted.

"60 Minutes" initially defended itself, with the show's executive producer Jeff Fager telling HuffPost's Michael Calderone that he was "proud" of the report and Logan attributing the scrutiny to political partisanship.

However, on Thursday night, the show issued a statement saying that it had found new information. Using Davies' pseudonym, Morgan Jones, "60 Minutes" said it was looking to see whether it had been lied to:

60 Minutes has learned of new information that undercuts the account told to us by Morgan Jones of his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound.
We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction.

Prior to the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi late in the evening on Sept. 11, there was no protest outside the compound, a senior State Department official confirmed today, contradicting initial administration statements suggesting that the attack was an opportunistic reaction to unrest caused by an anti-Islam video.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, two senior State Department officials gave a detailed accounting of the events that lead to the death of Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The officials said that prior to the massive attack on the Benghazi compound by dozens of militants carrying heavy weaponry, there was no unrest outside the walls of the compound and no protest that anyone inside the compound was aware of.

In fact, Stevens hosted a series of meetings on the compound throughout the day, ending with a meeting with a Turkish diplomat that began at 7:30 in the evening, and all was quiet in the area.

"The ambassador walked guests out at 8:30 or so; there was nobody on the street. Then at 9:40 they saw on the security cameras that there were armed men invading the compound," a senior State Department official said. "Everything is calm at 8:30 pm, there is nothing unusual. There had been nothing unusual during the day outside."

The State Department says it never concluded that an attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya was simply a protest gone awry, a statement that places the Obama administration’s own foreign policy arm in sync with Republicans.

That extraordinary message, appearing to question the administration’s initial description of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, came in a department briefing Tuesday — a day before a hearing on diplomatic security in Libya was to be held by the Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the State Department of turning aside pleas from its diplomats in Libya to increase security in the months and weeks before Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi. One scheduled witness Wednesday, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for U.S. diplomats in Libya who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored.

Briefing reporters Tuesday ahead of the hearing, department officials were asked about the administration’s initial — and since retracted — explanation linking the violence to protests over an American-made anti-Muslim video circulating on the Internet. One official responded, “That was not our conclusion.” He called it a question for “others” to answer, without specifying.

Senate Democrats joined Republicans Thursday in questioning the Obama administration's handling of the fatal Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and why the administration refused for days to acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack linked to al Qaeda.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., circulated a bipartisan letter addressed to Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, asking for an "accounting of the attacks against U.S. missions in Egypt, Libya and Yemen," according to a copy obtained by The Washington Examiner.

The lawmakers are also demanding to know whether the administration had any advance warnings of the Libyan attack and, if so, whether it had shared that information with U.S. personnel on the ground.

President Obama came under intense criticism because the administration's explanation for what happened at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi kept changing. For days, the administration insisted to the public and Congress that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an American-made anti-Muslim video. As recently as Tuesday, in an address to the United Nations, Obama was blaming the video for inciting the attack.

But as evidence came to light showing that mortar rounds had been fired into the U.S. compound and that the attack had been carefully planned, the administration's explanation changed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first suggested in a high-level meeting at the U.N. that there could be a link between al Qaeda and "other violent extremists" and the attack in Benghazi.

On Thursday, the Pentagon confirmed that the attack was the work of a terrorist organization and not related to the anti-Muslim video.

"It was a terrorist attack," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at a news conference.

The Obama administration clearly had been hoping that the Libya attack would fade in the public's consciousness, said James Carafano, a defense expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. With congressional Democrats now also questioning how events unfolded, however, that's not likely to happen.

"Their hope was that on Monday, when the facts started to come out, everyone would have moved on, and that was a miscalculation on their part," Carafano said. "The one thing you can't do is have people intentionally lying to Congress or withholding information from Congress and then think you are not going to pay a price for that."

The Obama administration's lies about the Benghazi attack continue to unravel. The President would like us to believe that he and his spokespeople have merely passed on the best intelligence they had as it evolved. But the State Department said yesterday that it never concluded that there was a protest outside the consulate.

For seven days after the attack, the Obama administration clung to its YouTube protest fiction. Then, the White House claimed to have received new information that the attack was terrorism, planned in advance and unrelated to a protest. Yesterday's State Department admission reveals this "evolving intelligence" claim to be yet another lie.

Within 24 hours of the attack, U.S. intelligence suspected that it was terrorism linked to Al Qaeda. At the time, the Obama administration was still claiming it was merely a spontaneous protest that got out of hand.

By September 13, the President had internally designated the attack an act of terrorism so that he would have the legal authority to mobilize military and intelligence assets. But, for the next five days, his spokespeople, most notably Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.N. Ambassador Rice, continued to insist that the attack started as a protest.

The State Department is now saying that, like the intelligence agencies, it never concluded that the attack grew out of a protest. So why did the Obama administration continue to tell the protest lie to the public for a week after the attack?

I'll tell you why.

The President would have been in a tough spot if he had admitted at the time of the attack and murder of a U.S. ambassador that it was Al Qaeda-linked terrorism. After all, he had, only five days earlier, boasted at the Democratic National Convention that "Al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat."

A disaster like the premeditated slaying of a U.S. ambassador would also call into question Obama's entire Libyan adventure. In truth, the very act of toppling Gaddafi made the region less safe, less stable, and less manageable. And responsibility for that lies solely with President Obama, since he failed even to ask Congress for authorization to attack Libya.

To avoid the indignity of being called to account for his own failed policies, the President and his staff concocted a lie. It was a plausible lie, though it rested on the absurd stereotype that Middle Eastern mobs carry mortars with them. But it was a lie and it was designed to direct the public's attentions away from Obama's own failures.