BENGHAZI: Top Clinton aide swiftly briefed Capitol Hill on “coordinated” attack
By James Rosen
In a briefing to Capitol Hill staffers delivered the day after the deadly 9/11 attacks in Benghazi, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the killings appeared to be the result of a terrorist attack.
Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy – who exercises responsibility for all State Department personnel, facilities, and operations, and who is one of the department’s most respected civil servants, having served in his position under both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations – delivered the assessment in an unclassified, half-hour conference call with staff aides to House and Senate lawmakers from relevant committees, and leadership offices, on the evening of September 12.
That a State Department official of Kennedy’s rank – one with direct oversight of the installations and people targeted in Benghazi – should have reached so swiftly the conclusion that the attacks were premeditated and coordinated stands in stark contrast to the opposing narrative pressed at that time, and for several days afterward, by other top officials at State, the Obama White House, and the intelligence agencies.
Three days after Kennedy’s conference call, for example, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows to insist that the attacks were neither coordinated nor premeditated, but were rather the result of a spontaneous mob action, inspired by an anti-Muslim video on the Internet, that spun out of control.
Rice has since told lawmakers that her comments reflected “the intelligence community’s best, current assessment as of the date of my television appearances,” and a spokesman to the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, has said in a statement that the intelligence community “revised our initial assessment to…[conclude] that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”
According to participants on the Kennedy call, the under secretary noted he is not a “security expert,” but then focused on the presence of light and heavy weapons outside the U.S. consulate and annex in Benghazi where U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, and three other Americans, had been killed the night before.
“He made clear that this was a sophisticated attack,” said one Hill staff aide with a security clearance. “He indicated this was fairly complex, and not, like, a protest that got out of hand….These were not the kind of weapons you tote around.”
In subsequent days, Kennedy delivered an in-person, classified briefing to a group comprised of many of the same congressional staff aides who had participated on the September 12 conference call.
Fox News and other news organizations have previously reported that earlier on September 12 – within twenty-four hours of learning about the murders – the Obama administration made a secret determination that Benghazi was indeed a terrorist attack. Doing so enabled them, under the terms of a 2001 anti-terrorism statute, to move men, money and materiel around more freely, and position these assets to meet the threats in Libya and other parts of the Mideast that had recently seen attacks on U.S. installations. Kennedy’s assessment accorded with that determination.
This leaves unexplained how Rice, ostensibly armed with the intelligence community’s best assessment, could have offered such a starkly different account in her Sunday show appearances. As late as September 17, Fox News reported last week, high-level U.S. intelligence officials obtained from outside security contractors assessments of the mortar damage done at the U.S. annex in Benghazi. Sources told Fox News these officials then used the contractors’ mortar damage assessments – which indicated the presence of at least two highly skilled mortar teams using GPS devices – to rebut Rice’s claims internally.
The next day, on September 18, Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified publicly that the attacks were an act of terrorism – which effectively ended the internal disputes roiling the Obama administration and the intelligence community.
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James Rosen
Chief Washington Correspondent
Host, “The Foxhole”
Twitter: @JamesRosenFNC
