Diplomatic,
western posts targeted repeatedly in Benghazi in run-up to deadly assault
Published September
15, 2012
FoxNews.com
While the Obama administration says there was no "actionable intelligence" foreshadowing the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, there were at least four attacks on diplomatic and western targets in Benghazi leading up to the murder of the U.S. ambassador.
“This (the U.S.
Consulate) was a place that was targeted months before with an IED (improvised
explosive device)," Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence
committee who has been briefed on the attack and investigation, told Fox
News. “It's clearly a target that they wanted to hit and they wanted to
cause casualties. ... It's just too many coincidences here”
On June
6, an IED was thrown at the perimeter of the U.S. Consulate in
Benghazi. On June 11, the British ambassador's motorcade came under attack by a
rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. Two security personnel were
injured. Seven days later, on June 18, armed gunmen attacked the Tunisian
consulate and burned its flag. And on Aug. 5, five weeks before the
assault on the U.S. Consulate, the International Committee of the Red Cross
building in Benghazi was also struck by RPGs.
On Friday, the chairman
and ranking members of the Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman
and Susan Collins, sent a letter to the State Department inspector general
requesting an investigation into the U.S. Consulate’s security posture at the
time of the attack. The letter specifically references the previous attacks in
June on the consulate and the British ambassador’s convoy, adding:
“Does the risk
assessment process consider the capacity or lack thereof of the host country to
provide security? Did the Libyan government request or suggest that security
could be improved at the Benghazi facility prior to September 12th,
2010?”
A spokesman for the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nation’s top intelligence
officials, said “actionable intelligence would have meant that we either
saw or heard something, through intelligence collection, that told us that a
specific act was being planned or was imminent. As I have said, we are not
aware of any actionable intelligence related to the attack in Benghazi.”
But a former official
with the Bush administration said the Obama White House appeared to be dodging
the real issue. “This definition relies on the notion that action is only taken
to prevent a specific plot where we know the time, place and even method of
attack. Action can be, and is taken, to increase security when more
general threats, like what we saw this summer in Benghzai, are known,” the
former official said.
Asked if the four
attacks prior to the ambassador’s murder were briefed to the president as part of
the highly classified daily briefing which details threats against the U.S.
homeland and U.S. interests, there was no immediate response from the ODNI nor
the spokesman for the National Security Council.
Given the heightened
threat picture, the former Bush administration official questioned whether more
aggressive precautionary measures should have been taken at diplomatic missions
even though the intelligence was apparently not specific.
“President Bush was criticized for being disengaged before 9/11, but
given what we all know now about the terrorist threat, there is no excuse for
lacking engagement or focus on the persistent threats to U.S. personnel in
North Africa.”
