Competing leaks, statements and time-lines in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg News, LA Times and other media outlets show that State Department and CIA were not on the same page for security at the Benghazi “consulate” — one report suggests that something other than diplomacy was the real/only CIA-State Department game in that town on 9/11
According to Max Fisher’s Washington Post commentary on a Wall Street Journal item, “WSJ: State Dept. and CIA had secret, botched deal for Benghazi security” posted at the Washington Post’s World Views on November 2, 2012: “The CIA is said to have been the dominant U.S. presence in Benghazi, where it had a ‘symbiotic’ relationship with the State Department consulate that served as cover for its staff. ‘The State Department believed it had a formal agreement with the CIA to provide backup security,’ the Journal says, ‘although a congressional investigator said it now appears the CIA didn’t have the same understanding about its security responsibilities.’ *** But, on Sept. 11, the arrangement for the CIA to provide ‘emergency’ security to the consulate apparently did not unfold as the State Department had expected....”
Fisher of the Washington Post thinks that these factors lead to more critical questions that need to be dug into right away.
Two November 2nd reports, one at Bloomberg News.Com by John Walcott, “CIA Describes Effort to Rescue Americans in Libya Attack”; and another, an LA Times report by Ken Delanian, “U.S. says CIA responded within 25 minutes to Benghazi attack”, contain several defensive and combative statements by CIA officials that are principally intended to rebut Fox News accounts over the last week indicating that CIA superiors had ordered CIA assets on the ground at the “Annex” to “Stand Down”.
The LA Times article contains a series of “confidential”quotes by senior CIA officials and time-line provided by those CIA officials. These indicated that it took the CIA officers at the Annex only 25 minutes to respond to the attack at “Consulate” compound; and they concluded that "The officers on the ground in Benghazi responded to the situation on the night of 11 and 12 September as quickly and as effectively as possible.... The security officers in particular were genuine heroes. They quickly tried to rally additional local support and heavier weapons, and when that could not be accomplished within minutes, they still moved in and put their own lives on the line to save their comrades."
In addition to a similar time-line and similar quotes as those in the Delanian/LA Times piece, the Walcott/Bloomberg News report, “Charges that the Obama administration failed to respond to requests for additional security in Benghazi and at the American Embassy in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, have grown harsher and become part of the Republican campaign to unseat President Barack Obama, and the CIA has suffered collateral damage from the allegations. *** Responding to accusations aired on Fox News and picked up elsewhere that officials in Washington had refused to approve military strikes or rescue efforts, the official said no one in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA or any other organization second-guessed decisions made in Benghazi, and there were no orders to anyone providing support to stand down.”
Unfortunately, the conclusory remarks by the CIA superior officers quoted by Ken Delanian and John Walcott are internally inconsistent and rendered completely problematic by the Washington Post/WSJ revelations. The principal questions being — if the security plan called for rallying additional local support with heavier weapons, why could that support not be accomplished within the time frame of the attack of 9/11/12; and was the heavy reliance on the local support as part of the security plan one of shortcomings that Ambassador Stevens had complained about up his chain of authority prior to 9/11.
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