CIA note on Libya stirs GOP

— Republicans pounced Friday on disclosures that President Barack Obama’s administration could have known early on that militants, not angry protesters, launched the Sept. 11 attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya.

Within 24 hours of the deadly attack, the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington that there were eyewitness reports that the attack was carried out by militants, officials said. But for days, the Obama administration blamed it on an out-of-control demonstration over a video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee, led Friday’s charge.

“Look around the world, turn on your TV,” Ryan said in an interview with WTAQ radio in the election battleground state of Wisconsin. “And what we see in front of us is the absolute unraveling of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.”

As a security matter, how the Obama administration immediately described the attack has little effect on broader counterterrorism strategies or on the hunt for those responsible for the assault, in which four Americans were killed. And Republicans have offered no explanation for why the president would want to conceal the nature of the attack.

But the issue has given Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney an opportunity to question Obama on foreign policy and national security, two areas that have received little attention in an election dominated by the U.S. economy. Obama’s signature national security accomplishment is the military’s killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Ryan was teeing up the issue for Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy.

“I’m excited we’re going to have a chance to talk about that on Monday,” Ryan said.

Obama, speaking Thursday on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, insisted that information was shared with the American people as it came in. The attack is under investigation, Obama said, and “the picture eventually gets filled in.”

In this week’s debate, Obama told Romney the suggestion that “anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive.”

The report from the station chief was written late Wednesday, Sept. 12, and reached intelligence agencies in Washington the next day,intelligence officials said. It is not clear how widely the information from the CIA station chief was circulated.

U.S. intelligence officials have said the information was just one of many widely conflicting accounts, which became clearer by the following week.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN that the administration didn’t understand the gravity of the situation in Benghazi and as a result bad decisions were made to promote the video as the root of the violence.

“By continuing to promote the video, by escalating the value and credibility of that video to a presidential level, by buying ads in Pakistan that actually fueled protests all across Pakistan - and so, this is what’s so disturbing to me: Were those decisions based on intelligence? I think it’s hard to say yes. So why did they do it? That’s the question we need to get answered. “

Democrats have spent the past week explaining the administration’s handling of the attack. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said a period of uncertainty typically follows attacks.

“In the wake of an attack like this, in the fog of war, there’s always going to be confusion,” Clinton said. “And I think it is absolutely fair to say that everyone had the same intelligence. Everyone who spoke tried to give the information that they had.”

On Tuesday, Obama and Romney argued over when the president first called it a terrorist attack. In his Rose Garden address the morning after the killings, Obama said, “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

But Republicans said he was speaking generally and didn’t specifically call the Benghazi event a terror attack until weeks later. Until then, key members of the administration were blaming an anti-Muslim movie circulating on the Internet as a precipitating event.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., put the blame on the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

“I think what happened was the director of intelligence, who is a very good individual, put out some speaking points on the initial intelligence assessment,” Feinstein said in an interview with news channel CBS 5 in California. “I think that was possibly a mistake.”

Rep. William Thornberry, R-Texas, a member of the House Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said: “How could they be so certain immediately after such events, I just don’t know. That raises suspicions that there was political motivation.”

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday that no evidence has surfaced to indicate that the Sept. 11 assault was planned in advance, a conclusion that suggests the attack was spontaneous even if it involved militants with ties to al-Qaida.

“There isn’t any intelligence that the attackers pre-planned their assault days or weeks in advance,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “The bulk of available information supports the early assessment that the attackers launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”

Much of the Republican criticism of the administration in the wake of the Benghazi assault has focused on U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who appeared on television talk shows days after the attack and attributed it to violent protesters angered by the anti-Muslim video clip. The latest assessment indicates that the timing of the attack in Benghazi was triggered by protests, but also supports subsequent accounts by Obama administration officials describing the siege as a terrorist assault.

House Republicans expanded their scrutiny of the administration Friday, pressing Obama to address whether the White House played a role in decisions on security at the Benghazi mission.

“Your administration has not been straight forward with the American people in the aftermath of the attack,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, wrote to Obama.

Separately, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, IConn., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the panel’s top Republican, requested documents and a classified briefing on the attack in letters to Clinton, Clapper and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

U.S. officials have backed away from claims that protesters had gathered around the Benghazi mission before it was overrun. Instead, analysts now believe that the siege involved militants who “may have aspired to attack the U.S. in Benghazi,” and mobilized after seeing protesters scale the walls of the embassy in Cairo to protest the contentious film.

The violence in Benghazi appears to have involved militants with ties to al-Qaida in North Africa, but no evidence indicates that it was organized by al-Qaida, or timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said.

CIA officers filed a series of cables during the assault, but those amounted to tersely worded incident reports, and did not include assessments on what had triggered the attack, officials said.

U.S. officials also said there were no American surveillance drones over the compounds until the next morning, when evacuations were under way, meaning there was no aerial footage to show how the attack began.

Information for this article was contributed by Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press and by Greg Miller and Anne Gearan of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/20/2012

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