Fox News (by Kathleen Troia McFarland, Fox National Security Analyst)
Today, most of the mainstream media have stopped reporting on the Libyan assassinations on the anniversary of September 11th. They have moved on to the next story in the news cycle. They’ve decided that while the administration may have made a few mistakes in statements and timing, it is otherwise not an important story – more of an election year PR gaffe, than a serious national security issue.
But they’re wrong. The Libyan assassinations aren’t just an embarrassing political problem about who said what and when on the timeline or events. There are serious questions that remain unanswered, that go to the heart of our intelligence and national security policies in the Middle East.
These questions fall into three broad categories: intelligence, security and policy.
Intelligence. The administration’s original version of events – that this was a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim YouTube video – hasn’t held up.
After nearly two weeks of dissembling, they’ve admitted it was a terrorist attack, planned in advance, by an Al Qaeda cell in Libya. But shouldn’t our intelligence community have known about this cell in advance?
In August the Defense Department received a report from the Library of Congress entitled “Al Qaeda in Libya: A Profile.” The unclassified version lists a number of Al Qaeda veterans who had set up shop in Libya. It traces the franchise as progressing from the organizational to recruitment phases and predicted it was about to go operational with an attack. Didn’t the Defense Department share this report with the intelligence community, and if not why not? Why didn’t the intelligence community at least pick up on the unclassified version of the report?
Did the new Libyan government known about the threat? After all, we just fought a war in Libya on behalf of the rebels now in charge. They knew radical elements that had fought in the Libyan war had yet to be demobilized. Did they know about these groups were behind the recent spate of anti-American attacks in Benghazi and if so, why didn’t they warn us that something even bigger was in the works?
Continue Reading on www.foxnews.com
