Republicans are now accusing Obama of throwing the CIA under the bus because the White House released evidence that Obama and Susan Rice hewed to CIA talking points about Benghazi. For example, John McCain just said this on CNN:

First they threw Hillary Clinton under the bus, now I guess they’re going to throw the CIA under the bus.

But here’s the funny thing. Perhaps the most extensive example of Republicans moving the bar is this WSJ article, that confirms the CIA was emphasizing  that Obama’s public statements tracked CIA intelligence is this WSJ article, which first describes what was in Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefs, then, in the passive voice, suggests Obama shouldn’t be using his PDBs as the basis for his public statements.

President Barack Obama was told in his daily intelligence briefing for more than a week after the consulate siege in Benghazi that the assault grew out of a spontaneous protest, despite conflicting reports from witnesses and other sources that began to cast doubt on the accuracy of that assessment almost from the start.

New details about the contents of the President’s Daily Brief, which haven’t been reported previously, show that the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t adjust the classified assessment until Sept. 22, fueling tensions between the administration and the agency.

[snip]

At the same time, questions have been raised about why the White House relied so heavily on the daily intelligence report and wasn’t more proactive about seeking corrections once conflicting accounts about the protests began to emerge in news accounts and elsewhere.

Administration officials’ response is that the White House relied on the intelligence community to provide its best assessment.

[snip]

The CIA was consistent from Sept. 13 to Sept. 21 that the attack evolved from a protest. The current intelligence assessment still notes there is conflicting evidence about whether there was a protest earlier on the day of the attack.

Nowhere does the article mention the attack Republicans were focused on on September 10, the claim that since Obama didn’t get his PDB delivered aurally, he was a bad Commander-in-Chief.

It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

[snip]

When Obama forgoes this daily intelligence meeting, he is consciously placing other priorities ahead of national security. As The Post story that the Obama White House sent me put it, “Process tells you something about an administration. How a president structures his regular morning meeting on intelligence and national security is one way to measure his personal approach to foreign policy.”

Golly. Dick Cheney’s mouthpiece says PDBs are centrally important. And Obama, in this case, followed the PDBs.

But now Republicans say that, too, is wrong.

On Thursday, Randolph Linn, the guy accused of setting fire to Toledo’s landmark mosque, was indicted on two Federal hate crime charges. There’s an interesting detail that appears in the FBI press release about his indictment (that doesn’t appear in his indictment). A witness came forward saying that Linn complained about how Muslims responded to the Innocence of Muslims video.

On October 2, a woman contacted law enforcement and identified the man in the photos as Randolph Linn. The woman stated that she knew Linn and that he had recently made anti-Muslim comments. Specifically, she stated that Linn had complained about the international Muslim community’s reaction to the anti-Muslim video on Youtube; recent attacks on United States’ embassies; and the deaths of U.S. military personnel in the Middle East. She further stated that Linn complained that Muslims in this country get a “free pass,” according to the affidavit.

The woman recognized the sweatshirt as one Linn owned and stated that the three months earlier, Linn had purchased a red, SUV-type vehicle that matched the vehicle in the surveillance footage at the Islamic Center, according to the affidavit. [my emphasis]

So this guy allegedly responded to a bunch of protests and–in a few cases–burning diplomatic buildings by setting fire to a mosque.

I guess this guy’s mother never told him that two arsons don’t make a right.

In addition to the IssaLeaks dump, there were several reports on the Benghazi attack Friday suggesting it was an “opportunistic” attack: not planned in advance, but not an outgrowth of non-existent protests; not planned by al Qaeda, but carried out by those with ties to it.

That assessment corresponds with what my best wildarsed guess about what happened, based on the IssaLeaks documents (perhaps not surprisingly, since those documents presumably come from State’s investigations).

An anonymous official describes the current understanding of the attack this way to Greg Miller.

“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.”

[snip]

U.S. officials have backed away from claims that protesters had gathered around the Benghazi mission before it was overrun. Instead, analysts now think 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 controversial video.

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

The LAT includes similar quotes–as well as eyewitness accounts describing the attackers to be a mix of experienced fighters and apparent civilians.

Libyan guards who served as the security force at the U.S. compound said the mob was made up of disparate types, some who appeared to be experienced fighters and others who were not. There were long-bearded men whose faces were obscured by scarves in the style of practiced militants and called each other “sheik.” But there also were younger men, some who looked like teenagers with wispy beards on their uncovered faces.

“There were civilians there, and many were carrying weapons,” said Sheik Mohamed Oraibi, a hard-line Islamic preacher who arrived soon after the attack began. He said the attackers arrived in about 20 pickup trucks, many of which had machine guns mounted on them in the style favored by rebels during the Libyan revolution last year.

These details, along with the materials in the IssaLeaks, appear to support an early report from CNN, stating that the suspected culprit was the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.

 A pro-al Qaeda group responsible for a previous armed assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is the chief suspect in Tuesday’s attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, sources tracking militant Islamist groups in eastern Libya say.

They also note that the attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior Libyan member of the terror group.

The group suspected to be behind the assault — the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades — first surfaced in May when it claimed responsibility for an attack on the International Red Cross office in Benghazi. The following month the group claimed responsibility for detonating an explosive device outside the U.S. Consulate and later released a video of that attack.

A June 25 cable from the IssaLeaks dump–labeled routine–noted the Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade (ISOARB) had taken credit for three attacks against western targets: two attacks on the ICRC (which it accused of proselytizing Christianity) and the June 6 attack on the US mission in Benghazi (see PDF 45). CNN says they’re likely also responsible for a June 11 attack on the UK Ambassador’s convoy. Naming the brigade after the Blind Sheikh suggests an affiliation with Egypt, his home country.

Darrell Issa’s letter to Hillary Clinton includes the message ISOARB left on Facebook claiming credit.

After we confirmed that the ICRC were giving out the Bible to the refuges of Tuwerga in Benghazi, a group of Mujaheddin attacked the HQ of the ICRC with an RPG and it targeted the meeting room inside the building. We didn’t want to hurt the Christians it is just a warning, we also didn’t want to hurt any Muslims working there. We recorded it on video and will punish it soon–so the ICRC must take down their flag with the red cross and close its offices in Libya. We announce that Libya is an Islamic State. … Finally, now we are preparing a message for the Americans for disturbing the skies over Derna.

Curiously, the description of the May 22 attack on the ICRC in a long report on security issues in the previous year (PDF 107) includes part of that statement, but not the part about sending a message to the Americans.

The brigade accused the ICRC of attempting to convert internally displaced members of the Tawergha ethnic minority to Christianity. It called for the NGO to close its offices, and declared Libya to be an Islamic state.

According to CNN, the ISOARB made a video of this attack and posted it to Jihadist websites.

The description of IED attack on the mission (PDF 110) rather curiously doesn’t include details about the ISOARB’s motive, beyond saying they claimed credit for the attack. The June 25 cable says statements, “described the attack against the United States as ‘target[ing] the Christians supervising the management of the consulate.’” But in an earlier article, CNN says the leaflets left at the attack claimed it was retaliation for our killing of Abu Yahya al Libi, whom we killed in a drone strike two days before the attack.

The State security issues description of the attacks on the UK Ambassador’s convoy and the Misrata ICRC (PDF 111) don’t describe who was responsible.

One more document from IssaLeaks suggests State agrees that the events from June may have ties to the September 11 attack: the last several pages pertain to a June 7 “conference of diverse brigades and groups supporting Islamic Sharia in Libya … organized in Benghazi.” Among other details recorded about the event was the claim we had bombed a training camp outside of Derna.

US drones are not only hovering all the time over eastern Libya, they also bombed a training came run by Abdulbasit Azuz, a commander from Dernah.

Yes, you heard that right, US drones are bombing Libya already.

Dernah, Benghaz, other parts of eastern Libya are teeming with mujahideen, InshaAllaah, high levels of popular support, specially [sic] from the youth, even in western cities like Misrata and Tripoli.

If it’s true that a group of militia members working under the ISOARB banner carried out the September 11 attack, here’s the chronology that would attach to it:

May 22: Attack on ICRC in Benghazi

June 4: US kills Abu Yahya al Libi in drone strike

June 6: ISOARB attacks consulate in Benghazi, partly in response to Abu Yahya killing

June 7: Gathering of militia members favoring Sharia law takes place in Banghazi

June 11 and 12: Two attacks by ISOARB, one in Benghazi and one in Misrata, aiming to get western targets to pull out

September 10: Ayman al-Zawahiri confirms the death of Abu Yahya

September 11: Protests in Cairo, then attack in Benghazi

The story the intelligence community is telling is that after protestors scaled the Embassy in Cairo, militia members in Benghazi launched an opportunistic attack on the mission. It would make a lot of sense that a group who had earlier launched an opportunistic attack on it, in response to Abu Yahya’s death, would do the same again.

Frankly, I don’t buy that it didn’t come with some advance warning, which I’ll explain in another post.

But if all of this is true, it raises another question for me. Drones weren’t surveilling Benghazi–a drone started surveilling the compound well after the attack started. But they were surveilling Derna (indeed, that’s one of the complaints the militia had). Was the intelligence from Derna shared as it should have been?

Darrell Issa just released a bunch of documents so as to seed the Sunday shows in time for Monday’s foreign policy debate. [Update: See Josh Rogin’s reported description of some of the sensitivities Issa exposed.]

Here’s a running explication of what he released, all in the name of “national security.”

PDF 1: In December, Jeffrey Feltman asked Patrick Kennedy to approve “a combined footprint of 35 U.S. government personnel in Benghazi.” That would include 10 people identified as State: 8 State Department and USAID, and 2 temporary duty personnel.

Which leaves 25 people unaccounted for.

As it happens, the Libyans say there were 29 people they hadn’t expected when they came to evacuate the Americans. They complained afterwards that the Americans hadn’t told them about all the spooks they’d have onsite.

Well, now, Issa just confirmed they were not State or even USAID personnel. He has confirmed the Libyans’ claims–that they were spooks.

And then there’s this:

Because of budget considerations and the reduced footprint, Diplomatic Security’s current presence consists of two Special Agents…

As far back as December 2011, budget considerations were driving the small security footprint in Benghazi.

The budget considerations put into place by the GOP cuts to State’s budget.

PDF 14: As of February 1, 2012, the sole terrorist group Eric Nordstrom expressed concern about was LIFG, whom we partnered with to overthrow Qaddafi.

PDF 17: Blue Mountain Group, the British security firm that had provided the unarmed Libyans at the mission, was one of just 7 firms approved by the Libyan government.

PDF 23: This is an annual crime survey, filled out in February. Though it describes a lot of crime–committed by criminals who are indistinguishable from the militia–it does say diplomats and expats can avoid crime–including murder–by avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though note PDF 117, which says by July the likelihood of an “isolating incident” is high.

PDF 27: On December 29, 2011: Someone burgled a 100-KG safe from the International Democratic Institute. This was before–but by just a matter of weeks–the detention of employees (including Ray LaHood’s son) of similar NGOs in Egypt.

PDF 45: The “Imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman Brigade” took credit for the May attack on the ICRC and the June attack on the US mission, suggesting ties to Egypt. Cf PDFs 107, 110.

PDF 47: One of the reasons Tripoli (not Benghazi) needed more security is because there were so many VIP visits. Of course, as part of this witch hunt, Jason Chaffetz did a short-notice trip to Tripoli (he did not travel to Benghazi, which raises questions about the value of his trip). So this witch hunt, in addition to being led by people who cut Diplomatic Security, creating the budgetary stresses underlying this, also added to the stresses of VIP visits.

PDF 55: The discussion of a women’s rights activists’ conversations with diplomatic personnel is one of the conversations Issa should have redacted.

PDF 56: Compare the redaction on the “from” line here with that on the same document released as Issa released it during the hearing. So these are either a different document set or Issa has been redacting things that hurt his argument. My posts on this cable are here and here.

PDF 89: Two female mission personnel from Benghazi were stopped at a roadblock. Given what we know about the staff at the mission, it appears likely these weren’t State employees.

PDF 96: One thing that thle lists of previous security incidents make clear is that the February 17 Brigade–on whom the US mission relied for security–were doing their job. They appear to have responded in timely fashion to all the earlier incidents (though were not able to bring culprits to justice). That raises questions why another militia, the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, was brought in the night of the attack on the mission.

PDF 97: Note the protest against the Arabian Gulf Oil Company. Ambassador Chris Stevens had multiple meetings with the company the week of the attack, and there were reports that records involving oil contracts were taken from the mission.

PDF 99-100: I had wondered why the detention of two South African contractors were included in Darrell Issa’s list of attacks on “western” targets. It turns out they were involved in the US-funded weapons abatement program.

PDF 102: Issa presumably counted each of these security incidents when giving the big numbers showing poor security in Libya. As was noted in the hearing, the majority of these incidents actually happened in Tripoli, not in Benghazi. But there’s another problem: they were also counting things like strikes by workers or clashes with drug gangs. Using Issa’s standards, then, we need military security in the US.

PDF 102: Note that a bank robbery in Benghazi was carried out by the unnamed brigade paid to guard the bank.

PDF 117: In the July summary of security incidents, the report says the likelihood of an American encountering an “isolating incident” is high.

PDF 119: In a discussion of a Sharia law conference, someone–it’s in English but it’s not clear whether it’s meant to be a translation–says:

Things are becoming clearer day by day in eastern Libya. groups and brigades are polarizing along Islamists-jihadists-secularist lines.

US drones are not only hovering all the time over eastern Libya, they also bombed a training camp run by Abdulbasit Azuz, a commander from Dernah.

Yes, you heard that right, US drones are bombing Libya already.

The following pages include video from the meeting and an Arabic text describing which brigades were involved. I’m guessing the Arabic will include some of the brigades involved in the attack.

Spencer Ackerman argues that Ahmed Abu Khattala had an interview with the NYT (and before that Reuters) so he could laugh at Obama’s manhunt for the Benghazi killers.

That’s true to a point: Abu Khattala has gone out of his way to make it clear he’s not cowering in fear of a drone strike.

But I’m equally intrigued by the story he’s telling. In both interviews, Abu Khattala claimed:

• The film, Innocence of Muslims, is what sparked the attack
• He was at the attack, but not one of its ringleaders
• Guards inside the compound shot first and he came to the consulate to help limit the chaos
• He is not an al Qaeda member but he’s sympathetic to its ideology and critical of America’s ideology

I’m not saying I believe any of these things. I’m suggesting we might want to consider what kind of story Abu Khattala is trying to seed, even while, with the very public nature of these interviews, he makes it clear that no one in Libya has the power and/or the desire to arrest him.

Particularly given the very vague way other militias get discussed in both stories.

Start with this Reuters quote from someone close to the Libyan side of the investigation, which makes it clear other brigades, in addition to Ansar al-Shariah, were also at the mission.

“There were many people there from Ansar al-Shariah, from other brigades and from the general public,” the official, who refused to be named, said, referring to the hardline Islamist militia group which has been blamed for the attack.

“Just because someone is there doesn’t mean they were behind it.” [my emphasis]

But note that Reuters assumes the reference to “brigades,” plural, refers solely to Ansar al-Sharia.

Now consider how Abu Khalttala, in the same article, refers to “brigade” and “militia leaders,” without specifying whether they were from Ansar al-Shariah or other brigades, and “other militias,”without indicating whether they were protecting the mission or fighting to overtake it.

He said that on the night of September 11, he received a phone call telling him that an attack on the U.S. consulate was in progress and that he then went to the scene.

“I arrived at the street parallel to the consulate and waited for other brigade leaders to show me the way to the buildings,” he said. “I arrived at the scene just like the others did — to see what was happening.”

[snip]

He said that after he arrived at the consulate, he began to help direct traffic with other militia leaders.

“People were crashing into each other because of the chaos and there was sporadic shooting,” he said. [my emphasis]

Even when he names the February 17 brigade and Supreme Security Committee, he doesn’t say whether they were protecting, pretending to protecting, or attacking the mission.

Abu Khattala said he called the commanders of Benghazi’s security forces — the February 17 brigade and the Supreme Security Committee — and told them to remove their cars and people from the consulate to avoid clashes.

“Soon after I made my calls, one of the guards told me that four men were detained in a building inside the compound who had been shooting at the demonstrators,” he said.

“By the time I arrived at the building the men had already escaped. At that point I left the scene and didn’t return.”

The NYT relays his claim that two leaders of “big brigades” were outside the mission, though it does not say which ones they were.

He even pointedly named two senior leaders of those big brigades, whom he said he had seen outside the mission on the night of the attack.

Note, too, that NYT states much more strongly than Reuters than Ansar al-Shariah is behind the attack.

Now all this seems to suggest that Abu Khattala is insinuating that the Supreme Security Committee and the February 17 brigade–the latter of which had chief responsibility as Benghazi’s Quick Reaction Force–were involved in the attack. Though if that’s what Abu Khattala insinuated, both Reuters and NYT seem hesitant to even report that he said it, much less comment on its truth.

And unmentioned in all of this is the Rafallah al-Sehati brigade, which we know was brought in–over hesitations from Americans–to help with rapid response during the attack.

It’s in that context that this discussion–from a September 11 cable that is part of State’s Accountability Review Board investigation but got misreported as part of Jason Chaffetz’ effort to turn this into Obama’s Jimmy Carter moment–of milita loyalties seems to come in.

The cable first discusses a September 2 meting with the Acting Principal Officer of the Supreme Security Council Fawzi Younis expressed concerns about reintegrating militia members, including the 18,000 members of his own group. And he discussed the higher political and economic aspirations of other militia leaders.

The cable then describes a September 9 meeting with Wissam bin Ahmed, Commander of the Libya Shield 1, and Muhammad al-Gharabi, Commander of  Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade and Libya Shield 2 (al-Gharabi was made to step down after the attack). The milita leaders,

discussed the very fluid relationships and blurry lines they say define membership in Benghazi-based brigades under the February 17, Libya Shield, and SSC umbrellas. They themselves were members of multiple brigades, they said. They claimed to exercise “control” over Libyan Armed Forces Chief of Staff Yousef Mangoush, who “depends” on them to secure eastern Libya. In times of crisis, Mangoush has no other choice than to turn to their brigades for help, they said, as he did recently with unrest in Kufra. As part of this arrangement, Mangoush often provides the brigades direct stocks of weapons and ammunition, they said.

They described their political plan to support Awad Al Barasi for Prime Minister, which would give their brigades control over Ministry of Defense, and criticized the US government for its support of another candidate.

The cable went on to suggest that the Libya Shield brigade had been involved in destroying Sufi shrines they had been tasked to protect.

The last thing the Benghazi mission produced before it was attacked was a cable talking about how the militia on which it was relying for its safety had blurry lines with other brigades it distrusted.

And now, the guy we’re publicly blaming for the attack is sitting in a fancy hotel regaling journalists with stories that vaguely implicate other militias, up to and including those blurry lined militias we were relying on for emergency response.

There’s a lot to suggest that the CIA–the folks who were supposed to be making sense of these blurry lines of loyalty between militia–has tried to delay revealing all it knew, and learned, about the attack. If it got these byzantine loyalties wrong–and as a result opened the mission to attack by those we thought were protecting us–I can understand why it would hesitate to come clean.

I think I’m nearly alone on the left in believing the Libya question in last night’s debate was not a total win for President Obama. I think he could have been even stronger than he was in his own answer, where he talked about how seriously he takes the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and others. After all, Mitt is by his own admission politicizing this, and it would be totally fair for Obama to call him out for dancing on the Ambassador’s grave.

I also think Candy Crowley got a moment of false neutral cold feet, when she said it took “about 2 weeks” for the White House to admit the protest was not a response to an anti-Muslim film. According to CNN, the last time Obama raised the video was on September 20.

Well, we’re still doing an investigation, and there are going to be different circumstances in different countries. And so I don’t want to speak to something until we have all the information. What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests —

So Crowly’s idea of a fact check here was to fudge by 5 days. And even that was in the context of questions about the protests generally.

Before we start, before talking about education and its future, we would like to talk about something that is happening right now in recent news. As we know, at the present time, 1,000 people are trying to get into the embassy in Pakistan, and we have seen protests, anti-American protests in thousands of countries.

We know in Libya, four Americans were killed. We know now that Ambassador Chris Stevens warned about security days before he was killed. Many people want to know whether — if you expected so much anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. And why wasn’t your administration better prepared with more security at our embassies on September 11?

Still, this “fact check” from John Dickerson is batshit crazy.

The president’s tall tales came during a debate over Libya. The administration’s story is changing almost daily about what happened, who knew what when, and who is going to take responsibility for it. The topic presents political peril for the president. He effectively took command, saying that all responsibility rested with him and that he would get to the bottom of who killed the four Americans, including the ambassador. He criticized Romney for using the issue to score political points and took umbrage at the suggestion that anyone in his administration would act politically. Then, he proceeded to act politically. That is, if you define acting politically as suggesting something that isn’t true is true for the purpose of saving your job.

Obama said, “The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people … that this was an act of terror.” Obama was trying to suggest that he had declared this a terrorist attack long before his administration actually did. For days and days afterward, administration officials would not claim it was a terrorist attack. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice famously refused to call it such on Face the Nation. The president was trying to reset the timeline. If you look at the president’s statement in the Rose Garden, he does use that phrase, but it’s a throwaway cliché. Indeed, it arguably wasn’t about the attack at all, just a bromide about more general acts of terror. In any event, the president buried the lead in the tenth paragraph of his remarks. That’s why none of the papers at the time reported that he had characterized any part of the attack as having to do with terrorism. When Romney called him on it, the president wouldn’t answer. “Please proceed, governor,” he said, as if he were the moderator and not the fellow who was being called out. It was the verbal equivalent of putting your hands over your eyes and pretending no one will see you. [my emphasis and link]

Yes, this fetish with calling things terrorism has become a cliché. But that’s the point–the entire reason Mitt’s team has staked so much on it. Yet using the word precisely as Mitt is using is somehow invalidates it for Dickerson.

And for a journalist to suggest that it’s the President’s fault this wasn’t reported?

So maybe I am totally wrong about how well the Libya question will serve Obama. If reporters like Dickerson are now blaming the President because they didn’t report this well back in September, it must have been an important moment, right?

I have hesitated to comment on this Thomas Joscelyn piece, which basically plays a game of Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden to suggest al Qaeda “was responsible” for all the attacks on US diplomatic locations last month. Partly, Joscelyn pulled together such a hodge podge of speculation, claims that have already been debunked, and tangential ties, it didn’t seem worth it. Partly, using Joscelyn’s standard of evidence we’d have “proof” that the right wingers who made the Muslim Innocence movie were in cahoots with al Qaeda.

But I confess I did hope someone was nearby to give Joscelyn smelling salts when this news first started breaking: a Yemeni security employee at the US Embassy in Sanaa (at one point reported to be in charge of security there) was killed today, using tactics that made the murder look like an AQAP hit.

Of course, the murder makes it likely that neither the murder nor the storming of the Embassy–which was apparently aided by insiders–were committed by al Qaeda. That’s because the victim, Qassem Aqlani, was likely killed because he was investigating the storming of the Embassy.

Aqlani had been working for the U.S. Embassy for nearly 20 years, said the officials who spoke to the AP condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Most recently, he was in charge of investigating a Sept. 12 assault on the U.S. Embassy by angry Yemeni protesters over the anti-Islam film.

Protesters stormed the embassy and set fire to a U.S. flag before government forces dispersed them with tear gas.

As Gregory Johnsen notes today, AQAP usually claims credit when their attacks are successful. And while they might have reason to claim credit for the storming of the Embassy but still kill the guy investigating it (to hide the insiders they’ve recruited), it seems more likely that both events have been made to look like AQAP to give someone else cover (something Yemen-based lawyer Haykal Bafana was joking about yesterday).

Of course, it’s possible that the culprit is someone–perhaps someone close to Ali Abdullah Saleh–who has convenient ties to AQAP figures, but who is operating to serve a different power.

There’s some weird shit going down in the Middle East–and I definitely include Syria in this–and I think we all risk oversimplifying when we jump to conclusions who is pulling the strings.

All that said, there is an uncomfortable tie to Benghazi. In yesterday’s hearing Charlene Lamb pointed to our Embassy security in Sanaa as an optimal form of cooperation with locals. I figured the second she said it, she would live to regret the comment, if for no other reason than the storming of the Embassy the day after the Benghazi attack. Sadly, I didn’t expect someone with a key role in that cooperative security would be targeted for his cooperative role.

Update: Yemen-based journalist Adam Baron says Aqlani had nothing to do with the investigation into the storming last month.

After it became clear that the Republicans hoped to use the Benghazi attack to turn Obama into Jimmy Carter, I predicted what would happen as Darrell Issa and Romney surrogate Jason Chaffetz investigated: there would be trouble with classified information.

And while in yesterday’s hearing they made State look like it was withholding information when Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy told Issa that a binder State had provided (presumably put together by the Accountability Review Board) was classified in its totality, even while individual documents in it were unclassified, Issa proceeded to enter a slew of unclassified documents from it into the record.

But it was Chaffetz who complained most loudly, after Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb put up a satellite image that showed both Benghazi locations (see after 55:00), and, later, after she implied there were other security resources on the ground that were not being discussed in the hearing. (Note, I’m not sure, but I think there may actually be a spook who died at the safe house, too, which would be consistent with this article’s mention of five total dead.) Chaffetz interrupted and complained that the hearing–his own hearing–was exposing sources and methods.

As Dana Milbank describes it:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was the first to unmask the spooks. “Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Department security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, described the chaotic night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

A State Department official assured him that the material was “entirely unclassified” and that the photo was from a commercial satellite. “I totally object to the use of that photo,” Chaffetz continued. He went on to say that “I was told specifically while I was in Libya I could not and should not ever talk about what you’re showing here today.”

The satellite image was commercial, available to al Qaeda as readily as State. The other security resources belonged to the CIA “safe house” that had been compromised before the attack, which is one thing that led to the deaths of the two former SEALs; Chaffetz was trying to keep hidden a safe house that had already been compromised by poor spycraft or espionage. In addition, Lamb and Kennedy implied that a video showing the attack was being withheld by CIA.

Understand what this means. This hearing focused on the complaints of two security whistleblowers, complaining, credibly, about State trying to shift security responsibilities to State resources, which in this case meant relying on Libyan militia (though the February 17 Brigade appears to have acquitted itself credibly). But that part–the part Romney’s surrogate is trying to make a campaign issue–is only a part of what what went wrong on September 11. Yet Chaffetz went out his way to shield the other failures–the ones made by CIA, which traditionally has close ties to the linguistically skilled Mormon Church.

Though Issa (who kept getting whispers from a guy who apparently used to be a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee) did reveal this bit.

In this hearing room we’re not going to point out details of what may still in fact be a facility of the United States government or more facilities.

FWIW, I’ve implicitly suggested that when DOD used 3 C-130s to ferry a single FBI team to Benghazi to investigate, there may have been a lot more on those planes, some of which presumably didn’t leave with the FBI team.

In any case, this hullabaloo demonstrates what I said weeks ago: if Republicans wanted to conduct their own investigation of this attack (and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do so), they should have done it in the House Intelligence Committee. Here’s Milbank again.

The Republican lawmakers, in their outbursts, alternated between scolding the State Department officials for hiding behind classified material and blaming them for disclosing information that should have been classified. But the lawmakers created the situation by ordering a public hearing on a matter that belonged behind closed doors.

Republicans were aiming to embarrass the Obama administration over State Department security lapses. But they inadvertently caused a different picture to emerge than the one that has been publicly known: that the victims may have been let down not by the State Department but by the CIA. If the CIA was playing such a major role in these events, which was the unmistakable impression left by Wednesday’s hearing, having a televised probe of the matter was absurd. [my emphasis]

But apparently, Rogers–who as Chair of the Intelligence Committee is of course too close to the intelligence agencies–doesn’t want to get to the bottom of this. And neither, apparently, do Issa and Chaffetz, who are conducting an investigation that by its nature will be incomplete.

There’s one more irony in all this. This very hearing room is the one where, five years ago, Republicans–including Issa–defended the right of the Executive Branch to insta-declassify things like a CIA officer’s identity for political gain. This time around, Republicans went out of their way to hide unclassified information that might reveal how the CIA fucked up.

This country’s treatment of classified information–which feeds partisan selective declassification about as often as it keeps us safer–really makes us fundamentally dysfunctional as a democracy.

Update: Cryptome has the super secret publicly available images here.

[youtube]GGDwvAbx_fg[/youtube]

Remember how central to the 2000 Presidential campaign nation-building was?

It was all in the context of the Kosovo effort, of course, an intervention that elicited horrified cries about Executive overreach from the likes of John Yoo. But at that time, the Republican opposed using our troops for nation-building and the Democrat reservedly spoke in favor of it.

BUSH: Somalia. It started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price, and so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building exercise. And same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.

[snip]

LEHRER: Vice President Gore, do you agree with the Governor’s views on nation-building, the use of military, our military for nation-building as he described it then defined it?

GORE: I don’t think we agree on that. I would certainly also be judicious in evaluating any potential use of American troops overseas. I think we have to be very reticent about that.

But look, Jim, the world is changing so rapidly. The way I see it, the world’s getting much closer together. Like it or not, we are now — the United States is now the natural leader of the world. All these other countries are looking to us.

[snip]

During the years between World War I and World War II, a great lesson was learned by our military leaders and the people of the United States. The lesson was that in the aftermath of World War I we kind of turned our backs and left them to their own devices and they brewed up a lot of trouble that quickly became World War II. And acting upon that lesson, in the aftermath of our great victory in World War II, we laid down the Marshall Plan, President Truman did; we got intimately involved in building NATO and other structures there. We still have lots of troops in Europe.

And what did we do in the late 40’s and 50’s and 60’s? We were nation building. And it was economic. But it was also military. And the confidence that those countries recovering from the wounds of war had by having troops there, we had civil administrators come in to set up their ways of building their towns back.

[snip]

LEHRER: Some people are now suggesting that if you don’t want to use the military to maintain the peace, to do the civil thing, it’s it time to consider a civil force of some kind that comes in after the military that builds nations or all of that? Is that on your radar screen?

BUSH: I don’t think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do and when it gets overextended, morale drops.

And then, after being elected, Bush launched an optional war against Iraq. His Defense Department aggressively undercut State’s mandate to rebuild Iraq, and as a result we had chaos for years. We failed, miserably, at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, there are still more Al Qaeda members in Iraq than there were in Afghanistan on 9/11, and a recent report predicts collapse in Afghanistan after we withdraw.

One of the things we saw in today’s Oversight hearing on the Benghazi attack was a difference of opinion about where the balance between security and openness, and where the balance between DOD and State capacities should be.

While I don’t think anyone believes she made the right decision in this particular case, the reason State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Programs Charlene Lamb did not approve requests to extend Temporary Duty military officers as part of the security team was because of a commitment to develop a security capacity at State, in this case by training Libyans to take on that role. Eric Nordstrom, who had been Regional Security Officer in Libya, made a compelling argument that the Libyans State was training into the task were not yet ready to take on that security role, and former Special Forces guys would better defend the mission. In the most damning document released by the committee–a July 9 memo requesting an extension of the Temporary Duty personnel–Nordstrom explained:

While post has made a number of procedural enhancements and physical security upgrades, our efforts to normalize security operations have been hindered by the lack of host nation security support, either static or response, an increase in violence against foreign targets, and GoL delays in issuing firearms permits for our LES state protection/bodyguard units. Despite field expedient physical security upgrades to improve both the termporary Embassy and Villas compound [in Tripoli] neither compound meets OSPB standards. Recognizing the growing challenges to Libya’s fragile environment the Department increased Post’s danger pay allowance from 25 percent to 30 percent on July 1.

[snip]

Post anticipates supporting operations in Benghazi with at least one permanently assigned RSO employee from Tripoli,, however, would request continued TDY support to fill a minimum of 3 security positions in Benghazi.

(Though his argument to support the claim that it would have made much difference in this case wasn’t entirely convincing.)

Other documents released–including the September 11 one I unpacked indirectly in this post (turns out I was even more right than I imagined)–make it clear that the problem was that there is simply no state in Libya yet. Libya has more going for it than, say, Afghanistan when we took over, but it’s at a crucial time where it could tip to extremism or start to flourish.

And we can’t decide whether to respond by barricading ourselves in, abandoning the effort altogether, or allowing the Libyans to build their capacity alongside us.

We’re still over nation-building, 12 years later. But we appear to have no better idea of how to accomplish it than we did then.

The second witness at the Oversight Hearing on Benghazi, the former Regional Security Officer for Libya, Eric Nordstrom, addressed a topic that has gotten lost in discussions of the attack: the Benghazi attack may well be something new.

Let me say a word about the evening of September 11 th . The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service. Having an extra foot of wall, or an extra-half dozen guards or agents would not have enabled us to respond to that kind of assault. I’m concerned that this attack will signal a new security-reality, just as the 1984 Beirut attack did for the Marines; the 1998 East Africa bombings did for the State Department, and 9/11 for the whole country. It is critical that we balance the risk-mitigation with the needs of our diplomats to do their job, in dangerous and uncertain places. The answer cannot be to operate from a bunker.

I’ve been wondering whether the attack gives terrorists, gangs, and others wanting to target or disrupt diplomatic have have a new roadmap for attacking a lightly secured diplomatic buildings.

But they don’t even need to succeed with such attacks: we’re likely to see further militarization of our diplomatic locations, making our efforts to help countries strengthen their governance look more and more like empire-building.

Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy addressed this issue as well.

I would like to take a moment to address a broader question that may be on your minds: Why is it necessary for representatives of the United States to be in Benghazi despite the very real dangers there? This question cuts to the core of what we do at the State Department and to the role of America in the world.

Ambassador Stevens first arrived in Benghazi during the height of the revolution, disembarking from a chartered boat, when the city was the heart of the opposition to Colonel Qadhafi and the rebels there were fighting for their lives. There was no doubt that it was dangerous. A bomb exploded in the parking lot of his hotel. The transitional authorities struggled to provide basic security. Extremists sought to exploit any opening to advance their own agenda. Yet Ambassador Stevens understood that the State Department must operate in many places where the U.S. military cannot or does not, where there are no other boots on the ground, where there are serious threats to our security. And he understood that the new Libya was being born in Benghazi and that it was critical that the United States have an active presence there.

That is why Ambassador Stevens stayed in Benghazi during those difficult days. And it’s why he kept returning as the Libyan people began their difficult transition to democracy. He knew his mission was vital to U.S. interests and values, and was an investment that would pay off in a strong partnership with a free Libya.

[snip]

Diplomacy, by its very nature, often must be practiced in dangerous places. We send people to more than 275 diplomatic posts in 170 countries around the world. No other part of our government is asked to stretch so far or reach so deep. We do this because we have learned again and again that when America is absent – especially from the dangerous places – there are consequences: extremism takes root, our interests suffer, and our national security is threatened. As the Secretary says, leadership means showing up. So that’s what we do. And that’s how we protect this country and sustain its global leadership.

[snip]

We must continue deploying our diplomats and development professionals to dangerous places like Benghazi. There is no other alternative. As the Secretary said, “We will not retreat. We will keep leading, and we will stay engaged everywhere in the world, including in those hard places where America’s interests and security are at stake. That is the best way to honor those whom we have lost.”

We’ll see whether the efforts to politicize this prevent efforts to find the appropriate middle ground here.