Republican Benghazi Report Alleges State Department Coverup [View all]

[DonViejo]

Source: The Daily Beast

Apr 23, 2013 7:09 PM EDT

A new report keys in on the space between what the White House knew, and what it chose to publicly say. Eli Lake reports.

Internal emails in the week following the 9-11 anniversary assault on the U.S. facility in Benghazi show the White House and State Department removed references to al Qaeda and the mention of other recent attacks in Benghazi from widely distributed talking points used to explain the incident to the public, according to a new report from five House Republican committee chairmen released Tuesday afternoon.

Citing administration emails provided to the House committees, the 46-page report claims that “to protect the State Department, the Administration deliberately removed references to al-Qaeda-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by Ambassador Rice.”

While the report does not disclose in full the still-classified emails or the officials who wrote them, it does give the clearest account to date of how the official public statements in the days after September 11, 2012 from the Obama administration departed from the classified assessments of the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The story begins on Friday, September 14, when then-CIA director David Petraeus briefed the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about the Benghazi attack three days earlier. The CIA’s notes for that briefing included information about five previous attacks on foreign interests in Benghazi since April 2012; potential links to the al Qaeda connected Libyan militia, Ansar al-Sharia; previous CIA assessments of groups linked to al Qaeda in eastern Libya; and information suggesting Islamic extremists participated in the attack, according to the report.



Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/23/republican-benghazi-report-alleges-state-department-coverup.html

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