WASHINGTON — Five days after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice described what precipitated the deadly episode on the basis of initial intelligence that later proved incorrect, the deputy CIA director told Congress on Thursday.
In a private session with the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Morell said Rice was provided with an unclassified version of events at the U.S. mission in Benghazi that left Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others dead, according to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the panel.
The assessment concluded that a spontaneous protest over an anti-Muslim video had evolved into an attack on the American Consulate, a description that Rice presented in television interviews the Sunday morning after the attack.
Schiff told reporters that he didn’t think the intelli- gence community had politicized the information. “They gave us the best initial assessments, and those proved inaccurate, but they warned us those assessments were subject to change as they got more information,” he said.
Rice’s comments on national television have drawn fierce criticism, with some Senate Republicans promising to block her nomination if President Barack Obama taps her to replace Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Obama defended Rice on Wednesday at a White House news conference and called the complaints outrageous attempts to besmirch her reputation.
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, said Rice “was given that same information we received from the administration through the intelligence community. And that’s the information she testified to, end of story.”
In one of her TV interviews, Rice said she was providing the “best information and the best assessment we have today.”
“In fact, this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video,” she said. “People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent. Those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya, and that then spun out of control.”
That answer has drawn constant criticism from Republicans, who question why Rice failed to call the event a terrorist attack. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said they would work to defeat Rice’s selection if she is nominated to be the nation’s top diplomat. Graham said Wednesday that he couldn’t back anyone who is “up to their eyeballs in the Benghazi debacle.”
Ruppersberger said the initial attack on the consulate was chaotic, with “a lot of people running around,” while the second attack, on a CIA annex near the consulate, “seemed a lot more sophisticated,” with the use of mortars, more clearly pointing to terrorist training and tactics.
Obama aides say the president’s vigorous defense of Rice during the news conference should not be seen as a sign that he plans to nominate her for the top job at the State Department. Instead, they said, it reflects a frustration within the administration that Rice, a longtime Obama adviser, is being unfairly targeted by Republican lawmakers.
Rice continues to have strong support within the White House as a candidate for the top post at the State Department. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, remains a leading contender as well.
Obama aides say the president hasn’t made a decision on that job or others opening in his administration, and may not do so until after Thanksgiving.
In the meantime, several House and Senate committees are conducting hearings on the Libya attack, with the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting Thursday afternoon with Morell and other administration officials. The panels will hear from former CIA Director David Petraeus today, one week after he resigned amid the revelation of an extramarital affair.
After a four-hour closed hearing Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel had reviewed a detailed chronology of the attack on Sept. 11 that killed the four Americans. It included a video made from a composite of sources, including Predator drone video of the events that night.
Feinstein said that in addition to meeting with Petraeus today to hear his account of the attack, and an assessment of a visit he made just two weeks ago to the CIA’s station in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, the committee would hold at least three additional hearings on the matter.
“We are in effect fact-finding,” she said.
Feinstein and the panel’s senior Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, declined to tell reporters what questions they had asked the witnesses, but Chambliss and his colleagues said previously they would examine possible intelligence flaws, security lapses and the Obama administration’s handling of the matter.
“Were mistakes made?” Chambliss said. “We know mistakes were made and we’ve got to learn from that.”
While the intelligence committees questioned witnesses in private, Democrats and Republican sparred openly at a hearing on Benghazi by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which heard testimony from outside experts.
Michael Courts, a specialist from the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, told lawmakers that his agency warned three years ago in a report that the State Department’s diplomatic security division had failed to devise an effective strategic plan to deal with a growing number of operational challenges in increasingly dangerous overseas posts such as Pakistan, Yemen and Libya.
Rep. Ed Royce, a California Republican on the committee, suggested that the United States had been ill-prepared to cope with the threats posed in eastern Libya on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite a string of assaults against the Red Cross and Western diplomats in the previous several months. “Somebody forgot to circle the calendar on 9/11,” he said.
Others, such as Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., who visited Libya in May, said that the Foreign Service was inherently dangerous in certain places but U.S. diplomats needed to keep doing their jobs.
Libya was a case in point, Connolly said.
“When I landed at Tripoli there was a militia, not the government, guarding the airport in Tripoli,” he said. “It’s an inherently unstable situation after 40 years of autocratic rule by [Moammar] Gadhafi. Tragedies happen.”
Mc Cain and Graham have called for the creation of a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack, but there is little interest in that step beyond a few GOP lawmakers. Both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the existing congressional committees should handle the work.
Information for this article was contributed by Kimberly Dozier, Julie Pace and Donna Cassata of The Associated Press and by Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/16/2012