“Office of the Director of National Intelligence”????? WHO?
“”The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.” DNI spokesman Shawn Turner tells CBS News.”
Sep 28, 2012
First, Turner says, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, “there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo. We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available. Throughout our investigation we continued to emphasize that information gathered was preliminary and evolving.”
But intelligence came in that caused officials to revise their “initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists,” Turner writes. “It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack, and if extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. However, we do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al-Qa’ida. We continue to make progress, but there remain many unanswered questions. As more information becomes available our analysis will continue to evolve and we will obtain a more complete understanding of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack.”
The DNI was created in 2004 because of concerns that the CIA hadn’t cooperated with other security agencies in the federal government prior to 9-11. The DNI is supposed to coordinate with the CIA, military, FBI, State and White House, but it means that the Director of the CIA no longer has a direct pipeline to the President. This is enabling the President to claim deniability because he can now blame the communication problems on the DNI, while letting the CIA claim that it did its job. But there is still no explanation as to why the DNI or CIA would let the White House and State spin the video explanation when there doesn’t appear to be any report from the CIA or DNI blaming the video.