Several members of Al Qaeda emerged as “leaders of the pack” in last year’s Benghazi attack according to Senator Saxby Chambliss who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee in conversation with Fox News following release of a bipartisan report blowing apart claims that the assault was the work of local extremists with no formal terrorist connections.
First identified by Fox News’s Bret Baier as a suspect 16 months ago, former Guantanamo detainee Sufian bin Qumu at the very least helped lay the groundwork for the operation. “Certainly Qumu was involved in planning in this…he is a member of a group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda so in my mind that makes him Al Qaeda,” Chambliss said. The report which has taken 16 months to complete has teeth because the findings were agreed to by both Republican and Democrats on the powerful Senate intelligence Committee.
The report concludes that the Benghazi attackers came from two official Al Qaeda affiliates, bin Qumu’s Ansar al-Sharia and the Jamal network whose leader is connected to the Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. “Individuals affiliated with terrorist groups including AQIM, Ansar al-Saria, AQAP and the Mohammad Jamal Network participated in the September 11, 2012 attacks,” the report said.
The committee sought a State Department classified cable, first reported by Fox News, that summarized an emergency meeting in Benghazi one month before the attack warning that Al Qaeda training camps were operating in Benghazi and the consulate could not sustain a coordinated assault. “They resisted for a long time in providing it to us, but at the end of the day, we did secure the cable,” Chambliss said.
Chambliss claims that was part of a pattern in which the State Department continues to block access to witnesses and documents. He said the committee also wanted to know whether a White House meeting on the day of the assault, believed to include then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the vice president and briefly, President Obama, set the marching orders for explaining the attack. “We’d been stonewalled on that question. We’ve asked time and again who was in the meeting and what was the substance of that meeting and we have not gotten answers on that,” Chambliss said. The administration continues to hang its hat on a very narrow definition of Al Qaeda that encompasses the leadership in Pakistan, known as the “core.”
“We still have no indications that core Al Qaeda was involved in directing or planning this attack,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters. “And I think you’re generalizing a little bit about the warnings.”
While the CIA in Benghazi ramped up security, the State Department did not and Republicans along with Democrats on the committee agree the attack could have been prevented and four brave Americans, Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and former U.S. Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty would still be alive today.