The details are pretty garbled, but it seems to me that the attack on the Libyan consulate represents a major disaster:
-the names of 400 Libyan operatives are now known to Al-Queda
-various other documents are in their hands
-it has been established that Al-Queda has a base in Libya and Egypt
Now there is a report that there were two warnings of the attack-one over a week ago, one two days ago.
Is the State Department brain dead? The anniversary of 9/11 must have been a concern to someone, yet no one seems to have bothered to alert the ambassador and the staff.
Now 4 Americans are dead, and who knows how much secret intelligence is in the hands of the enemy. Is this a failure of intelligence, or simply refusal to face facts?
I think I heard something about the warnings the other day. I want to say it was Israel who warned us, but I might be misremembering. Anyways, aren’t the Marines stationed at embassies specifically to prevent sensative info from falling into the wrong hands in case something like this happens?
I’m still surprised that protestors managed to get into the Yemen embassy a day after Stevens was killed. And it’s not like Yemen is a hive of pro-American love or something; I’d expect security at our embassy there to be pretty damn tight.
Mitt Romney said that the Administration wasn’t taking embassy security seriously enough. I guess he’s right.
Bengazi was a temporary consulate, not a proper Embassy. There would be little if anything in terms of classified material or Marine detachment, more likely contract security; if anything after a warning the security measures would have been taken in Tripoli anyway. In Yemen and Egypt you have the problem that regardless of warning, outside the property line of the mission, it’s the host nation who’s responsible for keeping the mob away and in both cases the hosts seem inclined to letting the mob vent while they’re angry at outsiders.
The Jerusalem Post reported on 9/11 that the Egypt had put its police on ontice of a demonstration, possibly violent, at the US and Israeli embassies. I haven’t read about warnings re: Libya so far.
The level of consulate security in Benghazi seems worrisome based on what we know thus far, but I’m reluctant to be critical while the facts are still settling out.
As far as information getting out from the consulate, do we actually know that that happened? Aren’t there instructions to burn sensitive stuff when in crisis? And even if it did, Libya is already an anarchic, violent mess of competing militias. The release of US information isn’t likely to make an appreciable difference.
I’m sure it makes a difference to those 400 operatives, and their families. I don’t know if the story about the missing names is true, but you have to assume that the US embassy in Libya is going to know who our assets are in that country.