Right-wing media outlets are pushing dubious allegations to attack Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the violence that claimed the life of the U.S. ambassador to Libya. But the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has poured cold water on the attack.
Breitbart.com attacked Clinton by citing a report from the U.K. Independent that cites anonymous “senior diplomatic sources” saying:
[T]he US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted."
Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro even used the report to call for Clinton's resignation, saying: “The details are so explosive that they will result in a Congressional investigation. In fact, they're so explosive that they should result in the resignation of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
The Drudge Report linked to the same Independent article under a picture of Clinton with the headline “Paper: U.S. warned of embassy attack, but did nothing.”
Fox News also hyped the charge that Clinton had advanced warning of the attacks. Fox & Friends guest co-host Eric Bolling said: “You have to wonder. Hillary Clinton came on September 12 and she came on September 13 and she said, you know -- denouncing the attacks and whatnot. But why was she on twice saying the exact same thing? Maybe, maybe we did have advanced knowledge of these protests and attacks coming.”
But later on Fox, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) showed why right-wing media should not have jumped on this one thinly-sourced report so quickly. Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Rogers about the Independent report. Rogers responded: “As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I have seen nothing yet that indicates that they had information that could have prevented the event.” He added:
ROGERS: That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I just haven't seen it yet, and we should be cautious about that. There's a difference between having lots of information flowing in, which we've had over months about the trouble that was brewing, especially Al Qaeda in the Maghreb looking for Western targets to strike -- the Maghreb being the northern part of Africa. So we knew that there was at least an interest in violence. This is the same site in Benghazi that had been attacked by an IED a couple months prior to that event. So we knew that there should have been a heightened level of security just for those reasons.