General Petraeus and the Benghazi Attack

General David Petraeus, former chief of US military operations in the Middle East and now head of the CIA, may be about to feel the heat of his first full blown Washington political affair. Petraeus testified ten days after the Benghazi terrorist attack that included the assassination of US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three of his aides to a closed door session of the congressional committee investigating the attack. Today we learned that the CIA Bebghazi station chief reported in a cable 24 hours after the attack that the attack was preplanned and carried out by militants. The cable reached Washington the next day. But for days, the Obama administration blamed the attack on a mob demonstration over an American-made video ridiculing Islam's Prophet Mohammad. It is not clear how widely the information from the CIA station chief was circulated. U.S. intelligence officials have said the information was just one of many widely conflicting accounts, which became clearer by the following week. But former CIA station chief Fred Rustmann Jr. says the White House would have been aware of it. "When things go down like that, there is no analysis in between," said Rustmann, who has separately accused the Obama administration of sharing too many details about the raid that killed bin Laden. "You report this raw information as you receive it in Sitrep (situation report) format, from the CIA station to concerned worldwide (CIA) stations and bases and to the White House, Pentagon and State Department." On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said a period of uncertainty typically follows attacks, "I think it is absolutely fair to say that everyone had the same intelligence. Everyone who spoke tried to give the information that they had." The issue has given Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney an opportunity to question Obama on foreign policy and national security, two areas that have received little attention in an election dominated by the U.S. economy. But GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan was teeing up the issue for next Monday's presidential debate on foreign policy, while Democrat President Obama says the attack is under investigation, and "the picture eventually gets filled in." Obama said that "the government is a big operation and at any given time something screws up,...and you make sure that you find out what's broken and you fix it." Democrats have spent the past week explaining the administration's handling of the attack. US Senator Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, put the blame on the director of national intelligence James Clapper. He "put out some speaking points on the initial intelligence assessment," Feinstein said in an interview with news channel CBS 5 in California. "I think that was possibly a mistake." The congressional committee is now trying to collect enough documentation from the US intelligence community and the Obama administration to determine what the intelligence community knew and when. It will then lay out an intelligence time line for the Benghazi attack and compare it to the information the Obama administration was giving to Congress and the American public at coinciding points on the time line. Enter General Petraeus, who at first told the congressional comittee that the attack was spontaneous although there were those in the intelligence community who disagreed. Later, he said that the attack possibly included terrorists but that there was insufficient evidence to show that terrorists preplanned it, or if they did, who was involved because names associated with the attack and intercepted in communication with al-Qaida in the Magreb around the time of the attack cannot be identified in video tapes of the attack itself. Later, earlier this week, the White House changed its story and said the attack was planned and carried out by terrorists. Genetal Petraeus will need to explain whether there was political cooperation between the CIA and the White House. This seems rather unlikely to apply directly to Petraeus, given his cool relationship with Obama. But others in the intelligence community could be involved and it will be General Petraeus' job to sort it out.