-Mike Morell, Deputy CIA Director
So today we find out from Mike Morell, the Deputy CIA Director at the time of the Benghazi attacks, that he crafted the talking points which were ultimately used by Susan Rice on talk shows based on what a few CIA analysts believed had happened instead of the on the ground accounts from the CIA Station Chief.
The idiocy is mind-boggling. So mind-boggling you have to wonder if he isn’t just covering his ass along with the ass of the administration.
As part of Morell’s testimony on Wednesday, the former acting and deputy CIA director acknowledged that he overruled the guidance of the top CIA officer in Libya at the time. That official told Morell the attack was not an “escalation of protests,” but Morell said he had to weigh that against analysts who concluded the opposite. He ultimately went with the analysts — whose assessment later turned out to be flawed — saying the chief of station’s report was not “compelling” and was based on loose evidence.
The account has many close to this investigation fuming. One operator watching the hearing told Fox News: “He doesn’t have any idea what happened that night. Why is he speculating? He wouldn’t have to speculate if he talked to the people in Libya that night, or others who were watching.”
Another said Morell either still has no idea what happened that night, or he is covering for someone. “Human intelligence takes precedence over everything else and he had no better intelligence than multiple reports from credible sources coming from the ground that night,” one operator said.
…Fox News has previously reported that intelligence on the ground within the first 20 minutes was consistent that a terror attack was underway. Yet in Wednesday’s testimony, Morell said analysts didn’t know for sure and the only way he knew Al Qaeda was involved was through classified sources — and that’s why it was taken out of the talking points. But later in the testimony, Morell said he did not take out Al Qaeda from talking points, and that a group of “officers” from another CIA department did.
But one intelligence expert with close knowledge of the attack questioned those claims. “To pretend he was deferring to analytical judgment is not true,” the source said. “He changed analytical judgment. … Heck, that’s in the Senate Intelligence Report.”
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The bottom line?
The U.S. intelligence community knew right away that al-Qaeda was involved in the attack but they lied to the American people about it.
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