The State Department has released a new chronology adding perspective to how the diplomatic agency, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other elements of the U.S. government scrambled to respond to the attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
The newly disclosed documents, obtained by Veterans for a Strong America through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, include 24 pages of watch logs from the State Department operations center recording the logistics of the back-and-forth over the deadly assault in a sterile, just-the-facts manner.
The first note of the attacks is recorded in military time, just after 4 p.m. on that Tuesday afternoon.
“1606 Upon receipt of information concerning an attack on the Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi, the Watch issued a targeted alert … via electronic mail.”
The first apparent efforts at real-time, governmentwide coordination came 15 minutes later, as a conference call of command centers at various agencies was convened through a mechanism known as the National Operational Intelligence Watch Officer’s Network.
“1621 The White House Situation Room convened a NOIWON on behalf of the Watch, in which INR [State Department Intelligence & Research] also participated, to report an attack on the Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi.”
The first mention of Clinton in the watch log after word of the attacks comes at 5:38 p.m.
“1738 The Watch patched the Secretary to Central Intelligence Agency Director [David] Petraeus.”
Clinton was connected with Libyan National Congress President Mohamed Magriaf at 6:49 p.m., and President Barack Obama was connected with Clinton at 10:27 p.m., the logs show. Testimony at a House Benghazi Committee hearing with Clinton last month established that she was at home by the time of the latter call. The logs show Clinton next contacting the operations center at 7:15 the following morning.
The death of Ambassador Chris Stevens appears to have been reported to the operations center at 2:55 a.m. on Sept. 12. Three other Americans also died in the attacks.
The watch logs do not show all the calls Clinton made that night, but a State spokesman said many calls are not routed through the operations center. The logs also do not appear to reflect an interagency secure video teleconference in which Clinton took part that evening.
A spokesman for the House Benghazi Committee said the panel had access to other State Department chronologies and call records but received copies of the watch logs only on Friday. That’s a week after they were released to the veterans group on Oct. 30.
“The committee has readouts of calls for Secretary Clinton related to the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” panel spokesman Matt Wolking said. “The State Department [on Friday] provided a copy of the watch log to the committee because it was providing it to others in response to FOIA requests.”
However, State spokesman Alex Gerlach said Sunday that the logs from Sept. 11 and early on Sept. 12 had been provided to the House panel earlier in its investigation. “The 9/11 log previously provided covered the full time of the attacks and the evacuation,” he said.
Gerlach acknowledged that the operations center logs from the daytime and evening on Sept. 12 were sent to the committee just last week.
The logs show that in addition to dealing with the attacks on the Benghazi facilities, and the evacuation of surviving Americans from Benghazi, State Department officials were also juggling reports of threatening demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and later near the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. There is also discussion of more routine State business, including revoking a visa, apparently due to a terrorism concern.
The release to the veterans group also contained a previously undisclosed email to Clinton from her daughter, Chelsea, on the night of the Benghazi attacks.
In a message to her mother, Chelsea Clinton called the violence “anathema to us as Americans” but also seemed to link the attacks to Muslim anger over an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube. She called it “a painful reminder or [sic] how long it took modernism to take root in the US, after the Enlightenment … removal of censorship norms and laws, etc.”
At the House Benghazi hearing last month, it was revealed that at one point on the night of the attacks Clinton sent a message to her daughter saying “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al-Queda [sic] like group.” Some Republicans seized on the message as evidence that Clinton was aware the attacks were a preplanned assault by a terrorist group and not related to the anti-Islam video.
At the hearing, Clinton pointed to a press report saying a militant charged with organizing the attacks used the videos to recruit people to join in the assault.
It appears from the email threads that Chelsea Clinton, who used the pseudonym Diane Reynolds in the emails, had not received her mother’s message about “Al-Queda” before responding with the comments about censorship and the Enlightenment.
