The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

16 MARCH 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Interlocutor: I wonder how many people outraged over the loss of lives in Benghazi ever gave a second of thought to the safety of Foreign Service officers and others working over- seas (often in installations with limited security), and even now would tell Congress it should appropriate more money to this. How many will forget about the issue should it fade as a political issue? Many more Americans died in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the 1980s, but there was far less outrage and, much more importantly, no bipartisan push to spend enough money to make our facilities secure. I was in the Foreign Service, so am acutely aware of how little most Americans think about security at embassies, con- sulates, etc. I know people who have been attacked, and even killed, overseas, [and it] seldommakes the news. Robinson: You are absolutely right. It is obscene that critics will try to use the chant “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” as a political weapon against President Obama and Hillary Clinton, but won’t propose or even support any increase in funding for State Department security. Note to conspiracy theorists: If you really cared, you would be looking for ways to keep such a tragedy from happening again. — From a Jan. 21 livechat with Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson. Contemporary Quote IC work together to identify and priori- tize the largest gaps in coverage for the protection of U.S. diplomatic, military and intelligence personnel in the North Africa region and other high-threat posts around the world. The small number of U.S. military resources devoted to the vast and often ungoverned North African landscape makes it unlikely that DOD can respond in short periods to all potential crises across North Africa. If DOD cannot always provide help in an emergency, U.S. personnel on the ground must make alternative plans to evacuate in the event of an attack or if intelligence indicates that an attack is imminent. FINDING #8: Unarmed U.S. military surveillance assets were not delayed when responding to the attack, and they provided important situ- ational awareness for those under siege during the attacks against the Temporary Mission Facility and the annex on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012. FINDING #9: In finished reports after Sept. 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without suffi- cient intelligence or eyewitness state- ments to corroborate that assertion. The IC took too long to correct these errone- ous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers. RECOMMENDATION: Intelligence analysts should more aggressively request and integrate eyewitness report- ing—especially from U.S. government personnel—in the aftermath of a crisis. The IC should establish a process or re-evaluate its current procedures to improve the speed and process with which operational reporting (for example, eyewitness reporting) and raw collection make it into disseminated intelligence products. RECOMMENDATION: The IC must act quickly to correct the written record and address misperceptions in its fin- ished analytical products. The IC should avoid repeating erroneous information in its intelligence products as analysts continued to do when they wrote there were “protests” at the Temporary Mission Facility, which then made its way into reports disseminated to U.S. policymak- ers and Congress. FINDING #10: The State Department Bureau of Intel- ligence and Research did not disseminate any independent analysis in the year following the Benghazi attacks. RECOMMENDATION: The commit- tee urges the Director of National Intel- ligence and the State Department to con- duct a review of the types of intelligence products that INR prepares and to look for ways to make INR’s products more timely and responsive to world events, especially those that directly affect State Department personnel. The committee notes that the Independent Panel on Best Practices has also recommended that the State Department audit and assess “how quickly and effectively INR shares intelligence with DS and all other [State] Department components.” FINDING #11: The DNI’s Office of Analytic Integrity and Standards failed to provide complete and accurate information to Congress during its review of the Benghazi attacks. The committee found AIS’s methodology in assembling documents to be flawed.