Just before CNN broadcasts interview with same
 U.S. government officials have reportedly filed the first criminal charges related to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead and a diplomatic outpost in ruins.
Arwa Damon, a CNN reporter, spoke with Ansar al-Sharia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday night. The network first reported on the criminal charges against him a few hours before airtime.
| We have him in custody, then? Kudos to those who captured him. |
| Nowhere in the article does it say we have him; we're just filing charges. Maybe we'll send someone to Benghazi to collect him. Maybe not. |
The U.S. government has not yet spoken with Khattala, but CNN found him in Benghazi, the eastern LIbyan port city where militant members of his al-Qaeda-linked group lobbed mortars and gunfire at the consulate compound, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.
| Wow. That's embarrassing. But I s'pose after the AP and other bugging-the-reporter scandals, they can't tail the CNN's person too closely. |
'It's still stunning to see how little protection this sprawling compound had,' Damon says in the preview footage, walking through the burned-out remains of the U.S. Consulate.
| Indeed. Although they did have very good men on the ground for a while, as it turned out. |
| Perhaps it was intended to be a temporary facility. The "very good men" weren't intended to be there, at least not in that capacity. |
| But they were there nonetheless, running to the sound of guns. |
CNN released a few short video clips Tuesday afternoon, but neither included portions of the Khattala interview, which the network said would not include any footage of the suspected terror ringleader's face.
He told CNN, however, that while he was present in the U.S. Consulate compound when hostilities began, he played no part in it. Khattala said in the interview that no Libyan or American officials have reached out to him.
'Never,' he said.
'Even the investigative team did not try to contact me,' he said, referring to the FBI.
| Still? Perhaps they should have consulted CNN. |
OutFront host Erin Burnett also interviewed Geoff Porter, director of North Africa Risk Consulting Inc. Porter was responsible for briefing Ambassador Stevens on security risks, according to CNN, and spoke about why security at the diplomatic outpost was so sparse.
'What we're essentially talking about is a CIA mission in Benghazi, whose purpose was to collect information, to collect weapons potentially,' Porter says, 'and they may have deliberately wanted to keep a low security profile.'
'There were so many different violent non-state actors - armed groups - that the U.S. couldn't identify the threat. They couldn't distinguish which was a group threatening the United States' interests, and which was simply a violent non-state actor pursuing its own agenda.
At least two other media outlets interviewed Ahmed Abu Khattala in October 2012. At the time, he scoffed at reports that said 'no one knows where I am and that I am hiding.'
'But here I am in the open,' he told Reuters, 'sitting in a hotel with you. I'm even going to pick up my sister's kids from school soon.'
He also told The New York Times a story that resonated with the Obama administration's earliest contentions about the terror attack. Khattala 'contended that the attack had grown out of a peaceful protest against a video made in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and Islam,' the Times reported.
'He also said that guards inside the compound -- Libyan or American, he was not sure -- had shot first at the demonstrators, provoking them.'
Khattala was a member of the Islamist opposition when Muammar Gaddaffi was alive, and spent years in the country's notorious Abu Salim jail. After his release in 2011, he helped the rebels capture and kill the longtime dictator.
Ansar al-Sharia, his brainchild along with other former political prisoners, means 'supporters of Islamic law.' At the time of the attack, Libyan sources said the group numbered between 100 and 200 people.
Damon's reporting has brought outrage from eight congressional Republicans, who castigated the newly confirmed FBI Director James Comey in a letter and demanded a full investigative briefing within 30 days. The Obama administration's investigation of the attack, they wrote, has been 'simply unacceptable.'
| Yet they've been accepting it... |
'It has been more than 10 months since the attacks,' the letter reads. 'We appear to be no closer to knowing who was responsible today than we were in the early weeks following the attack.'
Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a vocal proponent of a more aggressive Benghazi administration, told reporters on July 31 that "one of the pertinent questions today is, why we have not captured or killed the terrorists who committed these attacks?'
If 'CNN was able to go in and talk to one of the suspected terrorists,' he asked, after news of the Ahmed Abu Khattala interview percolated throughout Washington, 'how come the military hasn't been able to get after them and capture or kill the people? How come the FBI isn't doing this and yet CNN is?'
He added that he would be willing to speak with investigators, 'but not as an interrogation, as a conversation like the one we are having right now.'
Chaffetz said during a July 31 Fox News broadcast that the FBI hasn't placed a high priority on bringing to justice the attackers who are connected with the Ansar al-Sharia.| Perhaps the FBI could contract-out to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department; they found and arrested Nakoula Basseley Nakoula rather quickly. |
'Our FBI has never talked to these people,' Chaffetz said, 'and that's just wholly unacceptable.'
| Y'know, war isn't the responsibility of the FBI. Nor of the American court system. This is CIA and DOD business, those people who used to be called the War Department, back when we were into clear communication instead of obfuscation |
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