Benghazi updateState Department denies concluding attack on consulate was in reaction to anti-Islamic video

Ahead of hearings today before a congressional panel investigating potential security lapses at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the U.S. Department of State has said that it had no actionable intelligence about plans by a terrorist organizations for the deadly attack on the consulate.

Also, the BBC reports that in Tuesday’s briefing, unnamed State Department officials, contradicting initial assertions by Obama administration officials such as Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said the department had never concluded that the sacking of the mission was motivated by the U.S.-made video ridiculing Muslims.

“That was not our conclusion,” an official said.

The officials said it was instead a coordinated assault involving several groups of men armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades over an expanse of more than a mile.

“There was no actionable intelligence of any planned or imminent attack,” a top state department official said.

The official also told reporters: “It would be very, very hard to find a precedent for an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.”

The New York Times reports that Tuesday’s hastily arranged conference call with reporters was a sign of the administration’s concerns over the House hearing. The briefing offered the State Department’s first extended account of what happened in Bengazi on the night of 11 September, after having repeatedly cited a continuing FBI investigation as a reason for not releasing information on the attack.

In addition to two state department officials scheduled to give evidence today, two security officers who were posted in Libya until recently are also expected to testify. Both of them said the Department of State denied requests for extra security.

One officer, Eric Nordstrom, has said in a document to the congressional committee that a state department official, Charlene Lamb, had wanted to keep the security presence in Benghazi “artificially low”.

Both Nordstrom and Lamb are due to appear today before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Democrats and Republicans on the oversight committee accused each other with playing politics with the Benghazi consulate issue. “Never in all of my years in Congress have I seen such a startling and damaging series of partisan abuses,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), the panel’s ranking Democrat. “The Republicans are in full campaign mode, and it is a shame that they are resorting to such pettiness in what should be a serious and responsible investigation. We should be above that.”

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on national security issues, said the Democrats’ strategy was to “blame it on politics rather than addressing the nature of the issue.”

“They can blame it on politics,” Chaffetz said, “but we are concerned about the more than a hundred embassies and thousands of Americans abroad.”

The New York Times notes that soon after the Benghazi attack, Congressional Republicans began accusing the administration of trying to play down the possibility that an al Qaeda-affiliated groups in North Africa were more involved in the assault than administration officials first acknowledged. Republicans said the administration did not want to acknowledge the al Qaeda links because it would contradict the message that Obama’s policies had significantly weakened the terrorist network, especially since the Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan last year that killed Osama bin Laden.