Michael Morell is the former deputy director of the CIA. His new book, written with Bill Harlow, is The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS (Twelve).

Like clockwork, every several weeks, someone discovers a new document that, to their minds, “proves” that what the administration and the intelligence community have been saying about Benghazi is a bunch of lies. But time and again these documents don’t add up. They don’t show what the pundits think they show—and the Benghazi broadsides miss their mark anew.

Here is a recent example: Earlier last week a handful of number of news organizations, including Fox News, breathlessly reported that they had just gotten their hands on a Defense Intelligence Agency report—acquired through a FOIA request by Judicial Watch—that they say proves that the government knew very soon after the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya on 9/11/12 that they had been planned ten or more days in advance. These news organizations suggest that this document puts the lie to what I and other current and former intelligence officials have been saying—that there was little planning before the attacks.


But the only thing that newly released document proves is that the people who trot out these reports do not understand the world of intelligence and do not take the time to ask the right people the right questions before publishing the “news.” The DIA report in question was an “Intelligence Information Report” or IIR. It is what we term “raw intelligence.” It was not the considered view of DIA analysts. Often from a single source, these bits of information represent one thread that some intelligence collector has picked up. The all source analysts in the Intelligence Community are charged with looking at that snippet of information and every other bit of available information from communications intercepts, human intelligence, open source material and much more to come up with an overall judgment.

Those all source analysts—without any input or pressure from above—looked at all the available information and determined that there was not a significant amount of planning prior to the attacks. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can look at the briefing slides produced by the National Counterterrorism Center (which is not part of CIA) and coordinated across the Intelligence Community. These slides were declassified over a year ago and were appended to the report on Benghazi produced by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee. In describing the attacks at the State Department facility, the slides say “attackers moving in multiple directions,” “attackers do not appear well coordinated” and “no organized effort to breach every building.” Not the words one would expect to see associated with an attack planned well in advance.

Some of the media reporting on the DIA IIR say that they have found another gotcha as well. They say DIA’s report was issued on September 16th—the same day that former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday talk shows, so she must have known before she went on the air, right? Wrong. The DIA report was issued hours after her final TV appearance that day. Some accounts, including the first piece written on the DIA report by Judicial Watch, erroneously say that the report was issued on September 12th, four days before Rice was on national television. They simply misread the report.

When I recently asserted my belief in an interview on Fox News that the terrorist attacks in Benghazi were not the result of a carefully planned operation, I was confronted with the Justice Department indictment of Abu Khattala, the lone participant in the attacks in U.S. custody. The indictment says the object and purposes of Khattala and others was to kill U.S. citizens at the mission and the CIA annex and that they “intentionally participated in an act intending lethal force be used.” It was alleged that either I was wrong or the indictment was wrong. Not necessarily. What my interviewer failed to share with his viewers were these words from the indictment: “Beginning on a date unknown to the Grand Jury but no later than on or about September 11, 2012…defendant Khatallah did knowingly and intentionally conspire….” (emphasis mine). What does this mean? It means that the grand jury found no evidence of planning before the day of the attack either. Exactly the point of the intelligence community analysts.

While there are no shortage of new arguments on this old subject, there are also some old ones that resurface on a regular basis. One is the debate on whether an anti-Islam YouTube video played any role in sparking the Benghazi attacks. The short answer is that we still don’t know with absolute certainty. Intelligence community analysts in the days immediately after the attack said that the attackers were probably motivated by an attack that happened in Cairo earlier in the day. We know that that attack was motivated at least in part by the video. However the analysts also said that the attack in Libya might have been motivated by Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri’s call just two days before the Benghazi attack for avenging the death of the terrorist Abu Yaya al-Libi earlier in the summer.

The most strident voices on Benghazi ridicule the notion that a video might have played any role. But among those who have argued that the video may have been a factor include the FBI, who told the House Intelligence Committee in February 2014 that the attacks were ordered in response the YouTube video and to Zawahiri’s call for avenging the death of al-Libi. You can read that on page 18 of the House Intelligence Committee’s report on Benghazi.

What those who focus on the questions of the amount of pre-planning and the role of the YouTube seem to miss is that the answers to those questions make no difference to the bottom line: That the attacks were terrorism and that the terrorists murdered four Americans. And they make no difference to the most important point going forward—that the U.S. must do the best job it can in protecting its diplomatic, intelligence and military personnel serving in dangerous places.