James Clapper, director of National Intelligence (DNI), has come out swinging against his critics, just two weeks after his public affairs director said that US intelligence had initially labeled the attacks on our Benghazi consulate “spontaneous.”

Back on September 28, the DNI public affairs director explained, “We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available. As we learned more … we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

But today, Clapper denied that his office had done anything wrong. “The challenge is always a tactical warning, the exact insights ahead of time that such an attack is going to take place and obviously we did not have that,” he said, in particularly Clintonian language. “This gets into the mysteries versus secrets thing. If people don’t behave, emit a behavior or talk or something else ahead of time to be detected, it’s going to be very hard to predict an exact attack and come up with an exact attack …. I flew back to Washington, and I’m reading the media clips about the hapless, hopeless, helpless, inept, incompetent DNI, because I acknowledged publicly that we didn’t instantly have that ‘God’s eye, God’s ear’ certitude about an event that I mentioned earlier. It made me want to go right back to Australia.”

Poor baby. Our ambassador to Libya is dead. It’s absurd to believe that you need specific intelligence in Benghazi, Libya, to provide an American ambassador with proper security. If the DNI was willing to take the hit for President Obama’s State Department – if the DNI was willing to blame faulty intelligence for this debacle, rather than insufficient baseline security – then they don’t get to complain later about how competent they were. Ambassador Stevens didn’t have the luxury of saying “enough already.”