The New York Times found the guy hanging out wearing a red fez in a luxury hotel in Benghazi. Maybe the FBI had a man behind the potted plant in the corner.
Witnesses and the authorities have called Ahmed Abu Khattala one of the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission here. But just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.
Libya’s fledgling national army is a “national chicken,” Mr. Abu Khattala said, using an Arabic rhyme. Asked who should take responsibility for apprehending the mission’s attackers, he smirked at the idea that the weak Libyan government could possibly do it. And he accused the leaders of the United States of “playing with the emotions of the American people” and “using the consulate attack just to gather votes for their elections.”
Mr. Abu Khattala’s defiance — no authority has even questioned him about the attack, he said, and he has no plans to go into hiding — offered insight into the shadowy landscape of the self-formed militias that have come to constitute the only source of social order in Libya since the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Of course nobody’s questioned him. It took the FBI three weeks just to reach the sacked consulate. They’ll get around to chatting with Khattala on, say, November 7th or so. Or maybe he’ll meet a Predator drone on Oct 21st.
Though Khattala is a true Islamist, he sounds like he would fit right in at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church.
Although Mr. Abu Khattala said he was not a member of Al Qaeda, he declared he would be proud to be associated with Al Qaeda’s puritanical zeal for Islamic law. And he said that the United States had its own foreign policy to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Why is the United States always trying to impose its ideology on everyone else?” he asked. “Why is it always trying to use force to implement its agendas?”
Chickens, roost, God damn America, you know the drill.
Khattala even does Ambassador Susan Rice a solid.
Contradicting the accounts of many witnesses and the most recent account of the Obama administration, he 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.
Perhaps he has succumbed to Hillary Clinton’s “fog of war.”
Mr. Khattala assures the Duranty Times that he did not lead the 9-11-12 attack, he merely directed traffic and went search and rescue when some “protesters” found themselves trapped in the burning building, which he did not notice was burning.
At the end of its story, the Times strives to make sure that readers know just how hard the paper works to achieve accuracy:
An earlier version of this article described incorrectly a beverage that Ahmed Abu Khattala was drinking at a hotel in Benghazi, Libya. It was a strawberry frappe, not mango juice, which is what he had ordered.
Did he call up the Times to make sure they got his drink right? Did the intrepid reporters get his caller ID? The FBI could surely use it.
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