Officials: No Warning of Benghazi Compound Attack

The State Department received plenty of warnings about deteriorating security in Libya before the deadly attack on the Benghazi consulate last month, but there was no specific warning that the compound would be a target, the New York Times reports. But while interviews with officials and a review of State Department documents do not reveal any sign that warnings were overlooked, the security strategy for Libya appears to have been geared toward a different environment than the one that existed at the time of the attacks.

The Obama administration had received warnings that militants linked to al-Qaeda were operating training camps near Benghazi, but officials in Washington do not appear to have paid much attention to security arrangements for American personnel in the city. "Given the large number of attacks that had occurred in Benghazi that were aimed at Western targets, it is inexplicable to me that security wasn’t increased," says Sen. Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on one of the congressional panels probing the attacks. (More Benghazi stories.)