Four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, when the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked in a premeditated and calculated assault on September 11, 2012. Initially shrouded in mystery, details have been unearthed in the week following the attack.
Libyan President el-Megarif has declared that the attack was in fact planned beforehand and the attackers simply used protests against the anti-Islamic film The Innocence of Muslims as a cover for their own actions. Meanwhile, U.S. Intelligence has uncovered connections between the attackers and al-Qaeda.
The attack itself has provoked widespread response all over the world, but in different ways. Many countries in the Muslim world have erupted in protest, supposedly against The Innocence of Muslims. This film, created by Nakoula Basseley, denounces Islam as a faith of violence and accuses the Prophet Muhammad of being a pedophile and homosexual.
Obviously offensive and designed to be hurtful, this film has fomented outrage throughout North Africa and parts of South Asia. Protests spread in the week following the attack in Benghazi.
It was initially believed that the assault on the American consulate was the result of protests that had spiraled out of control. It was only reasoned later that the attack was far too coordinated to be a random act of violence, and so it was declared a terrorist attack. The date of the attack, the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is also conspicuous enough to support this reasoning.
While the Muslim world went aflame because of Bassely’s film, the reaction in Libya has been definitively against the attack itself, condemning the use of violence, even against an offensive video. The day after the attack, ordinary Libyans in Benghazi and Tripoli held demonstrations to honor Ambassador Stevens and to denounce the use of violence. The Libyan government officially supports the United States in its efforts to apprehend the attackers.
On September 16, Libyan authorities arrested about 50 people who were suspected to be in connection to al-Qaeda. Yet, despite the wave of support the United States has received from the people and government of Libya, there has yet to be specific individuals named for killing Ambassador Stevens. The spokesman for Director of National Intelligence stated that “the intelligence community will continue to follow the information about the tragic events in Benghazi wherever it leads.” For now, the overall analysis of the incident is still evolving.
