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CIA denies claim that Benghazi annex held Libyan prisoners
The Central Intelligence Agency denied charges Sunday that its annex in Benghazi, Libya secretly held a few jihadi prisoners until it was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. Paula Broadwell, the girlfriend then-CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus, made that claim during an Oct. 26 speech in Denver, Colo."I don't know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner. And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back," Broadwell declared during the speech, at the University of Denver. The CIA's denial came just hours after Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news outlet, first published a partial transcript of Broadwell's speech. By midnight Sunday, intelligence reporters with both The Daily Beast and The Washington Post were reporting and tweeting, respectively, that the CIA said her claim was false. An agency spokesperson told The Daily Beast that "[t]he CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless." One possible explanation, The Daily Beast wrote, is that Broadwell was confused about a report she had heard that day on the Fox News Channel. "According to a source on the ground at the time of the attack," Fox News' Jennifer Griffin reported Oct. 26, "the team inside the CIA annex had captured three Libyan attackers and was forced to hand them over to the Libyans. U.S. officials do not know what happened to those three attackers and whether they were released by the Libyan forces."
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