Via NYT:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated for the first time on Wednesday that there was an explicit link between the Qaeda franchise in North Africa and the attack at the American diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans, including the ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens.
She also said American intelligence and law enforcement agencies were working not only with Libya but also with other nations in the region to investigate the attack in Benghazi on Sept. 11. That indicated that the attack’s planning and execution might not have been the local, spontaneous eruption of violence that the administration had initially described.
Mrs. Clinton made her remarks at a special United Nations meeting on the political and security crisis in the swath of North Africa known as the Maghreb and the Sahel, a crisis that is particularly affecting northern Mali, which has been overrun by Islamic extremists since a military coup divided that country earlier this year.
She said Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which originated in Algeria, was now using the region as a haven to support extremism and terrorist violence in countries like Libya.
“Now, with a larger safe haven and increased freedom to maneuver, terrorists are seeking to extend their reach and their networks in multiple directions,” Mrs. Clinton told world leaders assembled at the United Nations meeting. “And they are working with other violent extremists to undermine the democratic transitions under way in North Africa, as we tragically saw in Benghazi.”
She did not detail any new evidence of the linkage. Some Republican critics in Washington have argued that the administration played down the possibility of any connection to Al Qaeda, especially with President Obama in the midst of a re-election campaign in which the killing of Osama bin Laden is a major talking point.