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Ex-Bush aide: Only military action will get justice for Benghazi

Oren Dorell, USA TODAY
3:54 p.m. EST January 8, 2013

A person examines the inside of the U.S. Consulate after an attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya.(Photo: Mohammad Hannon, AP)

Story Highlights

Suspect held in Sept. 11 attack on U.S. Embassy in Libya was released on lack of evidence

Four Americans, including the ambassador, died in the attack in Benghazi

The release in Tunisia of a man suspected in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi shows that the United States must respond to the assault militarily against the al-Qaeda-linked militias responsible, a former Bush administration official said Tuesday.

"This is an act of war and they're treating it like a crime," said Marc Thiessen, a top aide to former president George W. Bush. "We should be collecting intel and giving it to our drone targeters."

However, Mansour El-Kikhia, a former adviser to Libya's transitional government, says unilateral military action by the U.S. would be harmful because it would further weaken an already shaky secular Libyan government and empower Islamists.

"An attack without the cooperation of the Libyan government would weaken them even further because the United States would be seen as the aggressor," El-Kikhia said.

Ali Harzi, a Tunisian and the only person arrested in the Sept. 11 attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, was released Monday by a Tunisian court for lack of evidence, according to his lawyer, Anwar Oued-Ali.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., vice chairman for the intelligence panel for the Armed Services Committee, has said that Harzi was confirmed to be a member of Ansar al Sharia, an al-Qaeda-linked terror group.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Tuesday that U.S. diplomats have offered to help Libyan officials strengthen their internal security and police agencies and integrate militias but "they have not yet availed themselves to some of these offers." She referred most reporters' questions about Harzi to the FBI.

Thiessen said there is little hope of prosecuting terrorists overseas in countries dominated by Islamist governments. The only way to respond to attacks against Americans and to stem the expansion of Islamist terrorism is with force.

To do otherwise "sends a signal of weakness to the enemy and weakness is provocative," Thiessen said. "It sends a signal that you can attack the United States, kill an American ambassador with impunity. They'll do it again and again and again."

But El-Kikhia says there is a risk.

"Libya is on the knife's edge," he said. "What the United States does now can bring it to safety or to a hell hole. It's the only country in the region that isn't led by fundamentalism and is the only country that is fighting it."

The Libyan people have been putting pressure on the Libyan government to deal with radical militias, but the government is currently outgunned, El-Kikhia said.

After the Benghazi attack, street demonstrations against terrorism in the city forced members of the Ansar al Shariah to abandon their headquarters. The militia has since gone underground, El-Kikhia said.

FBI investigators interviewed Harzi in the presence of a Tunisian judge in December. He was originally detained in Turkey and in October was extradited to Tunisia, where authorities had said he was "strongly suspected" of being involved in the attack.

Tunisian officials, led by the Islamist Nahda party, were looking for an excuse to let him go under pressure from the more radical Salafist politicians, El-Kikhia said.