Benghazi, Not Petraeus Affair, Is Focus at Closed Hearings

By ERIC SCHMITT, NYT

WASHINGTON — In closed sessions before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Friday, David H. Petraeus apologized to lawmakers about his affair with Paula Broadwell, which led to his resignation last week as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but lawmakers said later that they did not ask about the matter.

Instead, the focus of both hearings was the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, two months ago that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Mr. Petraeus said that classified intelligence showed that the deadly raid on the diplomatic mission was a terrorist attack, but that the administration withheld the suspected role of specific affiliates of Al Qaeda to avoid tipping off the terrorist groups.

The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies prepared unclassified talking points on the attack for members of Congress, and in them the references to Qaeda affiliates were changed to the less specific “extremists” to avoid revealing to insurgents that American intelligence agencies were eavesdropping on their electronic communications.

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