Yesterday afternoon, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland admitted in the aftermath of the murder of one of our Yemen embassy security forces that al Qaeda may have a complete list of our Yemeni embassy personnel:
QUESTION: Is it safe to assume that he was targeted by al-Qaida, who may have also a list of all the national – Yemeni national employees at the Embassy?
MS. NULAND: Well, Said, I’m sure you can understand if I stress the fact that the Yemenis are investigating. We are supporting their investigation. It is premature – this happened today – for us to be drawing conclusions about who did it, why it happened, all of those things. But obviously it’s of great concern, and it’s of great concern given the larger issues in the region.
This is a stunning admission by the State Department. By refusing to say whether al Qaeda has a list of Yemenis working with the US embassy in Yemen, she tacitly admits that they could – and that puts all of their lives in danger. In Libya, our failure to secure our Benghazi consulate resulted in the loss of crucial national security intelligence, supposedly including lists of Libyans working with us in the country. Now it appears that a second list may have found its way to al Qaeda in Yemen.
The State Department went on to state that the Yemeni security official killed may have been targeted and murdered for other reasons:
QUESTION: Does that mean that you don’t know if he was targeted because he was an employee? This could have been – as far as you know, this could have been just a random act of crime – criminality?
MS. NULAND: It could – he could have been killed for reasons that had something to do with his job or reasons that had nothing to do with his job.
Sure.