Benghazi fiasco leaves seven Americans dead? Including three in Algeria?

Question: How many Americans were murdered as a result of the Obama administration's reluctance to put boots on the ground in Benghazi to confront the terrorists?

Four Americans? The four who were killed during the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in September?

Perhaps. But according to the latest report, it is quite possible that seven Americans died as a result of the Obama administration's inaction.

Several Egyptian members of the squad of militants that lay bloody siege to an Algerian gas complex last week also took part in the deadly attack on the United States Mission in Libya in September, a senior Algerian official said Tuesday.

Three of the militants were captured alive, and one of them described the Egyptians’ role in both assaults under interrogation by the Algerian security services, [an Algerian] official said...

But the Algerian official did not say why the captured kidnapper’s assertion — that some fighters had taken part in both the Benghazi and Algerian attacks — should be considered trustworthy. Nor did he say whether it was obtained under duress.

Instead, he focused on the chaos unleashed by the recent uprisings throughout the region, leaving large ungoverned areas where extremists can flourish.

“This is the result of the Arab Spring,” said the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations into the hostage crisis were still under way. “I hope the Americans are conscious of this.”

If the kidnapper is indeed telling the truth, that would mean some of the terrorists who participated in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi - which claimed the lives of four Americans - also took part in the attack on the Algerian gas complex that left three Americans dead. That would mean seven Americans died as a result of the Obama administration's disinclination/reluctance to put boots on the ground in Libya to confront the terrorists.

In a related development, which connects the Libyan Arab Spring to the attack on the Algerian gas facility:

The terrorist leader who claimed to have mounted the deadly raid on an Algerian gas plant in the name of al Qaeda is the same one-eyed jihadist who once bragged his fighters “benefit” from the loose weapons streaming out of Libya...

“We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world,” Mokhtar Belmokhtar, then a leader of the north Africa-based al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), told the Mauritanian news agency ANI in November 2011. “As for our benefitting from the [Libyan] weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”...

Several major Algerian news outlets, including the state-run Numidia News, reported that the militants crossed into Algeria from the Libyan border just 50 miles to the east, drove vehicles with Libyan license plates and dressed in Libyan military uniforms to attack the BP joint venture facility outside In Amenas, Algeria. They were reportedly armed with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and several bombs...

The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), told ABC News Sunday that the U.S. didn’t react quickly enough to stop the arms from seeping through Libya’s porous borders.

“Remember when Gadhafi fell, all of those arms rooms, all of those weapons caches, while we were debating… walked out the back door, fueled the insurgency and the extremist groups, including al Qaeda affiliates to feel emboldened…” he said. “So now they’re well armed. You have battle-hardened fighters from Libya. It really is naive to believe this isn’t getting worse.”