The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know (14 page)

If the Obama administration could hide the dramatic evacuation of the Tripoli embassy while crafting misleading talking points to deceive the American public about the nature of the September 11, 2012 attacks, what else don’t we know about the real Benghazi story?

T
he news media’s distortion of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, is so grandiose and the cover-up of Obama administration misdeeds so egregious that I could easily dedicate an entire book to exclusively correcting the misinformation and faulty reporting related to the coordinated terrorist assault. Since it is virtually impossible to squeeze all of these media misrepresentations into one chapter, I will instead focus on a few of the more outlandish examples of media malpractice. For the purposes of this chapter, I won’t even attempt to document the mainstream news media reports that continue to wrongly call the attacked U.S. facility a “consulate” when it was anything but. Instead, let’s take a look at the way major news agencies have been misleading the public on the narrative of what really happened.

Let’s start with one of the most disgraceful pieces of propaganda in international “reporting” I have seen in quite some time. On December 28, 2013,
New York Times
reporter David D. Kirkpatrick released a book-length, multi-chapter article that sought to literally rewrite the entire Benghazi tale. The report, titled “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” is filled with misleading information, including details negated by the U.S. government, Benghazi victims, and numerous previous news reports. In fact, I will show that Kirkpatrick’s fanciful piece is scandalously contradicted by his
own
previous reportage.

One of the major contentions in Kirkpatrick’s
Times
piece is that “contrary to claims by some members of Congress,” the Benghazi attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”
¹
He repeated in
chapter 5
of the article, “There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers.”
²
Another central claim is that there is “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.”
³
Laughably, Kirkpatrick seeks to prove the Benghazi attack was largely not premeditated, although the article allows that some aspects of the assault were loosely planned the day of the actual attack. I will now dismantle each of these claims, in part using the
Times’
own reporting.

Before we address the outlandish tale about the anti-Muhammad film, let’s start with the contention that al-Qaeda or international jihadi organizations played no role
in the assault, a claim that clearly seeks to bolster the Obama administration’s thoroughly discredited talking points that infamously scrubbed terrorism as a motivating factor in the attacks. Stunningly, in his piece, Kirkpatrick asserts “Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests.”
⁴

Benghazi was not infiltrated by al-Qaeda? The U.S. government may take issue with that. Recall
chapter 5
, where we documented how a Library of Congress report detailed – one month before the deadly September 11 attack in Benghazi – that al-Qaeda established a major base of operations in Libya in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO campaign that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and his secular regime. The report warned that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations were establishing terrorist training camps and pushing Taliban-style Islamic law in Libya while the new, Western-backed Libyan government incorporated jihadists into its militias. The document said scores of Islamic extremists were freed from Libyan prison after the U.S.-supported revolution in Libya.
⁵

Embarrassingly for Kirkpatrick, the claim of no al-Qaeda infiltration in Benghazi is contradicted by another
Times
article, to which he contributed reporting from Benghazi. That’s right. An October 29, 2012,
New York Times
article titled “Libya Warnings Were Plentiful, but Unspecific” related that “Al Qaeda-leaning” Islamic extremists were establishing training camps in the mountains near Benghazi.
⁶

The 2012 article begins: “In the months leading up to
the Sept. 11 attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the Obama administration received intelligence reports that Islamic extremist groups were operating training camps in the mountains near the Libyan city and that some of the fighters were ‘Al Qaeda-leaning,’ according to American and European officials.”
⁷

Continued the
Times
article:

Small-scale camps grew out of training areas created last year by militias fighting Libyan government security forces. After the government fell, these compounds continued to churn out fighters trained in marksmanship and explosives, American officials said.

Ansar al-Shariah, a local militant group some of whose members had ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a local Qaeda affiliate, operated a militant training camp whose location was well known to Benghazi residents. On the Friday after the attack, demonstrators overran it.

American intelligence agencies had provided the administration with reports for much of the past year warning that the Libyan government was weakening and had little control over the militias, including Ansar al-Shariah.
⁸

Things only get worse for Kirkpatrick. In his distorted “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” the
Times
reporter claims the attacks were largely not premeditated, although again he does allow that some parts of the assault were loosely planned that day. “Surveillance of the American compound appears to have been underway at least 12 hours before the
assault started,” reported Kirkpatrick in his rewrite of history. “The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack.”

The journalist continued: “Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.”
⁹

Both of Kirkpatrick’s major contentions – that al-Qaeda was not involved and that the attack was largely not premeditated – are contradicted by a piece he cowrote with Steven Lee Myers on September 12, 2012, titled “Libya Attack Brings Challenges for U.S.”
¹⁰
That’s right. Kirkpatrick is so committed to his revisionist narrative he is willing to basically repudiate his own reporting without batting an eyebrow.

The article says: “Islamist militants armed with antiaircraft weapons and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a lightly defended United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.” The two writers added, “The assailants seemed organized, well trained and heavily armed, and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning.” Further contrasting with Kirkpatrick’s later piece, the article went on to quote Col. Wolfgang Pusztai, Austria’s former defense attaché to Libya, as saying he believed the attack “was ‘deliberately planned and executed’ by about a core group of 30 to 40 assailants who were ‘well trained and organized.’”
¹¹

The “assault was led by a brigade of Islamist fighters known as Ansar al-Sharia, or the Supporters of Islamic Law,”
the writers informed. “Brigade members emphasized at the time that they were not acting alone.” Ansar al-Sharia, as you well know by now, is an al-Qaeda–linked group.

Kirkpatrick and Myers continued: “On Wednesday, perhaps apprehensive over Mr. Stevens’ death, the brigade said in a statement that its supporters ‘were not officially involved or were not ordered to be involved’ in the attack.

“At the same time, the brigade praised those who protested as ‘the best of the best’ of the Libyan people and supported their response to the video ‘in the strongest possible terms.’”

More al-Qaeda and organized extremist connections to the Benghazi attack were reported by the
Daily Beast
, which confirmed an October 2012
Wall Street Journal
report that fighters affiliated with the Egypt-based, al-Qaeda–linked Jamal Network group participated in the Benghazi attack.
¹²
Later on, the eighty-five-page Senate report on the Benghazi attacks, released January 2014, would confirm Jamal’s involvement.
¹³

Kirkpatrick’s claim that the attacks were mostly not premeditated doesn’t fit with the State ARB investigation into Benghazi, either. The ARB described a well-orchestrated attack with militants who seemingly had specific knowledge of the compound. The State investigation focused on “men armed with AK rifles” who “started to destroy the living room contents and then approached the safe area gate and started banging on it.”
¹⁴

In another detail bespeaking a plan, the ARB stated that the intruders smoked up Villa C, likely to make breathing
so difficult that anyone inside the safe room where Ambassador Chris Stevens was holed up would need to come out.
¹⁵

It may be further difficult for keen observers to swallow the
Times
’ claim of unplanned looters in light of events that demonstrated the attackers knew the location of the nearby CIA annex or that they set up checkpoints, as they did, to ensure against the escape by Americans inside the special mission. In fact, as you may recall from
chapter 4
, they seemed to know where
everything
was, right down to the gasoline, the generators – and the precise location of Stevens’ safe room.

Now let’s get to Kirkpatrick’s clownish claim that the Benghazi attacks were motivated by an anti-Muhammad film. First, the storyline simply doesn’t jibe with an independent investigation that reportedly found no mention of the film on social media in Libya in the three days leading up to the attack. Agincourt Solutions, the leading social media monitoring firm, reviewed more than four thousand postings and found that the first reference to the film was not detected on social media until the day after the attack.
¹⁶

The
Times’
claim of popular protests about the Muhammad film doesn’t hold up to logic. The U.S. special mission was not a permanent facility, nor was its existence widely known by the public in Libya. Indeed, the State Department’s ARB report on the Benghazi attack itself documented the facility was set up secretively and without the knowledge of the new Libyan government.

Kirkpatrick may not have realized it, but he undermined
his own claims about the Muhammad film later in the article, where he may have inadvertently alluded to some of the real motivation for the attackers. Interestingly, Kirkpatrick’s article seeks to link the Benghazi attack to protests planned outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Reads the
Times
piece: “[O]n Sept. 8, a popular Islamist preacher lit the fuse by screening a clip of the video on the ultraconservative Egyptian satellite channel El Nas. American diplomats in Cairo raised the alarm in Washington about a growing backlash, including calls for a protest outside their embassy.”
¹⁷

However, as we extensively covered in
chapter 5
, the Cairo protest on September 11 was announced days in advance as part of a movement to free the so-called blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, held in the United States over the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The State Department’s ARB report stated that the “Omar Abdurrahman group” was involved in previous attacks against diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.
¹⁸
Kirkpatrick failed to report that the anti-U.S. protest movement outside the Cairo embassy was a long-term project about freeing Rahman.

On the day of the September 11, 2012, protests in Cairo, CNN’s Nic Robertson interviewed Rahman’s son, who described the protest as being about freeing his father. No Muhammad film was mentioned. A big banner calling for Rahman’s release can be seen as Robertson walked to the embassy protests.

The case study of Kirkpatrick is simply the tip of the iceberg. There are legitimate questions about a Reuters article penned in the immediate aftermath of the jihadist attack against the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

Reads the September 12, 2012, Reuters report: “Accounts from Libyan and U.S. officials, and from locals who watched what began as a protest on Tuesday against a crudely made American film that insults the Prophet Mohammad spiral into violence and a military-style assault on U.S. troops, point to a series of unfortunate choices amid the confusion and fear.” The article then quotes one protester – identified only as “a 17-year-old student named Hamam” – as saying, “When we had heard that there was a film that was insulting to the Prophet, we, as members of the public, and not as militia brigades, we came to the consulate here to protest and hold a small demonstration.”
¹⁹

“Hamam” further claimed that a rumor had spread that a protester had been wounded by firing from inside the U.S. mission, and so Hamam and many others “went off to retrieve guns” which, Reuters reported, “like many Libyans, they keep at home for security.”

In other words, Reuters expects us to believe a bunch of local Libyan civilian protesters congregated outside the mission to protest an obscure film, and then, after a rumor had spread about an injured protester, these locals went home to retrieve weapons, only to return as expert warriors with inside knowledge of the compound. They then
established armed and manned checkpoints around the U.S. mission, engaged in hours of fierce gun battles, overran the compound, knew about the existence of a secretive CIA annex, and even had mortars prepared to be fired at the second U.S. facility.

The news agency further reported: “Some of those who took part in the initial demonstration in Benghazi insisted it was a spontaneous, unplanned public protest which had begun relatively peacefully. Anger over the film also saw an unruly protest at the U.S. embassy across the Egyptian border in Cairo on Tuesday evening, with protesters scaling the walls.” Of course, as noted both in this chapter and earlier in this book, the Cairo protests showed no signs of being about the film.