The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know (15 page)

The version of events presented by Reuters would later be somewhat contradicted by an October 27, 2012, Associated Press report also based on a firsthand witness account. Reports the AP:

It began around nightfall on Sept. 11 with around 150 bearded gunmen, some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants, sealing off the streets leading to the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. They set up roadblocks with pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, according to witnesses.

The trucks bore the logo of Ansar al-Shariah, a powerful local group of Islamist militants who worked with the municipal government to manage security in Benghazi, the main city in eastern Libya and birthplace of the uprising last year that ousted Moammar Gadhafi after a 42-year dictatorship.

Clearly contradicting the Reuters witness, the AP reported, “There was no sign of a spontaneous protest against an American-made movie denigrating Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. But a lawyer passing by the scene said he saw the militants gathering around 20 youths from nearby to chant against the film. Within an hour or so, the assault began, guns blazing as the militants blasted into the compound.”
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Whom to believe? Reuters’ claim of a “spontaneous, unplanned public protest” over an anti-Muhammad film, or the AP’s report that there was “no sign of a spontaneous protest” against the obscure movie?

Did you know the Benghazi controversy is actually a made-up scandal, generated out of whole cloth by Republicans for partisan gain? This is the central theme of a recent e-book by David Brock, founder of the controversial, George Soros–funded, progressive activist organization Media Matters for America. Brock seems to believe it is illegitimate to ask questions about the State Department’s repeated refusal to secure the U.S. special mission, the Obama administration’s talking point fabrications, or why Special Forces were not deployed during the assault. These and other topics are deceptively dealt with in Brock’s
The Benghazi Hoax
, coauthored with Media Matters executive Ari Rabin-Havt. I would not waste ink on Brock’s fantastical farce except that some members of the news media actually took the e-book tripe seriously.

Brock is a known Hillary Clinton associate, so it’s not surprising to read that he used the e-book to absolve Clinton of wrongdoing related to the September 11, 2012, attack. I invite Brock to review
chapter 7
of this book, aptly titled, which thoroughly documents Clinton’s central role in the Benghazi scandal. Progressive activist Brock further hails the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi as thorough, fair, and accurate, despite its major reported flaws. “The Obama administration had done exactly what any citizen would expect of its government – investigated an overseas security breach in depth,”
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Brock wrote. He praised ARB authors former ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired admiral Mike Mullen as “two figures with resumes beyond reproach.”
²²

Brock, of course, did not report that Pickering has largely unreported ties to the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Pickering is linked primarily through his role as a member of the small board of the International Crisis Group, or ICG, one of the main proponents of the international “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine.
²³
The doctrine is the very military protocol used to justify the NATO bombing campaign that brought down Moammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya.

With no previous military, terrorism, or international news reporting experience to speak of, newfound national security expert Brock next disputed the claim that highly trained Special Forces were available and could have been deployed in time to make a difference in the September
11, 2012, attack. Brock may want to have a brief conversation with Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We reported in
chapter 3
that Dempsey admitted that highly trained Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attack but were not told to deploy. There are major questions about why this special force, known as the C-110 or the EUCOM CIF, was not immediately ordered to Libya, especially since the assumption for several hours that night was that our U.S. ambassador had been kidnapped.

Brock and cohort Rabin-Havt did not bother to raise the many questions prompted by Dempsey’s testimony, including an admission to the highly unusual move of changing command of the Special Forces in the middle of the Benghazi attack. Instead, the dynamic Media Matters duo attempted to refute the exclusive Fox News interview discussed in
chapter 3
, in which an unnamed military special ops member, with face and voice disguised, contradicted Obama administration and ARB claims that there wasn’t enough time for military forces to deploy the night of the attack. “It was a compelling argument, especially for a typical news consumer who possesses only a casual knowledge of military affairs,” they wrote.
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“Military experts, however, dismissed these notions,” they contend. The authors then quoted former defense secretary Robert Gates stating that the suggestion the military could have responded in time was based on “sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.”
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Brock and Rabin-Ravt further quoted former secretary of defense Leon Panetta arguing in February 2013 that a military response during the attack was unfeasible. Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee: “The reason simply is because armed UAVs, AC-130 gunships or fixed-wing fighters, with the associated tanking, you’ve got to provide air refueling abilities; you’ve got to arm all the weapons before you put them on the planes; targeting and support facilities, were not in the vicinity of Libya. And because of the distance, it would have taken at least nine to 12 hours, if not more, to deploy these forces to Benghazi.”
²⁶

Brock and Rabin-Ravt entirely ignore the news-making remarks of Dempsey, who not only conceded that the C-110 Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away but also stated that command of the forces was transferred from the military’s European command to AFRICOM, or the United States Africa Command, during the attack, a move that may warrant further investigation. Dempsey did not give any reason for the strange transfer of command, nor could he provide a timeline for the transfer the night of the attack.

Meanwhile, Brock and Rabin-Ravt seem to have been caught in a talking points scandal of their own. The industrious activists promote as fact the disputed claim that White House talking points on the Benghazi attack were edited to preserve a criminal investigation. Brock and Rabin-Havt do not cite any evidence for their claim about the talking points editing, and they fail to inform readers of the forty-six-page House Republican report that purports to have discovered
another reason for scrubbing the talking points of references to terrorism: protecting the State Department’s reputation (see
chapter 8
).
²⁷
In other words, Brock and Rabin-Ravt are contradicted by lawmakers who had exclusive access to witnesses, classified documents, and intelligence reports.

Brock and Rabin-Ravt wrote of the talking points editing scandal:

Over the next 24 hours, a set of talking points was drafted by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, and then altered multiple times through an interagency process involving the State Department, the White House, and others. In the end, much of the intelligence agency’s specifics about the suspected perpetrators of the attack were removed in order to preserve the criminal investigation.
²⁸

The authors did not provide any reference for their claim. In fact, their sole argument rests on the integrity of then CIA director David Petraeus, who reportedly helped oversee the drafting of the talking-points document. “Petraeus would have had little to gain from misleading Congress, given both his track record of political independence and the enormous respect that he had from members of both parties,” wrote Brock and Rabin-Havt.
²⁹

However, Petraeus might have had good reason to edit the talking points. As detailed in
chapter 7
, he was complicit with Hillary Clinton in advocating a plan to arm the Syrian rebels – a plan White House officials claim to have rejected.
It seems the real hoax perpetuated here is the publication of Brock’s e-book,
The Benghazi Hoax
.

T
he real Benghazi story extends far beyond the deadly attacks on a U.S. special mission and CIA annex. We are today feeling the ramifications of the U.S.-coordinated arms shipments and vast supplies of aid and other support to the jihadist-led Mid-East rebels, with conflicts being fueled from Syria to Egypt to Israel to Mali to Algeria. Militants behind the Benghazi attacks may be linked to the Boston Marathon bombing and to the recent hijacking of an Algerian gas complex, targeting Westerners. In backing the rebels in Libya and later in Syria, the Obama administration may have unwittingly helped to create an al-Qaeda–allied army of thousands of highly motivated, well-trained gunmen. Besides wreaking havoc in the Middle East and Africa, these hard-line Islamists have been rampantly persecuting Middle Eastern and African Christians and other minorities. Among the ranks of these Islamists are Americans,
Australians, and Europeans who could return home to carry out domestic terrorist attacks.

Not only did we transfer weapons to the Mideastern rebels, it has been extensively reported that U.S. contractors working with the CIA have previously helped train the rebels fighting the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Reuters reported that Obama allegedly signed a secret order in 2012 authorizing U.S. agencies such as the CIA to provide support to rebel forces in Syria.
¹
Such support included helping run a secret military communications command center in Turkey while U.S. citizens were training rebels and possibly giving them equipment, at least since the summer of 2012.

The United States was behind covert training bases in Jordan and Turkey, where the Mideastern rebels were provided “two-week courses include training with Russian-designed 14.5-millimeter anti-tank rifles, anti-tank missiles, as well as 23-millimeter anti-aircraft weapons,” according to the
LA Times
.
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More than one year before other media outlets covered this story, I first documented the exact location of a U.S.-run training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region.
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Three months later, I reported on growing collaboration between the Syrian opposition, including the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army and al-Qaeda, as well as evidence the opposition was sending weapons to jihadists in Iraq.
⁴

What did the Obama administration think would happen after it armed jihadists in Libya and then armed and
trained Islamic gunmen fighting in Syria? Did the White House actually believe these battle-hardened, anti-Western extremists would simply forfeit their weapons when they were done fighting Assad or Muammar Gaddafi? I wish I could say we learned our lesson the hard way in Benghazi on September 12, 2012, when rebels we aided turned their weapons and ire on the United States. The Obama administration, however, evidenced little appreciation for national security, since it continued for more than a year to assist the anti-Assad rebels.

Just as alarming is a stream of reports about Westerners who joined the fight in Syria. Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert, penned an extensive article documenting that one in nine Westerners who joined these foreign jihadist insurgencies were complicit in terrorist plots back home.
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While the figures are not exact, some estimates suggest Westerners fighting in Syria include 200 to 400 French citizens, 200 Germans, 200 to 300 Brits, 100 fighters from Belgium, and up to 200 or more from Australia. There have been reports of dozens of Americans conducting warfare alongside the rebels in Syria.
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Before we more directly address the global implications of our efforts to aid the rebels, efforts headquartered at the Benghazi mission and CIA annex until the attacks on our facilities there, let’s take a brief look at how we essentially wrecked Libya by helping topple Gaddafi in hopes of
bringing democracy to his country. Make no mistake about it: Gaddafi was a thug, a thief, and at times a terrorist supporter. He changed course somewhat after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, acceding to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and allowing the U.S. and international community to assist in the destruction of those weapons. The strongman, however, was far from a democratic leader. Still, Libyans were not living under the constant threat of radical Islamic factions during Gaddafi’s rule. There were no reports of al-Qaeda erecting training camps in the country. Islamists were not waging war with the country’s military while gaining swaths of territory where these thugs are imposing hard-line Sharia law.

A month before the 2012 terrorist attacks on our facilities in Benghazi, a Library of Congress report detailed how al-Qaeda had established a major base of operations in Libya in the aftermath of the U.S.–NATO campaign that deposed Gaddafi and his secular regime. The report, quoted in more depth earlier in this book, documented that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations were not only establishing terrorist training camps but also enforcing Taliban-style Islamic law in Libya while the new, Western-backed Libyan government incorporated jihadists into its militias.
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As this book went to print, Islamists had seized three strategic Libyan ports and were tightening their grip on the south and east of the country amid fears that the weak, secular, Libyan government could lose total control. Just who are these Islamists who are now threatening to engulf
the country? I’ll let Reuters inform you. This one sentence in the news agency’s March 6, 2014, report accurately sums up the devastating situation: “The weak government in Tripoli is struggling to control well-armed former anti-Gaddafi rebels and Islamist militias.”
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That’s right. The rebels we helped arm in the name of democracy and freedom are currently the greatest threat to democracy and freedom in Libya.