The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know (8 page)

The story gets even weirder. The ARB report states that the intruders smoked up Villa C, likely to make breathing so difficult that anyone inside the safe room would need to come out. And that’s just what happened: Stevens and his guards had no choice but to exit the safe room for fresh air. Except somehow Stevens and his guards made it from the safe room,
where they were being smoked out, into a bathroom in the Villa without any of the intruders noticing? That’s what the Accountability Review Board expects us to believe.

States their report ARB: “As smoke engulfed the Villa C safe area, ARSO 1 led Ambassador Stevens and IMO Smith into a bathroom with an exterior window. All three crawled into the bathroom, while the thick, black smoke made breathing difficult and reduced visibility to zero.”
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“ARSO 1” escaped through a window, according to the ARB, believing Stevens and Smith were following him. He later reentered the building to search for Stevens and Smith. ARSO 1 made it to the roof of the compound, where he radioed for assistance. The report then relates that ARSO 1 was rescued by a small team that made it back to the nearby CIA safe house.
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From here, Stevens’ fate gets even sketchier in the State report. During the attacks, ARSOs entered Villa C several times to search the building, finding and removing Smith’s body but reportedly divining no sign of Stevens. That’s it. No mention of the knowledge of the ambassador’s whereabouts until approximately 0200 local time, when the Tripoli embassy was said to have received a phone call from ARSO 1’s cell phone, and it was determined to have come from the Benghazi Medical Center, a detail that will become quite relevant for our purposes shortly.

The ARB claims a “male, Arabic-speaking caller said an unresponsive male who matched the physical description of the Ambassador was at a hospital. There was confusion over
which hospital this might be, and the caller was unable to provide a picture of the Ambassador or give any other proof that he was with him. There was some concern that the call might be a ruse to lure American personnel into a trap. With the Benghazi Medical Center (BMC) believed to be dangerous for American personnel due to the possibility attackers were being treated there, a Libyan contact of the Special Mission was dispatched to the BMC and later confirmed the Ambassador’s identity and that he was deceased.”
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This description provokes several major questions. First and foremost: How in the world did Stevens’ body get from a heavily besieged compound to the Benghazi Medical Center?

Here’s the ARB’s explanation: “BMC personnel would later report that at approximately 0115 local on September 12, an unidentified, unresponsive male foreigner – subsequently identified as Ambassador Stevens – was brought to the emergency room by six civilians. The identities of these civilians are unknown at the time of this report, but to the best knowledge of the Board these were ‘good Samaritans’ among the hordes of looters and bystanders who descended upon the special mission after the DS and Annex teams departed.”
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In May 2014 an e-mail sent from senior adviser to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice Eric Pelofsky to Susan Rice and other administration officials was released as part of the 112 pages of documents handed over to Judicial Watch to comply with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The e-mail, which was sent on September 11, 2012, at 8:51 p.m. Eastern Time, or 2:51 a.m. Libyan time, in the immediate
aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, states a phone call from a local Libyan hospital was placed by someone who reported Stevens was at the medical center and was “alive and well.” The e-mail entirely contradicts the ARB report, which states the caller at the hospital said a man matching Stevens’ description was brought to the medical center and was “unresponsive.”

The e-mail was sent after the initial assault at the U.S. special mission and just prior to the second assault at the nearby CIA annex, according to administration timelines. It reads:

Post received a call from a person using a RSO phone that Chris was given saying that the caller was with a person matching Chris’s description at a hospital and that he was alive and well…. Of course, if he were alive and well one could ask why he didn’t make the call himself.

Pelofsky could have been provided faulty information in the initial shock and confusion right after the attacks, but given the extent of the Obama administration’s misinformation campaign surrounding Benghazi, we need to ask questions about this discrepancy regarding Stevens. Was the hospitalized ambassador “alive and well” or “unresponsive”? If Stevens was “alive and well” then how did he die?

This “good Samaritans” claim makes little sense. The ARB itself documents the security officers fleeing the Benghazi
compound to the CIA annex encountered heavy resistance on the way, including roadblocks set up by militants around the compound. The U.S. officers, the ARB relates, engaged in heavy fire clashes to make it past the compound periphery. Yet we are to believe that “good Samaritans” made it past those roadblocks with the body of the most high-profile American in Libya. And just who are these “good Samaritans” in Benghazi who risked their lives to make it through these checkpoints all the way to the hospital?

If you haven’t seen the photos of Stevens’ churned body being dragged through the streets, they certainly look real, although they haven’t been verified. The gang of Middle Eastern men brandishing the ambassador’s body definitely do not look like “good Samaritans.”

The Stevens story gets stranger still. After we’re told a “Libyan contact” went to the Benghazi Medical Center, a hospital the ARB calls “dangerous for American personnel,”
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to confirm the presence of Stevens’ body we hear nothing again about the American ambassador’s corpse until later in the morning when a Libyan Air Force C-130 had been provided to transport the Benghazi victims to Tripoli.

All of the sudden, the ARB relates, “Annex personnel continued to reach out to Libyan contacts to coordinate the transport of the presumed remains of Ambassador Stevens to the airport. The body was brought to the airport in what appeared to be a local ambulance at 0825 local, and the TDY RSO verified Ambassador Stevens’ identity.”
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That’s it. No explanation of how these “Libyan contacts”
managed to get Stevens’ body out of the “dangerous” hospital.

Now, let’s for a minute suspend independent thought and logic and assume the earlier ARB version of events is accurate: that “good Samaritans” indeed risked their lives to transport Stevens to the Benghazi Medical Center. A closer look at the hospital makes it seem unlikely the hospital staff simply gave up Stevens’ body to the United States via Libyan contacts. The hospital, it turns out, was said to have been controlled by Ansar al-Sharia, the very group that was reportedly helping to lead the Benghazi attack. The center allegedly fell into the hands of the rebels during the U.S. and NATO–supported revolution that overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

Enter Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Libya, the second in command in the country after Stevens. A detail provided in Hicks’ congressional testimony may require further investigation in light of our line of questioning. Hicks said the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Libya, was told Stevens was taken to a hospital controlled by Ansar al-Sharia, the group originally believed to have been behind the Benghazi attack.

Stated Hicks: “We began to hear also that the ambassador has been taken to a hospital. We don’t know initially which hospital it is, but we – through David’s reports we learned that it is in a hospital which is controlled by Ansar Sharia, the group that Twitter feeds had identified as leading the attack on the consulate.”
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Hicks was referring to David McFarland, the U.S. Tripoli embassy’s political section chief.

At about three in the morning, Hicks received a call from the Libyan prime minister informing him of Stevens’ death. “Before I got the call from the prime minister,” he said, “we’d received several phone calls on the phone that had been with the ambassador saying that we know where the ambassador is, please, you can come get him.

“And our local staff engaged on those phone calls admirably,” he added, “asking very, very good, outstanding, even open-ended questions about where was he, trying to discern whether he was alive, whether they even had the ambassador, whether that person was with the ambassador, send a picture, could we talk to the ambassador?”

He continued: “Because we knew separately from David that the ambassador was in a hospital that we believe was under Ansar Sharia’s call, we – we suspected that we were being baited into a trap, and so we did not want to go send our people into an ambush. And we didn’t.”

Even more mystery was added to the quest for details on Stevens’ death following the publication of a now-retracted book by Morgan Jones, who identified himself as one of the Blue Mountain private contractors who were hired to help train guards and provide external security at the Benghazi mission. The book by Jones, whose real name is said to be Dylan Davies, was recalled after it emerged that he reportedly provided contradictory statements not only to the FBI, but also in an unsigned Blue Mountain incident report said to have been his first-person account of what he did in Benghazi. Davies claimed in a
Daily Beast
interview that he was being smeared.
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We obviously cannot take anything Jones said as fact. My own personal review of his book leads me to believe that he seems to have inside knowledge of the inner security workings at the U.S. special mission, but there are legitimate questions regarding his true whereabouts during the actual attack.

The Blue Mountain incident report, which contradicts key elements of Davies’ account in his book and in a subsequent
60 Minutes
interview, states Davies returned to his villa immediately after the attack. The incident report says Davies learned of Stevens’ death from a Blue Mountain guard who had apparently secretly gone to the hospital and had taken a photo of the ambassador’s body. Davies wrote in his book, however, that he was the guard who infiltrated the hospital and verified that Stevens was dead.
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Here’s another discrepancy: The State Department’s ARB report does not mention any other wounded American at the hospital with Stevens, but the Blue Mountain report goes on to claim a second American was at the hospital. “I asked [blank] if any other Americans were at the hospital and he said yes, a black man who had been shot in the hand. I presumed that this was one of the Ambassador’s close protection team as both men were black.” The report does not relate the fate of the other American it said was at the hospital.

The Blue Mountain report also contradicts statements by Ziad Abu Zeid, identified by the Associated Press as the doctor who treated Stevens at the Benghazi Medical Center. Zeid said Stevens was brought alone to the hospital and that
no one at the facility knew who he was. The doctor told the AP that Stevens was close to death upon arrival at 1 a.m. local time, and “we tried to revive him for an hour and a half but with no success.” Zeid said Stevens was bleeding from his stomach due to asphyxiation and did not have other injuries, contradicting Internet claims the ambassador’s body was abused.
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Some of those abuse claims cite a Lebanese news outlet, Tayyar.org, that published a report falsely stating that Agence France-Press had reported Stevens was sodomized before being murdered. The AFP responded, issuing a statement that the Lebanese “report falsely quoted our news agency and has no truth whatsoever to it. AFP promptly sent a strongly worded complaint to that website and they removed the report and published a denial, saying that AFP did not report such a thing.”
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Even before the AFP denials, I personally found the rape rumors to be less than credible. Such activity is quite rare in jihadist circles.

Enter the Senate’s extensive, eighty-five-page report into the Benghazi attack. The report reveals a new detail about the assumption of Stevens’ fate when he could not be found by U.S. security personnel inside the burning U.S. special mission. Reads the report: “State and CIA personnel re-entered the burning compound numerous times in an attempt to locate Ambassador Stevens, but to no avail. Under the impression that the Ambassador ‘had already been taken
from that compound and that he’d been kidnapped,’ the leader of the Annex security team decided that U.S. personnel needed to evacuate to the Annex for their safety.”
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So the U.S. security team inside the compound was acting under the assumption the Ambassador had been kidnapped. This was their official belief from approximately 11:10 p.m. local time until at least 2:30 a.m. local time, when it was reportedly established that Stevens was at the Benghazi Medical Center and was deceased. This means that for three hours the U.S. command and control were under the impression that gunmen were holding our ambassador hostage. It begs the obvious question as to why no special forces were told to deploy during those hours.

U.S. government e-mails released in May 2014 reveal a top Obama administration official was immediately concerned the entire Benghazi attack itself was a concerted effort to kidnap U.S. Stevens. The night of the attack, UN Ambassador Rice’s senior advisor, Eric Pelofsky, sent an e-mail to Rice in which he expressed concern about a possible kidnap plot. “Yes – I’m very worried. In particular, that he is either dead or this was a concerted effort to kidnap him,” wrote Pelofsky at 9:06 p.m. eastern time the night of the attack.

The Senate report for the first time reveals new details about “negotiations” to transport Stevens’ body and how the corpse arrived at the tarmac with the waiting evacuation airplane. The report states:

After more than three hours of negotiations and communications with Libyan officials who expressed concern about the security situation at the hospital, the Libyan government arranged for the Libyan Shield Militia to provide transportation and an armed escort from the airport. After learning that Ambassador Stevens was almost certainly dead and that the security situation at the hospital was uncertain, the team opted to go to the Annex to support the other U.S. personnel. The security team from Tripoli departed the airport for the Annex at approximately 4:30 a.m. Benghazi time….