The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know (2 page)

Yet another chapter is dedicated to the Real Benghazi talking points scandal. This sordid tale goes beyond the selective and misleading editing of intelligence information or the cover-ups of the well-coordinated jihadist assault. The implications of the duplicitous editing affair are larger than obscuring the possibly illicit activities taking place inside
the U.S. special mission. The story here is the large-scale, purposeful deception of the American public, the abject betrayal of public trust to the point where national security was willingly jeopardized by stirring further riots across the Islamic world when the government decided to draw more attention to the Muhammad film, even misusing taxpayer dollars to apologize for the irrelevant movie.

The news media are also called out for their shady conduct in fostering misinformation, covering for the administration, and, with few notable exceptions, failing to do any real investigating even when the Obama administration’s claims about what transpired made no logical sense.

In summary, I will explore how the 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 Mideast rebels, with conflicts being fueled from Syria to Egypt to Israel to Mali to Algeria. In fact, the Benghazi attacks may have ties to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and to the hijacking of an Algerian gas complex that targeted Westerners. In backing the rebels in Libya and later in Syria, the Obama administration may have helped 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 their ranks are Americans, Australians,
and Europeans – jihadists who could return home to carry out domestic terrorist attacks. In each of these scenarios, the Benghazi scandals of 9/11/2012 are as yet unending. In these ongoing attacks on American allies and interests lie the ultimate answer to Secretary of State Clinton’s now notorious question: “What difference at this point does it make?”

L
et’s start with the most basic understanding of what transpired in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. If you ask most people to tell you what happened that fated night, a likely response will be that a U.S. “consulate” in Benghazi was attacked. For months after the dramatic events unfolded, the vast majority of all news media coverage worldwide referred to the U.S. facility initially assaulted as a “consulate,” even though the government itself has been careful to call it a “mission” or “U.S. special mission.” To this day, many in the news media continue to falsely report, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, that a “consulate” came under fire, while also informing the audience that a nearby “CIA annex” was the second target of the assault.

A
consulate
typically refers to the building that officially houses a
consul
, or an official representative of the government of one state located inside the territory of another.
Consulates at times function as junior embassies, providing services related to visas, passports, and citizen information. However, on August 26, 2012, about two weeks before he was killed, Ambassador Chris Stevens attended a ceremony marking the opening of consular services at the American embassy in Tripoli, meaning the functioning U.S. consulate was working out of Tripoli and not Benghazi.
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The new U.S. consul in Libya, Jenny Cordell, was stationed at the embassy in Tripoli. A search of the State Department website finds no consulate listed in Benghazi.

Government documents from the State Department–sponsored Accountability Review Board (ARB) probe to congressional and senatorial investigations to documents released by the State Department, White House, Pentagon, and the U.S. Intelligence Community all carefully label the facility a “U.S. special mission” and not a “consulate.” In fact, the ARB report divulges the mission was so special its classification “as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult.”
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The ARB report contains information that clearly contradicts any claim the special mission existed to serve as a liaison office to the local government, aka a consulate. It documents the local Libyan government did not know about the presence of the mission.

Even more stunning is a largely unreported revelation from the Senate’s extensive, eighty-five-page report investigating the Benghazi attacks released in January 2014. The report, based on eyewitness and other governmental
testimony, intelligence information, and thousands of classified and unclassified documents, related that key Pentagon officials had no idea there was a CIA annex that operated just 1.2 miles away from the Benghazi mission and was the second target on the night of the attacks.

With respect to the role of DoD and AFRICOM in emergency evacuations and rescue operations in Benghazi, the Committee received conflicting information on the extent of the awareness within DoD of the Benghazi Annex. According to U.S. AFRICOM, neither the command nor its Commander [Gen. Carter Ham] were aware of an annex in Benghazi, Libya.
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The Senate was “puzzled as to how the military leadership expected to effectively respond and rescue Americans in the event of an emergency when it did not even know of the existence of one of the U.S. facilities.”
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On the night of the attack, General Ham was placed in charge of the C-110, a forty-man special ops force maintained for rapid response to emergencies. The force exists for the very purpose of responding to events such as the Benghazi attacks. Command was transferred from the military’s European command to General Ham’s Africa Command in the middle of the attack. Ultimately, the C-110, which the military says was training in Croatia during the attack, was not deployed to respond in Benghazi. Instead the special ops were ordered to return to their forward operating base in Italy.
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We will discuss this puzzling turn of events in far greater detail in
chapter 3
.

Regarding the CIA annex that was attacked, the Senate report reveals the facility was set up so that the movements of U.S. personnel were hidden from locals. The Senate report states that intelligence and State Department personnel should “generally be co-located overseas except where the IC [Intelligence Community] determines that, for operational reasons, co-location is not helpful in meeting mission objectives or that it poses a security risk.” Keeping intelligence facilities separate from State Department compounds “can provide important operational advantages.” The report quotes the unnamed chief of the CIA annex as saying, “We had the luxury that the Mission didn’t have of keeping our compound low-profile and making our movements – we used very good… protocol movements, and our vehicular moves were very much low-profile.” The annex chief continued: “So we had a security advantage, I guess you could say, over our State colleagues.”
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The Senate report quoted a June 12, 2012, CIA cable from Benghazi, which said that as “a direct result of a concerted effort to build and maintain a low profile we believe that the locals for the most part do not know we are here and housed/officed in a separate stand alone facility from our USG [United States Government] counterparts.” The report states that, according to the State Department, the nearby “Mission facility did not store classified information, and therefore no Marine contingent was present.”
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As far as security was concerned, the U.S. facility in Benghazi was one of a kind, according to the State Department’s Libya desk officer, Brian Papanu. “Benghazi was definitely unique in almost every – I can’t think of a mission similar to this ever, and definitely in recent history,” he stated.
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Regarding the unusual nature of the U.S. facility in Benghazi, the House report stated: “Documents and testimony obtained by the Committee during the course of its investigation show that the
ad hoc
facility in Benghazi, rather than being an example of expeditionary diplomacy, was instead an expedient way to maintain a diplomatic presence in a dangerous place. The State Department was operating a temporary residential facility in a violent and unstable environment without adequate U.S. and host nation security support.”
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Lee Lohman, executive director of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, testified that he couldn’t remember U.S. diplomats ever having “gone into something in such an expeditionary way as this by ourselves without having military along with us.”
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Indeed, because the facility was so dangerous and did not meet the security standards set by the State Department, the Benghazi mission actually required a special waiver in order to be occupied by American personnel, including Stevens. The Senate report notes that “although certain waivers of the standards could have been approved at a lower level, other departures, such as the co-location requirement,
could only be approved by the Secretary of State.”
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Meaning Hillary Clinton herself provided regular waivers to ensure the continued legal operation of the Benghazi mission.

This information is staggering. We know from scores of reports and from details to be presented throughout this book that Benghazi staff repeatedly petitioned for more security. Yet Clinton provided waivers for the legal use of a facility that was woefully unprotected in one of the most dangerous hotspots in the world.

In a largely unreported item, a top State official revealed the State Department refused to install guard towers at the doomed U.S. facility in Benghazi, fearing the stations would draw too much attention to the compound. The admission by Patrick Kennedy, under secretary of state for management, raises immediate questions as to what was transpiring at the U.S. mission and why the State Department would fear drawing attention to the special facility.
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In an interview with CNN on November 18, 2013, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee, disclosed that his committee had learned a directive was issued August 11 – one month before the attack – telling Benghazi staff they were on their own. “And so we are looking into that directive to find out exactly who put that out,” he stated. Westmoreland said the Benghazi compound “itself is not set up for protection.” He stated that when his committee interviewed the people who
were on the ground, “they said they were really surprised [at] the lack of security at the mission facility… [P]eople at the facility had been wanting help, requesting help, requesting additional security… [T]hey just couldn’t believe that those guys were over there as unprepared and unequipped as they were.”
¹³

It tuns out the Benghazi facility may have violated the terms of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which governs the establishment of overseas missions. Like most nations, the United States is a signatory to the 1961 United Nations’ convention. Article 2 of the convention makes clear that the host government must be informed about the establishment of any permanent foreign mission on its soil: “The establishment of diplomatic relations between States, and of permanent diplomatic missions, takes place by mutual consent.”
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But according to the State Department’s ARB report, there was a decision “to treat Benghazi as a temporary, residential facility,” likely disqualifying the building from permanent mission status if the mission was indeed temporary. However, the same sentence in the report notes the host government was not notified about the Benghazi mission “even though it was also a full time office facility.”
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Article 12 of the Vienna Convention dictates, “The sending State may not, without the prior express consent of the receiving State, establish offices forming part of the mission in localities other than those in which the mission itself is established.”
¹⁶
If the Benghazi mission was a “full-time
office facility,” it may have violated Article 12 in that the mission most likely was an arm of the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, which served as the main U.S. mission to Libya, making the Benghazi facility an unauthorized mission.

If there were no guard towers, no military contingent, and the State Department all but refused to provide adequate security at the special mission, just who was protecting the compound?

According to the State Department, there were eight Americans present the night of September 11, 2012. Besides Stevens, there were two temporary-duty assistant regional security officers (ARSOs) who had accompanied the ambassador from Tripoli; information management officer (IMO) Sean Smith, who was said to have arrived in Benghazi one week earlier; and five diplomatic security agents, three of whom were assigned to Benghazi on short term.
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Due to the glaring lack of significant security at the mission and to the unarmed guards who served as the first layer of security, the State Department reached out to a UK-based security detail company that delivers security solutions for clients around the world. The mission’s entire security therefore depended on “armed but poorly skilled Libyan February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade militia members and unarmed, locally contracted Blue Mountain Libya guards,” the State Department ARB report reveals.
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Specifically, there were normally four armed February 17 Martyrs Brigade
members who resided inside the compound’s guest house building, acting as a de facto rapid response unit. In other words, these militia members worked within the gated complex. Blue Mountain, a private firm hired by the State Department, further provided five unarmed local Libyan guards “per eight-hour shift, 24/7, to open and close the gates, patrol the compound, and give warning in case of an attack,” states the Accountability Review Board. The actual night of the attacks, only three of the four February 17 Martyrs Brigade members were present, with one militia man absent for several days purportedly due to a family illness.
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