The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know (5 page)

In the previous chapter, I asked why the United States would employ armed members of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, a division of the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia terrorist organization, to provide “security” at the U.S. special mission? The exact nature of the Brigade’s involvement with the mission might have been unintentionally exposed when a Libyan weapons dealer formerly from the February 17 Martyrs Brigade told Reuters in an in-person interview he had helped ship weapons from Benghazi to the rebels fighting in Syria. No one seems to have connected the dots from what the weapons dealer said to the activities taking place inside the Benghazi compound and whether the Brigade serves as a cutout to ship weapons.

In the Reuters interview published June 18, 2013, Libyan warlord Abdul Basit Haroun declared he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria. Most of the weapons were sent to Turkey, he said, where they were in turn smuggled into neighboring Syria. Haroun divulged that he sent a massive weapons shipment from the port in Benghazi in August 2012, days before the attack on the U.S. compound. The weapons were smuggled into Syria aboard a Libyan ship that landed in Turkey, purportedly to deliver humanitarian aid, he related.
¹⁹

Ismail Salabi, a commander of the February 17 Brigade, told Reuters that Haroun was a member of the Brigade until he quit to form a brigade of his own. Haroun told Reuters his weapons smuggling operation was run with an associate,
who helped him coordinate about a dozen people in Libyan cities collecting weapons for Syria. Let’s pause here. This indicates Haroun, formerly of the February 17 Brigade, was possibly used as a proxy to ship weapons to Syria, and he may have also aided in the weapons collection effort.

Fox News may find one of its exclusive reports vindicated by Haroun’s interview, information that may tie in to a motivation for the Benghazi assaults. In October 2012, Fox News reported the Libyan-flagged vessel
Al Entisar
, which means “The Victory,” was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun, thirty-five miles from the Syrian border, just five days before Stevens was killed. The shipment, disguised as humanitarian aid, was described as the largest consignment of weapons headed for Syria’s rebels. Fox News reported the shipment “may have some link to the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.”
²⁰
That shipment seems to be the one described by Haroun in his Reuters article. Both Haroun and his associate spoke to the news agency about an August 2012 shipment with weapons hidden among about 460 metric tons of aid destined for Syrian refugees.
²¹

A recent UN report appears to confirm that weapons were hidden in the
Al Entisar
, Reuters noted. A UN panel found that the loading port for the shipment was Benghazi, that the exporter was “a relief organization based in Benghazi,” and that the consignee was the same Islamic foundation based in Turkey that Haroun told Reuters had helped with documentation.
²²

Besides weapons dealing and MANPAD collection, there have been some unsubstantiated reports claiming the CIA was running an interrogation center or secret prison at the Benghazi annex. A Fox News report quoted a well-placed Washington source confirming “there were Libyan militiamen being held at the CIA annex in Benghazi and that their presence was being looked at as a possible motive for the staged attack on the consulate and annex that night.”
²³

Fox News further cited multiple intelligence sources who served in Benghazi as saying “there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.”

The same day Fox News originally reported on the alleged CIA prison in Benghazi, October 26, 2012, Paula Broadwell, the alleged mistress of ex-CIA director David Petraeus, gave a speech in which she claimed the CIA may have operated a secret detention center in Benghazi. The forty-one-minute speech, a keynote address at a University of Denver alumni symposium, was removed from the university’s YouTube account after it was publicized in two links on the popular
Drudge Report
on November 11.
²⁴
Following media inquiries, the video was reposted by the university at a different link. University of Denver spokeswoman Kim Divigil told me that day the video “was down for several hours this morning but immediately restored.”

During the session, Broadwell stated, “Now, I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libya militia members prisoner. And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that’s still being vetted.”
²⁵
It wasn’t clear whether Broadwell was simply referring to the Fox News article about prisoners being held in Benghazi. A CIA spokesman flatly denied Broadwell’s claim of a prison at the Libyan annex. He said the CIA “has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued.” Suggestion that the agency is “still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless,” the spokesman added.
²⁶

Obviously Paula Broadwell is not exactly a credible source on Benghazi. However, her comments and the Fox News report simply add more to the mystery of the events surrounding the attack.

One need not be a nuanced observer of international affairs to understand that any weapons collection or distribution program centered inside the Benghazi mission could be a critical detail in determining the main motivation for the jihadist assault against the compound. As noted in the previous chapter, such activities may also go a long way toward explaining why the Benghazi mission was established so secretively and why there was not a large U.S. security presence protecting the compound since such a visible
security contingent would draw attention to the existence of the facility.

Yet Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigating the attacks, claimed in a radio interview that any involvement by the attacked U.S. Benghazi facility in arms trafficking “would have absolutely nothing to do with” the lack of adequate security at the compound where Stevens was murdered. Issa made the puzzling statement to radio host Hugh Hewitt after repeatedly deflecting questions about the alleged arms smuggling to al-Qaeda–linked Mid-East rebels based at the Benghazi compound.
²⁷

Issa claimed in the August 2013 radio interview that whether there was arms trafficking or not, it “would have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you provide the security necessary for a long-time, loyal ambassador who was a specialist in the Middle East. I visited him in multiple Middle Eastern countries over his tenure. He was asking for more security. Asked about the reports of arms trafficking at the Benghazi compound, Issa told Hewitt, “It’s not one of the items that we know, although I’ve seen it on the internet, too.” Issa stressed his own investigation will only focus on why Stevens was denied sufficient security and why terrorists allegedly responsible for the attacks have still not been apprehended. (We’ll discuss how Obama may have thwarted the capture of some of the most wanted Benghazi terrorists in
chapter 6
.)

When Hewitt asked Issa again about the reports of arms trafficking to the rebels, the congressman deflected the
investigative task: “There’s a specific [House Intelligence] committee chairman, Mike Rogers [R-MI], who deals with sources and methods and clandestine activities,” Issa stated. “Our investigation really is about two questions. When you deny an ambassador security he needs, are you denying it because of gross incompetence, in which case nobody’s been fired? You’ve got to ask why people aren’t being held accountable. Or was this a political aim to make it look like the war on terror was over, that it had been won once Osama bin Laden had been killed?” Those are quite narrow investigative topics.

O
ne of the persistent questions plaguing the Obama administration and military command regarding the Benghazi episode is why no reinforcements were sent the night of the attacks. The government’s standard response is patently absurd. They say they thought the attack was over after the initial assault, so therefore there was just not enough time to send a rescue mission or air support. But how could they have known what the gunmen had planned or that the first wave was the only attack to be carried out? Further, after the initial assault Ambassador Chris Stevens went missing. The acting assumption of the decision makers that night was that Stevens had been kidnapped, as documented in
chapter 4
. So why were Special Forces not immediately deployed for a potential hostage situation?

The controversy surrounding the decision not to send reinforcements should have been injected with steroids after
Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a bombshell admission during open congressional testimony. Dempsey conceded 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 to Libya

His shocking concession on available assets was broadcast live on C-SPAN, emitted in a room full of reporters. Yet his statements, which open a whole new line of questioning on Benghazi, have until this publication gone almost universally unreported by the news media, with the exception of my own coverage on my WABC radio show and in my WND.com and KleinOnline reportage. Like so many other aspects of the Benghazi story, Dempsey’s remarks require the trained ear of a reporter familiar with the minutiae of the attack to fully comprehend the ramifications of what he said.

Dempsey made the statements in question during testimony before the Senate Budget Committee on June 12, 2013. The vast majority of news coverage of his testimony that day focused on his statement that U.S. Special Forces “weren’t told to stand down” in response to the attack on the Benghazi mission. “A ‘stand down’ means don’t do anything,” he said. “They were told that the mission they were asked to perform was not in Benghazi, but was at Tripoli airport.”
¹

While those quotes led most headlines on the Dempsey remarks, the words were not the most newsworthy comments made by Dempsey at the hearing. His admission of highly trained Special Forces near Benghazi is far more important. In comments that may warrant further investigation,
Dempsey also stated that on the night of the attack, command of the Special Forces – known as C-110, or the EUCOM CIF – was transferred from the military’s European command to AFRICOM, or the United States Africa Command. Dempsey did not state any reason for the strange transfer of command, nor could he provide a timeline for the transfer the night of the attack.

His remarks for the first time confirm an exclusive Fox News interview aired April 30 in which a special government operator, speaking on condition of anonymity, contradicted claims by the Obama administration and the State Department’s ARB report that there wasn’t enough time for military forces to deploy the night of the attack.

“I know for a fact that C-110, the EUCOM CIF, was doing a training exercise in… not in the region of North Africa, but in Europe,” the special operator told Fox News’ Adam Housley. “And they had the ability to act and to respond.”
²
The operator told Fox News the C-110 forces were training in Croatia. The distance between Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, and Benghazi is about 925 miles. Fox News reported the forces were stationed just three and a half hours away.

“We had the ability to load out, get on birds and fly there, at a minimum stage,” the operator told Fox News. “C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in a matter of about four hours… four to six hours.”

The C-110 is a forty-man special ops force maintained for rapid response to emergencies – in other words, they are
trained for deployment for events like the Benghazi attack.

At the Senate hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asked Dempsey about Housley’s report. “The EUCOM CIF was not in Europe but actually deployed on a training exercise in Croatia. Is that correct?”

Dempsey confirmed, “It was on a training mission in Bosnia, right.”

But Senator Johnson had asked if the forces were training in Croatia,
not
in Bosnia, and in later remarks, Dempsey said the forces were in Croatia. He neither explained the discrepancy nor even took note of it.
³

Johnson then asked Dempsey if he agreed with Fox News that the C-110 could deploy in four to six hours.

“No, I would not agree to that timeline,” he responded. “The travel time alone would have been more than that. And that’s if they were sitting on the tarmac.”

Dempsey’s remarks are inaccurate. Even a large passenger jet can travel from the farthest point of Croatia to Benghazi in about two and a half hours or less. (Remember that in
chapter 2
we speculated about what the C-110 may have been doing in Croatia, where there was reportedly a major procurement of weapons for transport to the Syrian rebels).

Dempsey further stated the command of the C-110, or the EUCOM CIF, was transferred the night of the attack, but he didn’t explain why.

“There was a point at which the CIF was transitioned over to AFRICOM” from European command, he said. He could not give a timeline of when the command was
transferred, telling Johnson he would take the question for the record.

Asked whether the C-110 left Croatia that night, Dempsey stated, “They were told to begin preparations to leave Croatia and to return to their normal operating base” in Germany.

Why was a special force that exists for the very purpose of an emergency like Benghazi told in the middle of a massive attack on our U.S. mission to return to their normal operating base instead of immediately deploying to Libya? Dempsey’s statements confirmed the forces were not asked to deploy to Libya.