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May 3, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:19
2684 The Truth About Benghazi
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Hi everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux, and I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
This, as far as I believe can be ascertained through the soupy fog of political self-serving rhetoric and deception, is the truth about Benghazi.
Let's look at some of the events that were occurring in Libya during a time of civil war, of course, leading up to the tragedies of September the 11th, 2012, In December 2011, there was a terror plot that was thwarted.
Benghazi emergency plan warns of many Islamic terrorists still operating in the area.
March 2012, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli lead security officer RSO Eric Nordstrom requests additional security but later testifies that he received no response.
April 10, 2012, an explosive device is thrown at a convoy carrying UN envoy Ian Martin.
May 22, 2012, a rocket-propelled grenade hits the offices of the International Red Cross.
June 6, an improvised explosive device explodes outside the Benghazi consulate compound.
June 11, an RPG hits a convoy carrying the British ambassador.
The UK closes its consulate.
I suppose it has had some experience with restless natives.
Colonel Wood, military site security team commander, is in Benghazi and helps with emergency response.
July 2012, RSO Nordstrom again requests additional security.
July 9th, American Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens sends a cable requesting continued help from military SST and State Department mobile security deployment teams through mid-September 2012, saying that benchmarks for a drawdown have not been met.
The teams are not extended.
Early August, the State Department orders the last of three six-man State Department security teams and a 16-man military SST team removed from Libya.
August 2nd, 2012, Ambassador Stevens sends a cable to D.C. requesting protective detail bodyguard positions, saying the added guards, quote, will fill the vacuum of security personnel currently at post who will be leaving within the next month and will not be replaced.
He called the security condition in Libya unpredictable, volatile, and violent.
August 8th, 2012, just over a month before the attack, a cable from Ambassador Stevens to DC says, quote, a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape and calls them targeted and discriminant attacks.
That means focused and well-prepared, not the spontaneous demonstrations later claimed by the administration.
August 27, 2012, the State Department issues a travel warning for Libya, citing the threat of of assassination and car bombings in Benghazi and Tripoli.
This, my friends, is not a bolt out of the blue, but a series of increasingly escalating sets of violent attacks that point the way to the future.
What happened on September 11th, 2012 in Benghazi?
We'll get to the political situation in a moment.
Let's just go through the timeline of that night.
These times are all in Benghazi time.
Around 9 p.m., in the walled Benghazi compound, U.S. Ambassador Stevens says goodnight to the Turkish ambassador and retires to Building C, a large residence with numerous bedrooms and a safe haven, a safe room.
There are three other structures in the compound.
Building B, a residence with bedrooms, a cantina, and a dining room.
Located across from Building B is a tactical operations center, TOC, containing one-bedroom offices and security cameras.
Located by the front gate are barracks staffed by Libyan security guards.
There was a Welshman that had been hired to do security in the compound, but they were not allowed to be armed.
The only people armed were the Libyan security guards, which according to many reports were heavily infiltrated by Al-Qaeda.
9.40 p.m.
Benghazi time.
Gunfire and an explosion are heard.
A TOC agent sees on a security camera dozens of armed people flowing through a pedestrian gate at the compound's main entrance.
Inside job?
There seems to be significant evidence that it was.
It is not clear how the gate was opened.
The agent hits the alarm and alerts the CIA security team in the nearby annex and the Libyan 17th of February Brigade, one of several powerful militias serving as a de facto security presence in Benghazi.
The embassy in Tripoli and the State Department command center were also alerted.
State Department Diplomatic Security follows events in real time on a listen-only, audio-only feed, according to the testimony of Charlene Lamb, the Deputy Assistant Director for International Programs given before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on October 10.
Around 10 p.m.
Benghazi time at the compound, several DS agents leave to get tactical gear from Building B. One stays in Building C with Ambassador Stevens and Information Officer Sean Smith.
The mob sets fire to the 17th of February Brigade barracks that are on site.
DS agent Scott Strickland moves Stevens and Smith to the closest area, Safe Haven, which is in Building C. The other agents, currently in Building B and the TOC, come under attack.
The attackers get into Building C, light furniture on fire, and then the building's exterior.
Stevens, Smith, and Agent Strickland move to the bathroom and lay on the floor, but decide to leave the safe haven after being overcome by smoke.
Strickland goes out an emergency escape window that you can only open from the inside.
Stevens and Smith do not follow.
Strickland returns several times but can't find them in the smoke.
He goes up to the roof and radios the other agents.
Three agents return to Building C via armored vehicle.
They search and find Smith's body, but not Stevens, not the ambassador's.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is told of the incident shortly after it began at 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
Clinton spoke to the Libyan President Mohamed Magaryev to, quote, enlist his full support.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military began moving an unarmed drone over Benghazi to provide real-time intelligence to the CIA team on the ground.
It would take about an hour to arrive.
Interestingly enough, there was a military team also about an hour away from the embattled compound containing American personnel, but was not deployed to protect them.
10.05 p.m.
Benghazi time, an alert from the State Department Operations Center is issued to a number of government and intelligence agencies, including the White House Situation Room, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI. U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi under attack.
Quote, Approximately 20 armed people fired shots.
Explosions have been heard as well.
Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four chief of mission slash embassy personnel are in the compound safe haven.
10.25 p.m.
A six-member CIA team arrives through the annex with 40 to 60 members of the 17th of February Brigade.
The team removes Smith's body.
About 10.30 p.m., Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his top military advisors are told of the incident.
10.54 p.m., an alert from the State Department Operations Center, quote, the firing in Benghazi has stopped.
A response team is on-site attempting to locate COM personnel.
11 p.m., just ahead of the weekly meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon tells President Obama of the attack and the fire at the main villa.
The President and those officials discuss possible responses to the situation.
At the compound, the 17th of February Brigade says they can't hold the perimeter and...
They are, of course, the only armed guards present and, according to many reports, have been heavily infiltrated by al-Qaeda.
DS agents make a final search for Stevens and leave with the CIA team in an armored vehicle heading for the annex, taking gunfire along the way.
When CBS News Elizabeth Palmer visited the compound in one of several trips to Libya, she found little evidence of an extensive firefight at the compound's walls and main gate.
Likely indicating that the fiercest fighting occurred away from the compound, also that the entrance was not forced.
Midnight, Benghazi time.
Agents arrive at the annex, which receives sporadic small-arms fire and RPG rounds over a roughly 90-minute period.
The security team returns fire and the attackers arrive.
So the narrative that is put forward later, that this was a spontaneous demonstration about an internet video, seems not exactly to square with the basic fact that very few people go to demonstrations with mortars and RPGs.
Over the next two hours, Panetta holds a series of meetings and issues several orders.
Two fleet anti-terrorism security team platoons stationed in Rota, Spain, prepare to deploy.
One to Benghazi and the other to the embassy in Tripoli.
A special operations team in Europe is ordered to move to Sigonella, Sicily, less than one hour's flight away from Benghazi.
An additional special operations team based in the U.S. is ordered to deploy to Sigonella.
When later questioned about this, President Obama says he told the military to do whatever they could to come to the rescue of the people in Benghazi, in the compound.
Was this order not followed or was it not given?
Either is equally disturbing.
12.07 a.m.
Benghazi time, this is 6 p.m.
Eastern, an alert from the State Department Operations Center states that the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli reports the Islamic military group Ansar al-Sharia claims responsibility for Benghazi attack on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.
Around 12.30 a.m., 6.30 p.m.
Eastern, six-man security team, including two Defense Department personnel, leave Embassy Tripoli for Benghazi.
1.30 a.m., 7.30 p.m.
Eastern, the U.S. security team from Embassy Tripoli lands in Benghazi and learns that the ambassador is missing.
They try to arrange for transportation into town with the goal of locating Stevens.
4.07 a.m., Benghazi, 10 p.m.
Eastern, Secretary Clinton issues a statement acknowledging the death of one State Department officer.
5 a.m., Benghazi, 11 p.m.
Eastern, a second U.S. Predator drone arrives to relieve the first.
5.15 a.m.
The U.S. Regional Security Office in Tripoli gets a phone call from an Arabic-speaking source who says a Westerner has been found in Benghazi and is perhaps at a hospital.
It's believed to be Ambassador Stevens.
Transfer to airport is arranged.
At about the same time, the additional security team finds transportation from the airport under the escort of the Libyan Shield, another local militia, but decides to head to the annex after learning that Stevens was almost certainly dead.
Just after their arrival, the annex takes mortar fire, sustaining three direct hits.
The precision of the attacks indicates a level of sophistication and coordination.
Former U.S. Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty are killed in the mortar assault, which lasts just under 11 minutes.
Before dissipating, a DS agent and annex security member are severely wounded.
After the mortar attack, about 30 Americans evacuate the annex and head to the airport with the assistance of the Libyan security convoy.
Ambassador Stevens is confirmed dead late that morning as Americans see his body at the airport.
That is tonight.
Let us look at the background.
When President Obama assumed office, relationships between the U.S. and Libya were getting stronger.
Diplomatic relations were restored in 2006 by President Bush.
President Obama was photographed shaking hands with Muammar Gaddafi at a G8 summit in 2009, and Secretary of State Clinton stated in a 2009 speech that Libya was a country that had altered its behavior in response to U.S. interaction instead of isolation.
As I'm sure you remember, in January 2011, after a fruit seller in Tunisia set fire to himself, protests began in Libya after spreading from Egypt and Tunisia.
These protests escalated in size and spread to cities around the nation.
Calls began for Muammar Gaddafi to step down and allow a democratic rule to be established.
He'd been in power for about 40 years.
When Colonel Gaddafi refused, an opposition force began to claim cities in the northeast of the country.
The temptation is to think of them as freedom fighters.
Of course, a lot of them were looking to impose religious Sharia law.
The opposition spread westward by February 23rd.
The opposition claimed the port city of Misurata.
When protests began in the capital of Tripoli, the military fired upon the crowd.
Pro-government forces began to organize and reclaim some cities around the capital.
A failed attempt was made to reclaim Zawiyah.
On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council issued Resolution 1973.
The resolution created a no-fly zone in Libya to be enforced by NATO. It also gave permission for members to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in Libya.
It specifically stated that there was to be no foreign occupation force of any form in any part of Libyan territory.
UN Resolution 1970, Paragraph 9, which was issued in February of 2011, had already made it illegal to send arms into the nation of Libya or to arm the Libyan government or the people, either the people or the rebels.
It was illegal to arm them.
So, we've got a no-fly zone.
Protect the Libyan people.
You cannot put troops on the ground and you cannot sell arms to the government or the rebels.
Before the UN resolution on March 14th, Secretary of State Clinton met with Libyan opposition leaders in Paris to discuss possible UN or USAID. On the 29th, Obama was interviewed by CBS and stated that while the US had not decided to arm the rebels, it was not being ruled out.
That same day, Clinton was meeting with Libyan rebel leaders and the leaders of numerous other nations.
Clinton also asserted that it was the view of the US That UN Resolution 1973 overrode or amended 1970 to allow for arming the rebels.
This was not confirmed, to my knowledge at least, by the UN. March 30, 2011, Reuters reported that President Obama had signed an intelligence finding allowing for the CIA and other entities to operate in Libya with the objective of aiding the rebels and removing Gaddafi from power.
So in 2011, a NATO campaign, military campaign started against Gaddafi.
Thousands of bombs and missiles launched from American and European submarines, warships and fighter planes destroyed Libyan military bases, airports, roads, ports, oil depots, artillery emplacements, tanks, armored carriers, planes and troop concentrations.
Does it strain your credibility just a little bit to know how many warships were off the coast of Libya?
And how impossible it was claimed to be that any aid could have come to the embassy compound in Benghazi.
Dozens of CIA and SAS Special Forces trained, advised, and mapped targets for the so-called Libyan rebels engaged in a civil war against the Gaddafi government, its armed forces, popular militias, and civilian supporters.
The rebel forces, despite receiving military support and aid from 20 nations, ended up retreating.
In the Western media, they said that nobody really supports Gaddafi, they hate his guts, but they're all being hounded through the streets and hunted by the regime.
However, the Gaddafi regime had used a fair amount of the country's oil wealth to build public schools, hospitals, and clinics.
Libyans had the highest per capita income in Africa at almost $15,000 per year, which, compared to the crap hole that is most of the rest of the African economies, well, obviously is good.
So there was some trepidation, I guess you could say, among the Libyan people about all of the bombs coming in with, I guess, little peace doves nailed to the front.
In Libya, tens of thousands of low-income Libyan students had received scholarships to study at home and overseas.
The urban infrastructure, relative to the rest of Africa in particular, had been modernized.
Agriculture was subsidized and small-scale producers and manufacturers received government credit.
Now, of course, Gaddafi had enriched his own clan and family, as is typically the case in politics, but he had overseen some of these programs.
The Libyan rebels and their imperial mentors, which would be the Europeans and the Americans, had targeted the entire civilian economy, bombed Libyan cities, cut trade and commercial networks, blocked the delivery of subsidized food and welfare to the poor, caused the suspension of schools and forced hundreds of thousands of foreign professionals, teachers, doctors, and skilled contract workers to flee.
Although The UN resolution expressly states that the only action to be taken was to defend civilians and the previous UN resolution prevents any nation from moving arms into Libya.
The Obama administration announced that it would be providing non-lethal aid to the rebels and that it felt the wording in the resolution allowing for the defense of civilians overrode the previous resolution and allowed those rebels to be armed by outside forces if it was in the defense of civilians.
It was also determined around this time that President Obama had signed an intelligence finding to allow for CIA action in Libya.
Starting with 25 million and escalating to about 170 million eventually given.
I guess what percentage of that would have made for an effective defense force for the embassy compound?
Well, I think a little bit less.
According to the Citizens Committee on Benghazi, which released a report on April 22, 2014, the Benghazi attack could have been prevented if the U.S. hadn't, quote, switched sides in the war on terror and allowed $500 million worth of weapons to reach al-Qaeda militants.
Strong accusations.
This is a group, the Citizens Committee on Benghazi's abrut, comprised mainly of retired military officials and former intelligence officers aimed at discovering the truth of what happened in The night of the attacks, because the prostitutes in the mainstream media are not so much pursuing the story.
Citizens Committee on Benghazi claims the U.S. government allowed arms to flow to al-Qaeda-linked militants who opposed Muammar Gaddafi.
Their rise to power, the group says, led to the Benghazi attack in 2012.
The group claims that the strongman Gaddafi offered to abdicate his presidency and leave peacefully, but the U.S. refused to broker his exit.
The Commission, part of the Central Right Accuracy and Media Group, concluded that the Benghazi attack was a failed kidnapping plot.
U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was to be captured and traded for a blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who hatched the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot.
Rumors surfaced that members of the rebel forces in Libya were actually linked to al-Qaeda, according to retired Rear Admiral Chuck Kubik.
Kubik is a member of the Citizens Commission on Benghazi.
Kubik says, quote, Even former NATO top commander Admiral James Stafford went before the Congress and alluded to an intelligence summary that he had received that had indications of rebels who were actually terrorists.
Straff Ryders told the Senate on March 29, 2011, quote, We are examining very closely the content, composition, the personalities, who are the leaders of these opposition forces.
We have seen flickers in the intelligence of potential Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah.
We've seen different things.
Kubik said that Estreff Rydas gave his testimony to the Obama administration in, quote, an unbelievable series of days.
The president signs a directive that says we should both support and arm the Libyan rebels.
Now, if I knew that these rebels were terrorists and had the links, he certainly had to know that.
So, this is why the accusation is out there that the Obama administration was knowingly arming al-Qaeda terrorists in Libya.
The report stated that top officials, including those from the White House and Congress, knowingly and deliberately allowed the weapons which were originally intended for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to be delivered to al-Qaeda militants in Libya in an attempt to overthrow Gaddafi.
I mean, I know the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Obama, seems to have refused to let the Pentagon negotiate with Gaddafi for a peaceful and orderly transfer of power, thus opting for war when peace was a possibility.
Had the Obama administration done so and blocked the weapons from entering al-Qaeda's hands, the attack on Benghazi may never have happened and countless lives would have been saved.
Clara Lopez is a member of the Commission and a former CIA officer.
She says, quote, the United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures.
She blamed the Obama administration for tacitly approving the diversion of half a billion dollars of Qatari arms shipments to al-Qaeda-linked militants.
The UAE and Qatar, or Qatar, Was the avenue through which these weapons flowed into Libya, and since the US and the Europeans, through the UN resolution, had a no-fly zone and controlled the ports, those armed shipments would almost never have, it would have been impossible for them to go through without the knowledge of the NATO forces.
Quote, Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces, who are blockading the approaches from air and sea.
They were permitted to come in, they knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed.
The intelligence community was part of that.
The Department of State was part of that.
And certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress, if they were briefed on this, also knew about this.
The weapons were intended for Gaddafi, but allowed by the U.S. to flow to his Islamist opposition.
The group wrote in an interim report released recently, The White House and senior congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler, Gaddafi, The White House and senior congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order Thank you.
To reiterate, Kubik also recalled how prior to the NATO airstrikes in the country, Gaddafi expressed his willingness to abdicate shortly after the beginning of the 2011 Libyan revolt, but the U.S. ignored his calls for a truce, which led to an extensive loss of life, chaos, and detrimental outcomes for U.S. national security objectives across the region.
Gaddafi wanted only two conditions to step down, permission to keep fighting al-Qaeda, In the Islamic Maghreb and the lifting of sanctions against him, his family, and those loyal to him.
Only days later, NATO would attack with the U.S. in a primary role.
Kubik said that this was the beginning of the chaos that would eventually lead to the deaths of Stevens, State Department Information Officer Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
A U.S. businesswoman who had access to senior Libyan officials and provided information as a paid informant to the CIA and the FBI said she was asked to provide intelligence on various rebel leaders and their actions while she was conducting business in Libya.
Speaking to The Blaze's TVs for the record...
And only going by the pseudonym Annie to protect her identity, she said the Obama administration was aware that 500 million of the billion dollars in weapons delivered in shipments from weapons dealers in the Persian Gulf were being taken by members of Al-Qaeda.
As usual, by the by, the sources are all in the low bar, the description bar.
Current and former U.S. officials intimately familiar with the operations in Libya at the time confirmed Annie's statement to The Blaze.
And he said, one of the benefactors was Al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Abu Qatala, who is now wanted by the US government.
And he said, quote, I was able to uncover in less than 24 hours of the event that it was a terrorist attack in Benghazi.
I reported not only was it a terrorist attack, it was executed by Ansar al-Sharia and that some of the individuals involved in executing the attack had come from the rebel opposition and that this was a significant terrorist event.
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats.
The United States, which had only small numbers of CIA officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments.
Within weeks of endorsing Qatar's plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups.
They were more anti-democratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.
American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising asking for permission to ship American built weapons that the US had supplied for the Emirates use.
The administration rejected that request but instead urged the Emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the United States.
The very idea that you can ship weapons to Libya or you can allow the shipment of weapons Sold to Islamic countries, to Libya, and somehow know where they're going to end up and control where they're going to end up is complete delusion.
I mean, just think of the Fast and the Furious where weapons were sold to Mexican drug dealers in an attempt to trace where they went and then used to kill Americans.
When you arm the world, you end up with a whole lot of guns pointing your way.
You cannot control what happens to the weapons once you build and sell them overseas.
The American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the Emirates could not be completely hidden.
NATO, air and sea forces around Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the Emirates, American officials said.
Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting.
Officials said a debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated at least one meeting of the so-called deputies committee, the interagency panel consisting of the second highest ranking officials and major agencies involved in national security.
There was a lot of concern that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups, one official recalled.
Well, it's good that they had concern.
Well, that's always very helpful.
So as mentioned before, the Libyans received $25 million from the U.S. White House.
Non-lethal support, which is again, it's like having a non-peeing side to the swimming pool.
Non-lethal support frees up money which can be used for weapons.
All aid in a military region is fundamentally military aid.
Because whatever money you give them, if they use it for non-lethal purposes, that frees up more money that they can use for lethal purposes.
Annie, the pseudonym of the businesswoman, noted that the Blue Mountain Security Group, the security company hired by the State Department to protect Stevens, had hired rebels directly connected with Al-Qaeda from the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, which you may remember from the beginning as being heavily involved in the fighting, perhaps even initiating it.
Which begs the question, when you spend far more on the military than the rest of the world combined, why do you need to hire outside groups to protect people in a war zone?
And he says, why would the United States government allow any rebels to have knowledge and position...
On the U.S. facility of these types of sensitive security issues when some of the rebels are tied to a terrorist organization and saw al-Sharia who ultimately executed the attack.
Then she added an explosive charge.
I believe that explains why the rebels who executed the attack the terrorists were so able to know exactly where Chris Stevens was.
It was an inside job.
In other words, the people hired by the United States to protect the ambassador and the three other Americans The U.S. claims that it lacked the resources to mount a counterattack in time to save lives.
This is false.
A source says, I'm going to tell you that's not true.
We had a 130-man unit of forces at Sigonella AFB in Italy.
They were ready to go.
The flight time from Sigonella to Benghazi is roughly an hour.
And even if it was true that America had no capacity to respond to Benghazi, why did the American military have no capacity to respond to Benghazi?
There's a civil war going on.
America is allowing arms shipments into a sensitive area.
There are American personnel on the ground.
There are ships all over the oceans darting around there.
How could they possibly not have any forces in the vicinity to help?
Saying that there weren't any is no excuse.
The White House and senior congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations.
In order to topple a ruler who'd been working closely with the West actively to suppress al-Qaeda.
Retired Rear Admiral Chuck Kubik said that while Gaddafi wasn't a good guy, certainly true, he was being kept under control and marginalized.
So, when Gaddafi offered to abdicate, to resign, the Obama administration Announced that it wasn't going to pursue Gaddafi.
So he thought that, he took that as a sign that he was going to be able to negotiate.
To show that he was serious about his willingness to abdicate and to negotiate an exit, Gaddafi pulled his military back from the rebel-held cities, including Benghazi, which is why it was in a state of chaos the night of September 12, 2012.
At the start of the Libyan civil war, of course, which began as part of the Arab Spring movement, the US and Europe had difficulty telling friend from foe, as is so often the case when you go beyond your own house.
Al-Qaeda sympathizers and extremists moved among the rebel fighters and weapons shipments coming in from the Persian Gulf into Libya, landed in the hands of terrorists and other non-state actors, according to the UN report and several US officials.
A 2014 UN report revealed that, quote, most arsenals continue to be controlled by non-state armed groups and governing institutions have very limited capacity to control Libya's borders, ports and airports, which contribute to the overall insecurity in the surrounding region and within Libya.
Of course, while the U.S. was controlling traffic through Libya's ports, the U.S. allowed a half a billion dollars' worth of weaponry to be diverted to the Islamist opposition of Gaddafi's government.
So, what was the narrative in September? - Sure.
Remember, we were in the closing seven weeks or so of a U.S. presidential election where, of course, the narrative was that America had won fundamentally the war on terror, that Al-Qaeda was down for the count, was on the ropes, was on its way out, was heading towards the ash bin of history.
You pick your metaphor— And after the death of Bin Laden, everything was hunky-dory.
Now, the question is, how was it characterized?
So, was the attack on Benghazi an act of terror, or was it because Arabs were upset about an internet video?
Well, this is really core to the narrative.
The president has made the argument that he said it was an act of terrorism, most forcefully during the presidential race.
Against Mitt Romney, he was mainly referring to remarks in the Rose Garden September 12th where he referred to acts of terror as he condemned the attack.
But for days afterwards, he and other top officials would not use that term.
Later that day, on September 12th, Obama told CBS News, when asked whether he thought the strike was a terrorist attack, well, it's too early to tell exactly how this came about.
Obama would only call it an attack on Americans.
White House Press Secretary Jim Carney, aka Wormtongue, also denied reports on September 14th that it was a pre-planned attack.
After UN Ambassador Susan Rice made her controversial September 16th comments calling the attack the result of a protest, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was again asked if the attack was terrorism.
I don't think we know enough, she said.
Administration officials began to start publicly changing the narrative the week of September 17th.
We're going to run through these quickly.
One day after the Benghazi attack that occurred...
Obama spoke at a campaign event in Vegas on September 12th.
Quote, Day after 9-11 we are reminded that a new tower rises above New York, the New York skyline, but al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and bin Laden is dead.
On September 13th, Obama said, four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq, and we did.
I said we'd wind down the war in Afghanistan, and we are.
And while a new tower rises above the New York skyline, al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.
The next day, he says, the first 9-11, and he says, al-Qaeda has been decimated.
We got choices about war and peace, he says.
I ended the war in Iraq.
As I promised, we are transitioning out of Afghanistan.
We've gone after the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9-11 and decimated Al-Qaeda.
We've decimated al-Qaeda's top leadership in the border regions around Pakistan, but in Yemen, in Libya, in other of these places, increasingly in places like Syria, what you see is these elements that don't have the same capacity that a bin Laden or core al-Qaeda had, but can still cause a lot of damage.
We've got to make sure that we remain vigilant and focus on preventing them from doing us any harm.
Al-Qaeda, he says in the 21st, is on the path to defeat al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda has been weakened, he says, September 25th, and Osama bin Laden is no more.
By the by, January 2014, Al-Qaeda militants seized Fallujah, a key city in western Iraq.
So maybe not quite so down for the count.
So this is the narrative.
We've won the war on terror.
This was going on after many years of war weariness among the American population.
We've won the war on terror.
We're doing fine.
They're on the last ropes.
And this is probably one reason why additional security was not offered to Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi.
Why would you need additional security?
Al Qaeda is no more.
These are our friends that we're arming.
Why would you need security?
There's no harm that could come to you.
And if it turns out Al Qaeda was very strong, Al Qaeda was able to mount an attack on the most heart-wounded day in recent American history, September the 11th, then the idea that Obama had won the war on terror would have fallen by the wayside and would likely have cost him the election.
What was our good friend President Obama doing during all of this time leading up?
Well, he was campaigning and he was raising money and he was giving pretty speeches.
He failed to attend over half of his daily intelligence briefings as the PDB presidential daily brief.
September the 8th, 2012.
A Libyan defense militia warns State Department officials of security threats and announces their plans to no longer support the U.S. movements in the city, including the ambassador's visit.
So the very Libyans cannot protect the ambassador, they say.
Chris Stevens' final journal entry reads, never-ending security threats.
And of course, that night, 9.40 p.m., U.S. consulate is attacked.
Obama does not attend his daily intel briefings on September the 6th, the 7th, the 8th, the 9th, the 10th, or the 11th.
During a time of increasing, escalating attacks upon Westerners in Libya, at a time when Al-Qaeda is being armed with the express knowledge and permission of the Obama government, might not be a bad time to attend your intel briefings.
He spends time on the campaign trail.
He attends a daily briefing on September the 12th, then heads off to Las Vegas for a campaign event because, well, Vegas is fun, right?
Just a mention.
I'm going to throw this in.
Taliban are like super soldiers.
The estimated cost to kill each Taliban is about $100 million.
Some people conservatively estimate it at about $50 million.
Let's put this another way.
If we just use $50 million as the price to kill each Taliban, it costs the American taxpayer $1 billion to kill 20 Taliban.
As the U.S. military estimates, there is about 35,000 hardcore Taliban, and assuming that no reinforcements and replacements will arrive from Pakistan and Iran, just killing the existing Taliban costs $1.75 trillion.
Because as warfare has progressed, and this is something that the CIA taught Bin Laden and the Mujahideen, back in the 80s, the way you take down An expansive empire is you draw it into unwinnable conflicts because defense is way cheaper than attack.
You can take down a multi-million dollar plane with a $20,000 or $50,000 stinger missile.
So the way that you bring down an empire, which you can't fight militarily directly, is you draw them into conflicts, you blend into the local population, and then you just wear them down.
It's a war of attrition.
It's what worked and how bin Laden learned to take down Russia and how, of course, he learned to take down the United States.
So, This is fundamental to what is going on in America these days.
There is a huge challenge.
So much blood and treasure has been spent fighting the war on terror that the idea that it's been lost is unbearable to people.
It's far worse in many ways than Vietnam, though of course the headcount, at least on the American side, is much lower.
It is incredibly tragic for Americans to think that they've blown up their entire economy, printed More money than can be possibly imagined to wage war without having to raise taxes, thus creating inflation, massive debts, destroying the housing bubble, destroying the economy as a whole.
The idea that all of this has been done to not win the war on terror is so agonizing that any politician who suggested it would not only not be elected, but would probably be run out of town at the end of a pitchfork.
So, I'm going to tell you that it has been lost.
America has spent much more on the war on terror than it did On World War II, which is why the Taliban are like super invulnerable Nazi robot Godzillas, it's been lost.
So let's look at drones, for example.
Drones kill innocent people, and they're a key part of the war on terror.
There's a double tap, right?
So the drone returns to kill civilians and paramedics who are tending to the injured.
There's a 50-to-1 ratio.
Somewhere around 50 civilians are killed for every terrorist, assuming that any terrorists are being killed at all, which nobody knows for sure.
There's a large number of children who are part of that 50.
And the most harmful aspect is that drone strikes create terrorists.
According to the Washington Post, drone strikes in Yemen have led to a surge in Al-Qaeda recruitment, more than doubling their number.
There's a matter of signature strikes where people's lifestyle patterns are studied in some office thousands of miles away and statistical analysis decides whether they're probably terrorists and therefore worthy of death.
Where you go to work, who you hang out with, kind of things that you do, how you spend your money, people on the other side of the planet are guessing whether you are a bad guy and bringing down the sword of God onto the head of you and your family and your neighborhood and this is something that they live in constant fear of.
Can you imagine?
Like some vengeful Old Testament deity who can bring down the meteors of the Perseids onto your very head at any time for reasons you know not of.
This, of course, makes people terrified of being falsely identified and drone struck.
And then, who wants to go and help these people?
You can't even go back and help your family who may be lying in rubble because of the fear of the double tap, the second tap.
The drone strike that comes after the drone strike...
I mean, if some Chinese drone came to your hometown and went all red dawn on your friends and family, would you turn pro-Chinese or would you do anything in your power to hit back these monsters?
Well, America, you are those monsters.
Now.
So, why is this all in the news right now?
Well, Judicial Watch, an activist group, has obtained and released over a thousand documents pertaining to Benghazi as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
A just-released email from a top White House communications advisor clearly shows the political strategy behind then-U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice's appearance on Sunday news programs, blaming the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the murder of the ambassador and three other U.S. citizens on a fictional, violent protest of an internet video instead of a well-coordinated attack by al-Qaeda.
The email, dated September the 14th, three days after the attack, was sent by then White House Deputy Strategic Communications Advisor, a very landscape business card, Ben Rhodes, two top spokespeople in the White House and State Department.
The title of the email says it all, Prep Call with Susan.
Among the key objectives, to convey to Susan Rice hours before her media appearances.
One, to convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad.
Of course, this is completely false.
The man had begged for additional protection and not received it.
Two, to underscore that these protests are rooted in an internet video and not a broader failure of policy.
Three, to show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice.
Will you really?
maybe you should look in a house that's not black.
And standing steadfast through these protests.
To reinforce, four, to reinforce the president and administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.
Why would the administration admit that the attack was part of an al-Qaeda plot, especially since the president in the run-up to the November election had been touting that al-Qaeda was on the run, al-Qaeda had been decimated and defeated, and I've got bin Laden's head on a stick right here.
All right.
How could Al-Qaeda be decimated if it was behind the Benghazi attack?
If after trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives just of Americans, hundreds of thousands of lives of foreigners had been ended in the most appalling ways, when Iraq had been fundamentally depopulated in an attempt to end the war on terror,
When Fallujah had received so much radiation from depleted uranium shells that the basic genetic integrity of the population has been destroyed for a generation or two, when this amount of hell had been rained down upon the planet for the sake of fighting Al-Qaeda and ending the war on terror,
if it had been found that the administration was in fact allowing the arming of Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups, and if Al-Qaeda achieved a successful attack on an American target on the anniversary of 9-11-01.
What would have happened to Obama's presidential re-election aspirations?
Nobody in the administration wants to focus on that, which is why they blamed it on a spontaneous demonstration based upon some internet video.
This unredacted email wasn't initially turned over to congressional investigators.
The administration didn't include the complete text of the email in the heavily redacted information it provided to Congress.
No, it took a federal lawsuit by a private organization to unearth this damning email.
Now, there are reports that the administration finally turned over the redacted email to a congressional committee just days ago at the same time it was released to the private organization.
It is disturbing and perhaps criminal that these documents like these were hidden by the Obama administration, said Representative Darrell Issa, who chairs a House commission charged with overseeing and auditing the White House.
Issa says, the American people have learned that you cannot believe what the White House says.
You cannot believe what the spokespeople say, and you cannot believe what the President says.
The facts are coming out that, in fact, this administration has knowingly withheld documents pursuant to congressional subpoenas in violation of any reasonable transparency or historical precedent, at least since Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Nixon, third-rate burglary attempts, no smoking bodies, no corpses of any kind, and not really in the same league, no lying about.
War.
But to have a war is to lie about war.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton says, Now we know the Obama White House's chief concern about the Benghazi attack was making sure that President Obama looked good.
And these documents undermine the Obama administration's narrative that it thought the Benghazi attack had something to do with protests or an internet video.
Given the explosive material in these documents, it is no surprise that we had to go to federal court to pry them loose from the Obama State Department.
Don't you remember Obama promising the most transparent Administration in history?
Another critical email contained in the documents was written by a former deputy spokesman at U.S. Mission to the U.N. Patent Knopf.
It was addressed to Susan Rice and sent on September 12, 2012 at 5.42 p.m.
It provided a brief summary of the attack and further revealed that State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland had characterized the compound assault as clearly a complex attack.
This characterization undermined Rice's contention that the attacks were spontaneous.
Nonetheless, when Rice appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN, she insisted, as she specifically stated on CBS's Face the Nation, that, quote, based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is, as of the present, is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy, sparked by this hateful video.
So Ben Rhodes was a security advisor who began massaging the message.
His brother is CBS News President David Rhodes, who was not massively enamored with former CBS investigative reporter Cheryl Atkinson's reporting on the attack.
In fact, she's been canned, despite the fact that she'd been one of the few reporters to follow the story wherever it led.
So here's some questions that reporters could be asking, you know, just tossing them out here.
If the designated al-Qaeda enemy is so much against America and wishes to kill the American people, why, over the last three years, are more of our taxpaying dollars going to al-Qaeda fighting America's proxy war in Syria against Bashar al-Assad's government forces?
Why, oh why, you could ask, was al-Qaeda the first hired guns on the ground to go into Libya right after the U.S.-NATO bombings three years ago?
Why to this day, after removing the supposed bad guy, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, are Al-Qaeda still in control in Libya?
Ooh, I've got one.
Ooh, ooh, meet me.
Why are our taxpaying dollars for years at a time filling our supposed enemy Al-Qaeda's pockets in places like Syria and Libya?
And why does Al-Qaeda keep showing up as the U.S.'s surrogate troops on the ground in nations around the world, wherever U.S. foreign policy agenda calls for destabilization and regime change?
Well, it all goes back.
A decade ago, President Reagan's National Security Council Director, Lieutenant General William Odom said, quote,"...because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.
By any measure, the U.S. has long used terrorism." In 1978-79, the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism.
In every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.
In the rush to answer the Soviet Empire's expansion into Afghanistan in December 1979, US foreign policymakers bankrolled a charismatic young unknown upstart named Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen throughout the Soviet's 1980s decade-long Vietnam in Afghanistan.
Both Jimmy Carter's national security advisor and professional tongue twister Zbigniew Brzezinski and then CIA director and later G.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates publicly admitted that the U.S. made the decision to both organize and support Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen as the Al-Qaeda forefathers that ultimately defeated the overextended Soviet empire that in turn led to its crumbling apart in 91.
Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda's joint mission was to recruit Islamic fundamentalists from the entire Arab world to come together for the common cause of fighting to liberate fellow Muslims from oppression in nations throughout the world.
Soon after the Soviet war was won in Afghanistan, Osama sought his next terrorist campaign and soon found it in the Balkans in the 90s, liberating fellow Muslims in Yugoslavia.
As long as Al-Qaeda's enemies happen to be U.S. enemies like the Soviet Union, the U.S. government never has a problem providing financial support sponsoring Al-Qaeda terrorism.
Be it during the Republican Reagan years of the 1980s, Afghanistan or the Democratic Clinton years of the 1990s and beyond, in the Balkans the U.S. government secretly funneled a steady flow of American taxpayer dollars in support of continuous Al-Qaeda operations.
It's a revolving door, my friends.
The frenemy list goes round and round and round.
It's almost nothing more dangerous than be declared a friend of the United States.
That's when the lasers start pointing.
Clinton, U.S. Congress, and NATO Commander General Wesley Clark supported U.S. state-sponsored terrorism by al-Qaeda, the Bosnian army, and the KLA against the common enemy, Milosevic's Serbian army.
Though the US ensured Milosevic was tried for genocidal war crimes at The Hague and subsequently executed in 2006, the Muslim terrorists were committing the same war crimes of ethnic cleansing towards the Serbs, but both the US and the UN simply condoned them, hypocritically choosing to look the other way.
After all, by that time, the US had been consistently investing millions of US tax dollars on al-Qaeda terrorists in both the Afghanistan and Balkan wars for nearly two decades.
Things in history never come out of nowhere.
Never come out of nowhere.
Always look for the deep history of all supposedly sudden events.
You will find it.
For decades, the Bin Laden family has enjoyed close business ties with the Bush family as well as the U.S. government.
On the morning of 9-11, while Americans were jumping out of windows, in New York City, Bush Sr.
was busy whining and dining the Bin Ladens in a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in D.C. And later that same day, while all planes in the U.S. were grounded, the Bin Laden family was quietly escorted out of the country, flying safely home to Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda on the run?
In Libya alone, Al Qaeda had a strong presence, especially in the Benghazi area, since the beginning of 2012.
Congressional testimony given by State Department officials both on the ground in Libya and in Washington revealed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and other officials repeatedly requested more security for the consulate in Benghazi and all of their requests were denied.
And then you get these mealy-mouthed assurances that the Obama administration will do anything within its power to protect U.S. citizens.
Well, except send them a bodyguard or two in July.
Of 2012, Stevens received a death threat from Al-Qaeda on Facebook and even sent a request for more security on 9-11, the day he was killed.
Come save me.
Oh, sorry, I'm dead.
While the State Department denied more security, they did increase the amount of hardship pay officials in Benghazi received.
So really what is there to add to this chilling, almost I would say demonic, narrative other than to say at some point we as a species are going to have to face the reality that the last war did little if nothing to prevent the next war.
That the First World War sparked the landslide that led to the Second World War, which created the conflict, which led to the Korean War, which created the theory of containment that led to the Vietnam War, which led to all kinds of problems in America, led to stagflation, and...
That the arming of Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden for the Mujahideen led to problems in the Middle East as a whole, may have led to the Gulf War, may have led to September 11, 2001, which led to the War on Terror.
These dominoes are never, ever going to stop until we look at history in frozen time.
Until we look at history as it is, and look right over our shoulder, just in the short-sighted rear-view mirror, and say that last war was for nothing.
The agony of that is almost impossible to comprehend.
How a war can be worse than nothing.
Nothing at least is not a negative.
A zero is not a minus.
But if the wars that have been fought are doing little more than creating and sowing the demon seeds of the next war, then at some point we're going to have to accept that the last war was worse than nothing, that people died for worse than nothing, that people were murdered for worse than nothing, that economies were destroyed, infrastructure was destroyed, children were evaporated.
For worse than nothing.
Because as long as we're hiding that reality of the emptiness and waste of the last war, we will forever be preparing the justifications for the next one.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
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