There are a number of high profile articles out there in the last few days concerning the findings of a self-selected Citizens Commission on Benghazi.
The speculation here - that the Obama Administration 'changed sides in the War on Terror' by 'allowing a half billion dollar shipment of arms to be sent to al-Qaeda', that Ambassador Stevens was supposed to be the victim of a staged 'kidnapping' and swapped for 'the Blind Sheikh' Omar Abdel-Rahman, who hatched the 1993 WTC bombing plot and the use of questionable sources like NewsMax and WorldNetDaily should tell you that this report was concocted more for sensationalism, online fund raising and internet traffic rather than accuracy.
Here's an example of one tall tale. Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told a press conference that the Obama administration failed to stop a huge arms shipment from the United Arab Emirates from reaching what she called 'al-Qaeda-linked militants'.
"Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces who were blockading the approaches from air and sea,' Lopez claimed. 'They were permitted to come in. ... [They] knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed.."
Except Khaddaffi had plenty of arms already during the period she's talking about, and if he had any arms shipped in at that point there was no blockade until he had virtually won the civil war and was advancing on Benghazi, where he had the Islamists and al-Qaeda fighters cornered. That's the point when President Obama had us intervene, and putting the no fly zone into effect took additional time.And that's just one part of this 'report' than can easily be picked apart.
Let's also not forget that Benghazi happened after Khaddaffi had be defeated and lynched by a mob..so an 'arms shipment' would have been unnecessary and futile from Khaddaffi's viewpoint, to say the least!
And the 'kidnapping'? The jihadis planned the whole thing well in advance, and used heavy weapons like mortars and RPG's from Khaddaffi's looted stash to attack the consulate. Tell me..who uses ranged anti-personnel weapons like mortars in a kidnapping?
What actually happened in Benghazi is bad enough without making things up, and I revealed the true story here about a year ago. Obviously it needs retelling, so that the guilty parties aren't able to squirm out from under because of some self-seeking media buffoonery.
The key to finding out the truth about Benghazi is to try and figure out what Ambassador Stevens was doing sitting in a compound with no security in a town run by the al-Qaeda allied Ansar-al-Sharia, when even the International Red Cross had pulled its people out because it was too dangerous.What was he doing there?
The first thing we have to look at is why a U.S. Ambassador was there in Benghazi in the first place. He was there as an envoy to Ansar al Sharia and the other jihadist groups that ruled Benghazi, and his assignment, according to what I've been able to find out, was to make a deal over the heavy weapons they had pilfered from Khaddaffi's armories thanks to President Obama's ill advised intervention in favor of the rebels. Stevens, who was intimately familiar with Libya, was there to purchase as many of these arms as he could outright to ship them to Ansar al-Sharia's al-Qaeda comrades in arms in Syria. The idea was to help take out Basher Assad's regime covertly without the necessity of committing US forces, and as a secondary goal to dispose of as many of the arms as possible, buy off the Benghazi rebels if possible and cover up what a huge mistake the Obama Administration had made by getting involved in Libya. There was absolutely no other reason for Ambassador Stevens to be in such a dangerous location virtually unprotected, except as an envoy to the jihadist forces controlling Benghazi.
An envoy in the Arab world has a very carefully defined position. He relies on the age old rules of Arab hospitality, comes unarmed to his enemy and throws himself on their protection. And if the negotiations fail, especially if a state of war exists, his life can be forfeit. That's why not only was Stevens denied more security, but most of what he had was taken away, even when it became plain to him (if not to the Obama Administration) that the deal had failed and he and the rest of the Americans were in mortal danger.
Needless to say, the approach to Ansar al-Sharia and the other Muslim Brotherhood groups involved had to be off the radar. For it to come out publicly during an election that the Obama Administration was dealing with one al-Qaeda affiliate as a middleman to ship arms to another al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood group in Syria was not something that would have gone down well with either the American electorate or with the Russians, with whom the president was working on a diplomatic solution - at least officially.
The Saudis and the Qataris are the ones bankrolling the jihadi Sunni rebels in Syria, so it was their money that was involved.
The murder of Stevens and the subsequent mutilation of his body (something that was carefully hidden and unreported by the U.S. press, but was widely reported overseas) was the classic Arab negative response to the deal the Obama Administration was trying to achieve. It was an unmistakeable message. When Ansar al-Sharia was finished with him, it was they who took the body to a hospital under their control. And those Libyan arms wound up being used in places like Mali, Algeria and Sinai, as well as helping Ansar al-Shariah and their friends keep control of Benghazi.
Stevens likely wasn't rescued for two reasons. First,because the president was AWOL and no one else wanted to take responsibility for giving the order to send our forces in. It was Mrs. Clinton's '3 AM phone call' ad on steroids. And second because the way things went down, it would almost certainly have raised a number of awkward questions in the middle of an election campaign that had President Obama's supposed foreign policy expertise as a major talking point.
In the end, Ambassador Stevens was far more useful as a dead martyr and photo-op than as a live ambassador subject to inconvenient congressional questioning.The talking points, of course, had to be constructed in such a way to lead as far away from the real story as possible, a story we now know they were fully aware of. The Obama Administration was primarily concerned with protecting the president politically in the middle of his re-election campaign, and felt that by sequestering the survivors under pain of prosecution, classifying all the documents, videos and phone logs as top secret and relying on a compliant media to spread the narrative the Administration came up with they could make it work.
The repercussions of Benghazi were hideous. Libya remains a failed state in chaos to this day thanks to President Obama. And as I said at the time, one of my notorious Lil' Birdies who is definitely in a position to know told me, among other things, that the attempt to buy arms and send them to jihadis in Syria was seen as a major double cross by the Israelis, who knew those arms could just as easily be used against them. Those stinger missiles wouldn't only have been useful in taking out Basher al-Assad's Russian-built helicopters but commercial airliners, including those landing in Israel. You can just imagine how the Israelis felt about a plot to have weapons like this shipped to their northern border without their knowledge. Not to mention the Iranians, who use commercial airliners to ship fighters and weaponry to Syria to bolster Basher Assad's forces.
And the Russians? They were also livid about what they saw as President Obama's duplicity while he was supposedly working with Putin on a diplomatic solution to Syria. That's pretty much the point where Putin stopped trying to deal with President Obama in any serious way.
You can refer back to the link to read about the mechanics of the coverup an dother details. But this is the real story of what happened in Benghazi that night. No mystery arms shipment, no fake kidnapping...just a Middle East version of Fast and Furious, thought out by a clueless amateur of a president and his team..who then had to lie and connive to keep the truth from the American peiople to protect Barack Obama's re-election.
That's what happened, and that's how it was.
-Selah -
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