by Aaron Klein
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THE REAL BENGHAZI STORY
WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE AND HILLARY
DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
AARON KLEIN
THE REAL BENGHAZI STORY
Copyright © 2014 by Aaron Klein
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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-936488-86-5 eBook ISBN: 978-1-936488-87-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klein, Aaron.
The real Benghazi story : what the White House and Hillary don’t want you to know /
Aaron Klein.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-936488-86-5 (hardcover)
1. Benghazi Consulate Attack, Banghazi, Libya, 2012. 2. Benghazi Consulate Attack, Banghazi, Libya, 2012--Political aspects. 3. United States. Special Mission (Banghazi, Libya)--Security measures. 4. Diplomatic and consular service, American--Buildings--Security measures--Libya--Banghazi. 5. Terrorism investigation--Libya--Banghazi. 6. Stevens, John Christopher, -2012--Assassination. 7. Ambassadors--Libya--Banghazi--Death. 8. Embassy buildings--Security measures--United States. I. Title.
HV6433.L75K54 2014
363.32509612--dc23
2014013672
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction
1: The Real “Security” Situation at U.S. Special Mission
2: “Fast and Furious” of the Middle East
3: Why No Special Forces or Air Support Were Sent
4: Ambassador Stevens Kidnapped?
5: Whodunit?
6: The Real Reason Benghazi Suspects Not Captured
7: Game Changer: Hillary’s Central, Unreported Role in Benghazi
8: The Real Story of Those Pesky Talking Points
9: News Media Snagged in Benghazi Deception
10: From Benghazi to… the Boston Bombing?
Appendix A: Lies and Misleading Claims
Appendix B: Questions for the House Select Committee on Benghazi
Appendix C: Response to Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
The most logical way to begin a book about the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is to recount the timeline of the murderous assaults that targeted our U.S. special mission and nearby CIA annex. The Obama administration itself has provided a substantial portion of the publicly known version of events about that fateful night, and this outline was later re-crafted in more detail by a State Department–sanctioned review of the attacks. Key elements of the official chronology, however, have since been contradicted by Benghazi victims and witnesses, while particulars provided by the government have been denied by those who were on the ground inside the doomed facilities, calling into question the entire government narrative about what really transpired.
The White House should have lost all credibility on Benghazi after it was caught deceiving the American public by claiming the onslaught was the result of popular protests against an obscure anti-Islam film. Within five days of the attack, United Nations ambassador Susan Rice infamously appeared on five morning television programs (on Sunday, September 16, 2012) to push the “spontaneous protest” fiction, claiming the attack was in response to a “hateful video.” Other Obama administration officials made similar claims. Four days after Rice’s disinformation campaign, Obama himself described “natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video.”1
It would later emerge that the Obama administration knew from the beginning this was a well-coordinated, well-planned jihadist attack. The United States had surveillance video from the mission that showed no popular protest, while Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. official in Libya at the time of the September 11, 2012, attacks, testified that he knew immediately the attacks were terror strikes, not a protest turned violent. According to Hicks, “everybody in the mission” believed it was an act of terror “from the get-go.”2
Numerous other whistle-blowers would later come forward with similar information. Even the CIA’s Libya station chief sent an e-mail to superiors in the aftermath of the attacks, stating that the storming of the compound was “not an escalation of protests.”3
Of course, we would need to suspend rationality to believe the administration’s original claim of a “spontaneous protest.” Tell me which spontaneous protesters would show up to the site with weapons, erect armed checkpoints surrounding the compound, and evidence insider knowledge of the facility, while deploying military-style tactics to storm an American mission? Which “spontaneous protesters” would know the exact location of a secretive CIA annex, including specific coordinates that were likely utilized to launch precision mortar strikes? Who even believes “spontaneous” protesters are capable of mounting a fierce, hours-long gun battle with U.S. forces stationed inside the annex?
The “spontaneous protest” claim is just the tip of the Benghazi misinformation iceberg. The State Department released an Accountability Review Board, or ARB, report that provided a timeline of the attacks, an accounting adopted by the Obama administration. The ARB is very specific about what it says happened that night. It claims the initial assault on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi started between 9:45 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time and lasted until about midnight, when all but two Americans were evacuated to the CIA annex about a mile away. According to the ARB, at midnight the annex was attacked intermittently for an hour by gunfire and RPGs. The next phase of the attack started at about 5:15 a.m. local time, the ARB claims, describing the second wave of attacks as consisting of heavy mortar and RPG assaults.4
However, witnesses on the ground, including CIA contractors who were inside the annex, said there was no lull in the fighting at all.5 The “lull” claim was central to the Obama administration’s explanation for why no air support or special forces were deployed to Benghazi. The White House and State official
s said they believed the attacks to have been over but were later taken by surprise by the continuation of the assaults. The new accounts cast a shadow of uncertainty not only over the timeline provided by the Obama administration but over every claim it made about Benghazi. If the administration lied about a “lull,” how can anything else they told us about the assaults be trusted?
Benghazi witnesses further contradicted another central Obama administration claim. The State Department’s ARB report specifically claims U.S. security personnel inside the compound were armed during the attacks, and the report even details how some security officers retrieved their weapons at the start of the assault. Witnesses, on the other hand, reportedly told a House Intelligence Subcommittee investigating the attacks that “none” of the security officers were armed.6
And so we see that we must question every aspect of the official narrative while attempting to divine the real Benghazi story. So much misinformation and disinformation is floating around about the Benghazi onslaught that to this day many in the mainstream news media continue to wrongly refer to the attacked facility as a “consulate,” when it was something else entirely, as we will investigate.
I start this book by exploring the unprecedented “security” set up at the U.S. special mission. I will provide shocking new details about the withholding of critical protection at the facility while also investigating the mind-blowing decision to hire armed members of the al-Qaeda–linked February 17 Martyrs Brigade as the official quick reaction force to “protect” the facility – essentially ushering the enemy inside the gates.
We will blow the lid off of the secretive activities transpiring inside the doomed facility, exposing a scheme to arm the jihadist Mideast rebels in what essentially amounts to the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal of the Middle East, the Iran-Contra of the Obama administration. I will examine how these and other activities, including a separate weapons collection effort, may have been the motivating factor behind the September 11, 2012, assaults in the first place.
In one of the most devastating chapters, we will probe how a nonsensical decision made by Obama himself essentially sabotaged an operation in which Special Forces were just hours from capturing one of the most important terrorist figures charged with carrying out the Benghazi murders. An entire chapter is dedicated to investigating not only jihadist groups but also possible state actors behind the attack.
This book will shed new light on one of the persistent questions plaguing the Obama administration and its military command – why were no Special Forces or air support sent the night of the attacks? Not only will I offer new reasons for the lack of reinforcements, but we will also explore what our special forces were really doing the night of the assaults.
Of special interest are the details of what really happened to murdered ambassador Chris Stevens the night of the Benghazi attacks. The official State Department storyline regarding Stevens’ fate has some glaring, but until now largely unchallenged inconsistencies. Again, this prompts questions about the official version of events. Foremost in our line of inquiry is whether at any point, alive or dead, Stevens was held hostage – and if so, by whom? I will show it is likely that the rebels were in control of Stevens’ body at least for a period that disastrous night. If that was the case, how was the corpse eventually released? Were there negotiations to secure the remains? What promises did we make for Stevens’ body, and to whom? If Stevens’ body were held hostage, why do we not know about it? These details are important in comprehending the scope of the Real Benghazi Story.
Another crucial chapter explores the central role – really, roles – Hillary Clinton played in the Benghazi scandal, from her direct involvement in approving occupancy of the appallingly unsecured U.S. special mission, to the weapons-to-rebels scheme, to the very reason Ambassador Stevens was in the compound on the dangerous anniversary of 9/11. I will document Clinton’s central role in virtually the entire Benghazi story, replete with information indicating she may have perjured herself during sworn testimony.
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?”
1
THE REAL “SECURITY” SITUATION AT U.S. SPECIAL MISSION
Let’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.1 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 cla
ssification “as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult.”2 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.3
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.”4
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.5 We will discuss this puzzling turn of events in far greater detail in chapter 3.
