by Aaron Klein
Secured by a local Libyan? Just who was this “local Libyan” who secured Stevens’ body inside an Ansar al-Sharia–controlled hospital? A medical center that was considered so dangerous that after three hours of negotiations the Libyan officials still didn’t send in a militia out of concern for the security situation? Like so many other aspects of the official State Department story line, the claims about what happened to Stevens simply don’t withstand scrutiny.
5
WHODUNIT?
The effort to determine which group or state actors carried out the September 11, 2012, attack is critical for many reasons, including divining the motivation for the assault and holding the appropriate party or parties fully accountable. We obviously must know whether these players are still motivated to act against us, while the United States will need to revaluate its current relationship with any country or party implicated in the assault.
In this chapter, I will investigate the various possible actors behind the attack. The most likely scenario involves the attack being carried out by elements of several Islamic militant groups, which begs the obvious questions: What was the common denominator? What would drive a witches’ brew of jihadists, from al-Qaeda–linked groups to Egyptian, Libyan, and possibly even Yemeni and Algerian organizations to act in unison? Who organized the assault? Was blind hatred for the United States the main incentive, or was the attack an attempt to shut down specific activities transpiring inside the American facilities? If so, who stands to gain the most from the assault? Were these sordid jihadist groups being utilized by a larger player?
ANSAR AL-SHARIA
The first and most obvious suspect in the Benghazi attack is the al-Qaeda–allied Ansar al-Sharia militia operating in Libya. After all, the organization couldn’t wait to first take responsibility for the attack in social media in the hours following the assault. The group later claimed it “didn’t participate [in the attack] as a sole entity,” stating the aggression “was a spontaneous popular uprising” in reaction to the anti-Muhammad film mentioned earlier.1 As I reported in chapter 1, witnesses told the media they saw vehicles that bore Ansar al-Sharia’s logo at the scene of the attack. They also said the gunmen taking part in the violence boasted of belonging to the group.2
Before we continue, I must briefly highlight the detail that armed members of the Libyan February 17 Martyrs Brigade, which acts under the banner of Ansar al-Sharia, were hired by the State Department to provide security at the mission while State denied other security measures, including its cancellation of the Security Support Teams of special forces trained for counterattacks on U.S. embassies. (This factoid was investigated in chapter 1.) The presence of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade clearly helps explain how the attackers reportedly had such intimate knowledge of the inside of the mission.
Ansar al-Sharia has now been fingered directly by the United States. In August 2013, the United States filed the first criminal charges in the attack, blaming a senior Ansar leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala. Some witnesses and U.S. authorities called Khattala a ringleader of the attacks. You will soon become more familiar with Khattala, whom witnesses placed at the scene during the initial assault on the U.S. special mission. The next chapter details the shocking story of how President Obama, whether wittingly or not, all but thwarted any possibility of capturing Khattala.3
Another Ansar al-Sharia leader charged with the Benghazi assault is former Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Sufian bin Qumu, who reportedly heads Ansar in the Libyan city of Darnah. The Washington Post reported gunmen under Qumu’s command participated in the attack, according to a U.S. official. Witnesses told American officials that Qumu’s militia had arrived in Benghazi before the attack and that the information was used in part to designate Qumu’s branch of Ansar al-Sharia as a terrorist group, along with two other al-Sharia branches.4 Qumu, formerly a driver for Osama bin Laden, was released by the United States from Guantánamo Bay in 2007 and was transferred to a Libyan prison, where he remained until he was freed in a 2010 amnesty deal.
Incredibly, I found that one month before the September 11, 2012, attack, a fifty-four-page Library of Congress report that received almost no media attention warned that Qumu (which the report spelled Qhumu) was setting up shop in Libya and that his activities increasingly embodied al-Qaeda’s presence in the country. The August 2012 report, prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under an interagency agreement with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office’s Irregular Warfare Support Program, revealed that Qumu had a vendetta against the United States.
The document cited an Arabic interview in which Qumu was said to have “discoursed at length about his resentment of the United States, which he accused of torturing him during his Guantanamo detention, an experience that he said will not go away.”5
According to the report, on June 7–8, 2012, a gathering of groups supporting Islamic law was openly held at Liberation Square in Benghazi. The event was hosted by Qumu’s Ansar al-Sharia and reportedly was attended by members of at least fifteen militias, including al-Qaeda–affiliated organizations. The report further documented that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations were establishing terrorist training camps and pushing Taliban-style Islamic law in Libya while the new, Western-backed Libyan government incorporated jihadists into its militias.6 Despite this visible, growing al-Qaeda activity, including Qumu’s noted presence and the establishment of terrorist training camps in the city, the U.S. facilities in Benghazi scandalously remained poorly protected.
At the time, Qumu was leading the al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia, which espouses anti-Western ideology. Qumu’s group is particularly dangerous, the report warned, “as indicated by its active social-media propaganda, extremist discourse, and hatred of the West, especially the United States.”7
The paper further noted that, because Qumu’s views were so extreme, “Darnah’s residents have accused [him] of carrying out attacks, especially targeting former Libyan officials but also people who disagree with al-Qaeda.”8
EGYPTIAN MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND THE “BLIND SHEIKH”
As you will soon see, almost immediately following the Benghazi attack, the United States possessed information indicating some Egyptian participation in the assault, with links bringing us to the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the Obama administration kept this critical piece of information from the public. Recall the attack took place fewer than thirty days before the November 2012 presidential election. Obama could have found himself in quite the political quandary if it were determined the Muslim Brotherhood had been involved in the Benghazi attack in any way. After the U.S. president called for the resignation of Egypt’s longtime secular leader, Hosni Mubarak, Obama helped support the election of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi and then infamously proceeded to open ties to Morsi’s group.
Politics aside, the possible involvement of Egypt may be central in understanding what may have motivated some of the attackers and how the Benghazi assault could be linked to Morsi’s campaign to free the so-called blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in the United States for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Rahman’s release has been a central foreign policy issue for Morsi.
In July 2013, several major Arabic newspapers ran a story, first reported by the Kuwaiti paper Al Rai, quoting a Libyan intelligence report on the Benghazi attack that mentions an alleged connection to Morsi and other prominent Egyptian figures. The report, prepared by Mahmoud Ibrahim Sharif, director of national security for Libya, was based on purported confessions of some of the jihadists arrested at the scene. It states that “among the more prominent figures whose names were mentioned by cell members during confessions were: Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi; preacher Safwat Hegazi; Saudi businessman Mansour Kadasa, owner of the satellite station Al-Nas; Egyptian Sheik Muhammad Hassan; former presidential candidate Hazim Salih Abu Ismail.”9
Obviously, we cannot rely on Arabic media reports concerning claimed interroga
tions that likely were carried out under duress if they were carried out at all. Unsubstantiated Arabic-language reports from the Middle East also claimed a passport belonging to the alleged killer of Stevens had been recovered at the home of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood deputy leader Khairat el-Shater. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reportedly visited el-Shater in prison in August 2013, spending over an hour talking to the Brotherhood leader.10
YouTube videos of the attack find some of the jihadists speaking a distinct Egyptian dialect of Arabic.11 One of the videos shows a jihadist advancing on the U.S. special mission while stating in an Egyptian dialect, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, Dr. Morsi sent us.”12 There were also unconfirmed reports that Egypt would not allow the United States to interrogate suspects in the attack.
The original Obama administration claim of popular protests outside the U.S. Benghazi mission over an obscure, anti-Muhammad film might come back to haunt the White House in more ways than one. In perpetuating the now-discredited talking points about the film, the White House sought at first to connect the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attack to protests that same day in Cairo, Egypt, in which rioters climbed the walls of the U.S. embassy and tore down the American flag.
Those Cairo protests were widely reported to be acts of defiance against the anti-Muhammad movie. However, the protests were actually announced days in advance as part of a movement to free Rahman. In July 2012, Rahman’s son, Abdallah Abdel Rahman, threatened to organize a protest at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and detain the employees inside.13
In fact, on the day of the September 11, 2012, protests in Cairo, CNN’s Nic Robertson interviewed Rahman’s son, who described the protest as being about freeing his father. No Muhammad film was mentioned. A big banner calling for Rahman’s release can be seen as Robertson walked to the embassy protests.14
An Egyptian group was reportedly behind previous attacks targeting Western diplomats in post-Gaddafi Libya. The State Department’s ARB report on Benghazi itself noted that a jihadist group seeking the release of the blind sheikh, the Omar Abdurrahman group, made an unsubstantiated claim of responsibility for a June 6, 2012, bomb attack on the U.S. facility in Benghazi. The bomb exploded at the perimeter of the facility.15
There is information showing that murdered U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens or another U.S. employee was the target of the June 6 attack. The SITE monitoring group documented that the Rahman Brigades (the same organization the ARB report calls “the Omar Abdurrahman group”) said they were “targeting a group of ‘Christian overseers’ who were preparing to receive one of the ‘heads of instigation’ from the State Department.”16 The group was calling for Rahman’s release as well as vengeance for the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi, one of the most senior al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi, of Libyan descent, was killed by a U.S. drone in Pakistan in June 2012.
CNN previously cited a report that the Omar Abdel-Rahman Brigades was also responsible for a rocket attack against the convoy of the British ambassador in Benghazi on June 11 and an attack against the Red Cross in Misrata on June 12, 2012.17 Further, the deadly January 2013 assault on an Algerian natural-gas plant was reportedly carried out as part of an attempt to trade hostages for the release of Rahman. Thirty-eight people were killed in a three-day siege that ended the hostage crisis. That assault may be linked to Benghazi, as we will investigate in chapter 10.
HILLARY’S BENGHAZI INVESTIGATOR CONFIRMS EGYPT LINK
In a development largely unreported by news media, the State Department’s lead Benghazi investigator, Thomas Pickering, apparently leaked what was at the time classified information at a House hearing, revealing the government possessed evidence that an Egyptian organization was behind the Benghazi attack. Pickering of course was the author of the State Department’s ARB report on Benghazi. His revelation begs the obvious question: Why was the government hiding information that an Egyptian group was involved in the attack?
At the aforementioned September 2013 House Oversight and Government Reform committee hearing on Benghazi, Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) asked Pickering, “Is it true that there’s documentation that the Muslim Brotherhood and operatives from Egypt were involved in the attack?”
Pickering replied, “Our report indicates that one Egyptian organization which is named in the report was possibly involved. And I am not sure, I think that that’s in the unclassified. I hope it is.”18
The unclassified ARB report – which I know nearly by heart at this point – does not name any Egyptian organization as possibly being behind the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attack.
However, it would later emerge the group Pickering was most likely referring to was the Muhammad Jamal Network. In October 2013, the State Department declared the Jamal Network an official terrorist organization. Strangely, the official indictment of the group doesn’t mention anything about Benghazi. The State Department’s document only says, “Jamal formed the MJN after his release from Egyptian prison in 2011 and established several terrorist training camps in Egypt and Libya.”19
In contrast to the State Department’s designation, the Senate’s eighty-five-page report on the Benghazi attack states there is information Jamal’s Network participated in the assault.20 Questions need to be immediately asked as to why in its indictment of the Jamal Network, the State Department does not mention that the group may have participated in the Benghazi assault, an act of war against the United States.
Even the United Nations fingers Jamal for Benghazi. A UN Security Council resolution from October 2013 added Jamal’s Network to its list of sanctioned al-Qaeda groups. Unlike the State Department description, the UN resolution details Jamal’s alleged involvement in the attack on the U.S. special mission and nearby CIA annex. A UN narrative summary of the sanctions resolution reads: “Muhammad Jamal set up a training camp in Libya where Libyan and foreign violent extremists were trained. Some of the attackers of the U.S. Mission in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 have been identified as associates of Muhammad Jamal, and some of the Benghazi attackers reportedly trained at MJN camps in Libya.”21 Those are pretty damning charges against the Jamal Network, yet the information somehow didn’t make it to the State Department.
The Daily Beast confirmed an October 2012 Wall Street Journal report that fighters affiliated with Jamal’s group participated in the Benghazi attack. The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake further quoted Seth Jones, associate director for the international security and defense policy center at the RAND Corporation, about Jamal’s involvement. “There was at least one member and may have been more members from the Mohammed Jamal network on the compound for the attack on Benghazi along with members of Ansar al-Sharia and members of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Jones stated.22
Guess who sprang Jamal Network leader Muhammad Jamal from Egyptian prison following the downfall of abandoned U.S. ally Mubarak? None other than militants from Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Also freed from prison during the Brotherhood-led revolution of 2011 was Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Mohammed al-Zawahiri was one of the backers of a protest at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt, the same day as the Benghazi attack.23
AQAP
Lost in the news media coverage about the Benghazi attack was that one day before the assaults, on September 10, 2012, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video on a jihadi online forum, calling for jihadists, and particularly those in Libya, to mount attacks against Americans in Libya, to avenge the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi. As noted earlier in this chapter, al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda operative, was killed by a U.S. drone strike. “His blood urges you and incites you to fight and kill the crusaders,” al-Zawahiri said. The forty-two-minute video was released fewer than eighteen hours before the Benghazi attack.24
In May, CNN quoted sources disclosing several Yemeni men belonging to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, took part in the Benghazi attacks.25 AQAP, primarily active in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, is considered one of the deadliest members of the
al-Qaeda franchise.
One senior U.S. law enforcement official told CNN that “three or four members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” took part in the attack. Another source quoted by CNN as being briefed on the Benghazi investigation said Western intelligence services “suspect the men may have been sent by the group specifically to carry out the attack.
“But it’s not been ruled out that they were already in the city and participated as the opportunity arose,” continued the CNN report. In chapter 10, we will trace those AQAP members to Algeria, Mali, and beyond and probe the involvement of various groups tied to other recent anti-Western attacks.
IRANIAN INVOLVEMENT?
Now that we see the most likely scenario involves a panoply of jihadist groups participating in the attack, the obvious question becomes why they were acting in unison. What common thread runs through all these groups? Certainly each one is friendly toward the cause of al-Qaeda and creating an Islamic caliphate. But why attack the obscure U.S. mission? Of course, there is the strong possibility, explored at length in this book, that these organizations were acting to thwart the alleged weapons collection effort headquartered inside the U.S. Benghazi mission. (We allegedly provided weapons to the Mid-East rebels and now were purportedly collecting those weapons, plus missiles looted from Gaddafi. Some of the weapons may have been passed to rebels in Syria.) This would certainly be a major motivator. Jihadist groups throughout Libya and beyond were directly threatened by the U.S. weapons collection campaign.
