by Aaron Klein
The day after the attack, Libya’s deputy ambassador to London, Ahmad Jibril, told the BBC that Ansar al-Sharia carried out the assault.6 Libyan president Mohammed el-Megarif was even more direct, saying foreigner jihadists who infiltrated Libya planned the attack and used some local Libyans during the event. “The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous,” he said. “We firmly believe that this was a precalculated, preplanned attack that was carried out specifically to attack the U.S. Consulate.”7
Obviously logic dictates that spontaneous protesters do not show up with weapons, erect armed checkpoints surrounding a compound, and show insider knowledge of the facility while deploying military-style tactics to storm a U.S. mission. Nor do they know the exact location of a secretive CIA annex, including the specific coordinates of the building that were likely utilized to launch precision mortar strikes. Spontaneous protesters are not capable of mounting a fierce, hours-long gun battle with U.S. forces stationed inside the annex. And yet, the Obama administration was willing to reject logic and its own knowledge of what really happened to lie outright to the American people.
Two congressional sources who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said that Mike Morell, then acting CIA director, along with director of national intelligence James Clapper, and National Counterterrorism Center director Matthew Olsen, each testified behind closed doors that they did not alter the talking points. On November 16, 2012, former CIA director David Petraeus testified before the same congressional intelligence committees and also replied no to the question of whether he had changed the talking points, three congressional sources told Reuters.8
Then things got interesting on November 27 when, according to senators who met with Morell that day, the CIA reportedly told lawmakers it had in fact changed the wording of the unclassified talking points to delete a reference to al-Qaeda. That November 27 meeting was between Morell, Rice, and Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte. A statement by McCain, Graham, and Ayotte specifically related that Morell told them during the meeting that the FBI had removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points “and did so to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation” of the attack on the U.S. mission. The senators said in the joint statement, “We were surprised by this revelation and the reasoning behind it.”9
Morell’s claim of changing the talking points to protect a criminal investigation was repeated to the news media. On November 28, 2012, intrepid CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who resigned from the news agency in March 2014, quoted the CIA stating the edits to the talking points were made “so as not to tip off al Qaeda as to what the U.S. knew, and to protect sources and methods.” That same report quoted a source from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence, aka James Clapper, telling CBS News’ Margaret Brennan that Clapper’s office made the edits as part of the interagency process because the links to al-Qaeda were deemed too “tenuous” to make public.10
Meanwhile, a few hours after his meeting with the senators, Morell’s office reportedly contacted Graham to backtrack, claiming that “Acting Director Morell misspoke” in the earlier meeting. “The CIA now says that it deleted the al-Qaeda references, not the FBI. They were unable to give a reason as to why,” Graham said in a statement.11
An intelligence official called Morell’s change “an honest mistake and it was corrected as soon as it was realized. There is nothing more to this.”12 And CBS News was told that there was “absolutely no intent to misinform.” The official speaking to CBS claimed the talking points “were never meant to be definitive and, in fact, noted that the assessment may change. The points clearly reflect the early indications of extremist involvement in a direct result. It wasn’t until after they were used in public that analysts reconciled contradictory information about how the assault began.”13
Graham at the time went so far as to suggest he would hold up the nomination of Morell if Obama pushed him for CIA director, a position ultimately filled by John Brennon. All of the sudden, in June 2013, Morell announced he was stepping down to spend more time with his family. In a statement, Morell acknowledged that his reason for stepping down may seem somewhat difficult to swallow, but “when I say that it is time for my family, nothing could be more real than that.”14 Morell had served thirty-three years in the agency and was a front-runner for CIA director; it is doubtful he resigned to become a family man. As noted in the previous chapter, he later reemerged as a counselor to Beacon Global Strategies, an advisory firm particularly close to Hillary Clinton.15 The firm is led by Philippe I. Reines, who served from 2009 to 2013 as Clinton’s deputy assistant secretary of state for strategic communications and senior communications advisor.16
In February 2014 a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report revealed that Morell was in receipt of critical information on September 15, 2012, one day before Rice used the talking points publicly. The report said that Morell and others at the CIA received an e-mail from the CIA’s Libya station chief stating the attacks were “not an escalation of protests.” So on the same day Morell had helped edit the talking points by calling the attacks a “demonstration,” he had received correspondence from his own station chief clearly contradicting this claim. Sam Faddis, an expert on the U.S. intelligence community, explained to Fox News, “The chief of station is the senior intelligence officer for the entire United States government. You would really have to have some incredibly overwhelming factual evidence to disregard that and there is no indication of that in the report at all.”17
GOP CHARGES OBAMA OFFICIALS LIED TO PROTECT STATE
In perhaps one of the most damning sections of the Republican House Interim Progress Report on the events in Benghazi, lawmakers who penned the investigation wrote that they were given access to classified e-mails and other communications that prove the talking points were edited to protect none other than the State Department’s own reputation. “Evidence rebuts Administration claims that the talking points were modified to protect classified information or to protect an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the report states, directly contradicting Morell’s claims.18
It is instructive to briefly quote the report:
To protect the State Department, the Administration deliberately removed references to al-Qa’ida-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by [United Nations] Ambassador [Susan] Rice, thereby perpetuating the deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a demonstration caused by a YouTube video… .
Senior State Department officials requested – and the White House approved – that the details of the threats, specifics of the previous attacks, and previous warnings be removed to insulate the department from criticism that it ignored the threat environment in Benghazi.19
The interim House report authors said that as they went through e-mail exchanges of the interagency process to scrub the talking points, the e-mails did not reveal any concern with protecting classified information. “Additionally, the Bureau [FBI] itself approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested. Thus, the claim that the State Department’s edits were made solely to protect that investigation is not credible.”20
In a particularly stinging accusation, the report states: “When draft talking points were sent to officials throughout the Executive Branch, senior State Department officials requested the talking points be changed to avoid criticism for ignoring the threat environment in Benghazi. Specifically, State Department e-mails reveal senior officials had ‘serious concerns’ about the talking points, because Members of Congress might attack the State Department for ‘not paying attention to agency warnings’ about the growing threat in Benghazi.”21
Of course, the House report barely scratches the surface of the possible mo
tivations in hiding the true nature of the Benghazi attacks from the American public. Besides ignoring the growing jihadist threats in Benghazi, the truth about the assault would have led to uncomfortable questions about why State not only denied security requests made by U.S. personnel on the ground but also strangely pulled critical protection while turning down Pentagon offers to provide more manpower at the facility. It may also have also prompted questions about why the al-Qaeda–linked February 17 Martyrs Brigade served as the mission’s armed quick reaction force instead of specially trained U.S. forces. Recall the Benghazi attacks took place a few weeks before the 2012 presidential election. If any of this had been exposed before the election, Obama might not be the current White House occupant.
OBAMA, HILLARY USED TAXPAYER FUNDS IN BENGHAZI COVER-UP
Lying to the American public is bad enough. Adding insult to injury, the Obama administration’s decision to blame the anti-Muhammad film for protests that never took place served to further inflame the Islamic world against the United States, escalating deadly rioting. The administration spent seventy thousand dollars in taxpayer funds on an ad campaign denouncing the film. The ads reportedly aired on seven Pakistani networks. The commercials also came in response to protests in Pakistan that were reportedly a reaction to the film. However, it was the claim of popular protests in Benghazi at the time that garnered the biggest public reaction from the White House.
The September 19, 2012, ads feature Obama and Clinton making statements against the film in the wake of the Benghazi attacks. “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation of respect, that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” Obama says in the ad, which was stamped “Paid Content.” Clinton then denies any official U.S. involvement in producing the “Innocence of Muslims” video. “We absolutely reject its contents,” she says.22
In a clear bid to push the Muhammad film lie, law enforcement agents took the unusual and very public move of storming the home of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man said to be behind the film, because he was accused of violating his probation from a 2010 check fraud conviction. The director was escorted from his house by authorities, in full view of news media cameras. A judge ordered Nakoula be held without bail.23
DID STATE DEPT. HIDE THIS DRAMATIC EVACUATION?
One astonishing, nearly unprecedented event that transpired in Benghazi the night of the attacks has been largely kept from the public. I am referring to a dramatic incident during the assault in which U.S. embassy staff four hundred miles away in Tripoli evacuated their residential compound under possible terror threat. The threat was taken so seriously that, according to a key embassy staffer, communications equipment was dismantled and hard drives were smashed with an axe.
The scene was first brought to light in congressional testimony by Gregory Hicks, the former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya. The incident was not mentioned in the State Department probe, nor was it previously reported in news accounts of the attack, including accounts of Hicks’ testimony.24
Hicks said that about three hours after the attack began on the U.S. facility in Benghazi, the embassy staff in Tripoli noticed Twitter feeds asserting that the terror group Ansar al-Sharia was responsible. Hicks said there was also a call on the social media platform for an attack on the embassy in Tripoli.” We had always thought that we were… under threat, that we now have to take care of ourselves, and we began planning to evacuate our facility,” he said. “When I say our facility, I mean the State Department residential compound in Tripoli, and to consolidate all of our personnel… at the annex in Tripoli.”
Hicks testified that he “immediately telephoned Washington that news afterwards and began accelerating our effort to withdraw from the Villas compound and move to the annex.” He further recalled how his team had “responded with amazing discipline and courage in Tripoli in organizing withdrawal.” Continued Hicks: “I have vivid memories of that. I think the most telling, though, was of our communications staff dismantling our communications equipment to take with us to the annex and destroying the classified communications capability.
“Our office manager, Amber Pickens, was everywhere that night just throwing herself into some task that had to be done,” he went on. “First she was taking a log of what we were doing. Then she was loading magazines, carrying ammunition to the – carrying our ammunition supply to… our vehicles, and then she was smashing hard drives with an axe.”
The vivid, nearly unprecedented scene, however, was not reported in the State Department’s description of the Tripoli embassy’s response the night of the Benghazi attack. The section of the State Department’s ARB probe titled “Embassy Tripoli Response” simply says that upon notification of the attack in Benghazi, the U.S. embassy set up a command center and notified Washington.25
A later section in the State Department’s probe describes how a seven-person response team from Tripoli arrived in Benghazi to lend support but could not get to the Benghazi facility due to a lack of transportation. The section also says the Tripoli embassy worked with the Libyan government to have a Libyan Air Force C-130 take the remaining U.S. government personnel from Benghazi to Tripoli.26
If the Obama administration could hide the dramatic evacuation of the Tripoli embassy while crafting misleading talking points to deceive the American public about the nature of the September 11, 2012 attacks, what else don’t we know about the real Benghazi story?
9
NEWS MEDIA SNAGGED IN BENGHAZI DECEPTION
The news media’s distortion of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, is so grandiose and the cover-up of Obama administration misdeeds so egregious that I could easily dedicate an entire book to exclusively correcting the misinformation and faulty reporting related to the coordinated terrorist assault. Since it is virtually impossible to squeeze all of these media misrepresentations into one chapter, I will instead focus on a few of the more outlandish examples of media malpractice. For the purposes of this chapter, I won’t even attempt to document the mainstream news media reports that continue to wrongly call the attacked U.S. facility a “consulate” when it was anything but. Instead, let’s take a look at the way major news agencies have been misleading the public on the narrative of what really happened.
NEW YORK TIMES CONTRADICTED BY… NEW YORK TIMES
Let’s start with one of the most disgraceful pieces of propaganda in international “reporting” I have seen in quite some time. On December 28, 2013, New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick released a book-length, multi-chapter article that sought to literally rewrite the entire Benghazi tale. The report, titled “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” is filled with misleading information, including details negated by the U.S. government, Benghazi victims, and numerous previous news reports. In fact, I will show that Kirkpatrick’s fanciful piece is scandalously contradicted by his own previous reportage.
One of the major contentions in Kirkpatrick’s Times piece is that “contrary to claims by some members of Congress,” the Benghazi attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”1 He repeated in chapter 5 of the article, “There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers.”2 Another central claim is that there is “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.”3 Laughably, Kirkpatrick seeks to prove the Benghazi attack was largely not premeditated, although the article allows that some aspects of the assault were loosely planned the day of the actual attack. I will now dismantle each of these claims, in part using the Times’ own reporting.
Before we address the outlandish tale about the anti-Muhammad film, let’s start with the contention that al-Qaeda or international jihadi organizations played no role in the assault, a claim that clearly seeks to bolster the Obama administration’s thoroughly discredited talking points that infamously scrubbed terrorism as a motivating factor in the attacks. Stunningly, in his piece, Kirkpatrick
asserts “Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests.”4
Benghazi was not infiltrated by al-Qaeda? The U.S. government may take issue with that. Recall chapter 5, where we documented how a Library of Congress report detailed – one month before the deadly September 11 attack in Benghazi – that al-Qaeda established a major base of operations in Libya in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO campaign that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and his secular regime. The report warned 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. The document said scores of Islamic extremists were freed from Libyan prison after the U.S.-supported revolution in Libya.5
Embarrassingly for Kirkpatrick, the claim of no al-Qaeda infiltration in Benghazi is contradicted by another Times article, to which he contributed reporting from Benghazi. That’s right. An October 29, 2012, New York Times article titled “Libya Warnings Were Plentiful, but Unspecific” related that “Al Qaeda-leaning” Islamic extremists were establishing training camps in the mountains near Benghazi.6
The 2012 article begins: “In the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the Obama administration received intelligence reports that Islamic extremist groups were operating training camps in the mountains near the Libyan city and that some of the fighters were ‘Al Qaeda-leaning,’ according to American and European officials.”7
Continued the Times article:
