by Ben Shapiro
But behind closed doors, the administration prepared to act alone. On March 30, 2011, ABC News reported that President Obama had secretly signed a presidential finding to send covert aid to the al-Qaeda-linked rebels. This would be a violation of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S. Code § 2780), which specifically prohibits supporting terrorists. Those provisions are waivable by the president, but President Obama did no such thing at the time. He waited until 2013 to do so, and even then, he did so with regard to Syria, not Libyan rebels.31
The same day as the ABC News report, the Washington Post announced that Obama’s secret finding included an authorization to the CIA “to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and other support to Libyan opposition groups.” The authorization came in spite of the fact that the Obama administration was still busily sending “teams of CIA operatives into Libya” to find out who exactly the rebels were.32
The White House insisted that such aid was not lethal—“no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya,” said the White House press office. “We’re not ruling it out or ruling it in. We’re assessing and reviewing options for all types of assistance that we could provide to the Libyan people.” Meanwhile, Obama himself told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer that he would not rule out providing arms to the al-Qaeda-linked rebels. Hillary was more cautious: “We don’t know as much as we would like to know and as much as we expect we will know.”33
Those cautions didn’t last long. Not only did the United States allow arming of Libyan rebels from abroad, but the Obama administration tasked the CIA with ways of helping to accomplish that goal. If performed without congressional approval, such covert actions amounted to violations of the so-called covert action statute (50 U.S. Code § 413b).
Libyan terrorist groups began receiving arms shipments and money via Qatar. The Obama administration approved such operations. That was due to the administration’s unwillingness to get too involved directly with the Libyan uprising—they recognized that they had no domestic support for such involvement, and instead attempted to find a backdoor way to support Libyan terrorist groups. So the United States green-lit a gunrunning operation via Qatar to those groups. One of the people looking to arm the Libyan terrorists was an American arms dealer in communication with one of the men who would be killed in Benghazi.
His name was Marc Turi, and he was an arms merchant who lives in Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. In March 2011, he emailed then-special representative to the Libyan rebel alliance Chris Stevens, applying to help smuggle weapons. Stevens said he would pass the request up the chain. That application was originally turned down because it openly specified desire to ship weapons into Libya. A few months later, he applied again, this time saying he wanted to ship weapons via Qatar. This request was approved. Turi told the New York Times that his only job was to get the weapons to Qatar; what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.” A few months after the United States okayed Turi’s gun dealing, the Department of Homeland Security raided his home.34
The United States’ policy of winding down the war on terrorism played right into the hands of such terrorists. Take, for example, the case of Sufyan Ben Qumu. Qumu drove a tank in the Libyan army, spent time in prison in that country, and was a known drug addict; he fled Libya in favor of Egypt before heading to Afghanistan and joining Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Then he moved on up to the Taliban before being captured in Pakistan and sent to the United States, which imprisoned him at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At the time, he was considered a “medium to high risk . . . likely to pose a threat to the United States, its interests and allies.” In 2007, the Bush administration sent Qumu back to Libya to be handled by Qaddafi, on the condition that Libya and the United States could find a “satisfactory agreement . . . that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence.” In 2008, Qumu was released as the Qaddafi regime attempted to parley with the burgeoning rebellion.
All of that was on Bush. But it was President Obama who turned Qumu from enemy of the United States into, as the New York Times put it, an “ally of sorts.” What changed? The “remarkable turnabout,” the Times stated, “result[ed] from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.” Qumu led the Darnah Brigade, which received support from NATO. The Times quoted unnamed Western observers as stating that Qumu wasn’t much of a threat: “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones. . . . Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much of a threat to the West.”35 Giving guns to those folks, the Obama administration believed, wasn’t a problem. Legally, of course, it was: it was a violation of the Espionage Act, given that we were literally handing guns to terrorists without congressional approval. On September 19, 2012, Bret Baier of Fox News reported that intelligence sources believed that one Sufyan Ben Qumu had masterminded the attack on the compound in Benghazi—the same Qumu the United States had released from Guantanamo Bay, then helped attain weapons.36
PUTTING GUNS IN THE HANDS OF “SOME VERY UGLY PEOPLE”
There was more involved than the United States merely green-lighting other countries’ shipping weapons into Libya to Islamist terrorists. The United States played a direct role in arming such enemies of America. And that role continued long after Qaddafi’s fall, as the United States worked to arm al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria.
The U.S. operation in Benghazi was apparently crucial to American gunrunning into Syria. In January 2013, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether she had any knowledge of a CIA gunrunning operation in Benghazi. She responded, “You’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex,” claiming not to know whether such an operation had in fact been in place.37
But according to Joe diGenova, attorney for one of the whistle-blowers in Benghazi, four hundred U.S. missiles were “diverted to Libya” just before the September 11, 2012, attacks; diGenova said that the missiles were stolen and fell into “the hands of some very ugly people.” He said that the U.S. complex in Libya “was somehow involved in the distribution of those missiles,” sourcing his information to a “former intelligence official who stayed in constant contact with people in the special ops and intelligence community.” The British newspaper the Telegraph reported as well that thirty-five CIA operatives were in Benghazi working “on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian rebels.”38
On September 14, 2012, three days after the attack on the Benghazi annex, the Times of London reported that a Libyan ship loaded with the single “largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began has docked in Turkey and most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines. Among more than 400 tonnes of cargo the vessel was carrying were SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), which Syrian sources said could be a game-changer for the rebels.”39
All of this was allegedly part of a broader operation. In March 2013, the New York Times reported that the CIA had been shipping weapons to Syria for a year or more: “The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi, and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.”40 In June 2012, the Times reported that a coterie of CIA officers was working in southern Turkey, attempting to funnel weapons to particular groups. “The weapons,” the Times reported, “including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.”
The White House continued to
claim that all aid was “nonlethal.”41 Ben Swann of Full Disclosure did a one-on-one interview with President Obama. “You mentioned about al Qaeda in your speech,” Swann asked. “Going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan, certainly going after them in Yemen as well. And yet there’s some concern about the U.S. funding the Syrian opposition when there are a lot of reports about al Qaeda heading up that opposition. How do you justify the two?” Obama answered: “I shared that concern, so what we’ve done is said we will provide nonlethal assistance to Syrian opposition leadership that are committed to a political transition, are committed to an observance of human rights. We’re not going to just dive in and get involved in a civil war that in fact involves . . . some folks who would over the long term do the United States harm.”42
Obviously, that wasn’t true.
Arms poured into Egypt, too. In August 2013, after a military coup ousted erstwhile Obama friend Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi, the military reported on Muslim Brotherhood terrorist action . . . using U.S. weapons. Jihadists, the military reported, were using U.S. Hellfire missiles against government buildings in the Sinai Peninsula. Pictures showed an AGM-114F Hellfire missile with the label “U.S.” on the side. “Reports of U.S.-made weapons turning up in the Sinai date back to at least January, when six U.S.-made missiles were found in a cache of weapons bound for Gaza,” Fox News reported. Just a few months earlier, Fox News reported that “weapons left over from the revolution in Libya were being sold at clandestine auctions in the Sinai Peninsula.”43
Where did all these weapons end up? With virtually every major affiliate of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Times reported that the administration never could determine where all the weapons from the various programs had gone, although “[s]ome of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders.”44 As early as March 2011, al-Qaeda, according to the president of Chad, Idriss Déby Itno, had been raiding weapons in the Libyan rebel areas for their own use internationally.45 Hillary admitted as much in her final Senate testimony before leaving as secretary of state: She blamed Libya’s liberated storehouses of weapons for the gun smuggling that had become so common. “Libya was awash in weapons before the revolution,” she said.46 But not quite as awash as after the United States government began violating its own law in order to arm those Libyans.
“THE TALIBAN IS ON THE INSIDE OF THE BUILDING”
The attempt to minimize American involvement in arms smuggling in Libya rested on the secrecy of the mission in Benghazi.
The U.S. operation in Benghazi apparently rested on the CIA gunrunning operation. While initial reports suggested that there was a “consulate” in Benghazi, there was no official consulate—there was merely the CIA annex that was allegedly funneling weapons to the Libyan terrorists. According to reporter Aaron Klein, the U.S. diplomatic mission “actually served as a meeting place to coordinate aid for the rebel-led insurgencies in the Middle East, according to Middle Eastern security officials.” Both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton called the Benghazi complex a “mission.” As Klein points out, diplomatic missions, unlike consulates, are given a wide variety of responsibilities unrelated to immigration issues. The State Department website did not list Benghazi as a location for a consulate.47 Klein also reports that Ambassador Chris Stevens, who headed up the mission, was an integral spoke in the gunrunning wheel. “Stevens served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate the recruitment by Saudi Arabia of Islamic fighters from North Africa and Libya. The jihadists were sent to Syria via Turkey to attack Assad’s forces, said the security officials,” Klein wrote.48
Such a gunrunning operation would necessitate high security. After all, funneling thousands of weapons through a heavily terrorist area would seem to require a few guns of your own to protect those shipments. In the months leading up to September 2012, the New York Times reported, “the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants.” Within weeks, the United States was receiving reports of arms going to out-and-out terrorist groups. The administration never figured out where within the country the weapons, which included machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, went. This supposedly provoked consternation within the administration.49 But it did not provoke more security for the Benghazi complex.
It should have. As early as July 2011, Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reported that Benghazi’s security situation was controlled by Islamist terrorists—specifically, the Abu Obeida al-Jarrah Brigade, an element of the anti-Qaddafi forces. Abu Obeida was even responsible for killing General Abdel Fattah Younes, one of the leaders of the Libyan opposition who had switched sides from the Qaddafi regime. That assassination came the day after France, the United States, and Britain decided to endorse the Libyan opposition as the legitimate government of Libya. “Unlike the other militias, the Brigade seems to exercise considerable power within the rebel movement,” the Telegraph reported. “[I]t has emerged that the group was in charge of internal security in Benghazi, essentially operating as a secret police force.”50 That’s right—Islamist terrorists ran the security forces in Benghazi.
Those who were in Benghazi understood the threat. According to Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer at the U.S. embassy in Libya, in the full year before September 11, there were fifty violent incidents against American targets in Benghazi alone.51 On May 22, 2012, terrorists launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the Red Cross building; the Red Cross abandoned Benghazi in July. On June 6, terrorists hit U.S. facilities in Benghazi with an improvised explosive device.52 On June 11, a convoy carrying the British ambassador was attacked in Benghazi. The British abandoned Benghazi, leaving their weapons in the charge of the U.S. mission. The weapons went missing. “We are working with the U.S. to establish what, if anything, has happened to this equipment,” said a Foreign Office spokesman.53 In August, there were attacks on Benghazi military intelligence offices. On August 10, a Libyan army general was assassinated. On August 20, terrorists bombed a car belonging to an Egyptian diplomat.54 Even the United Nations abandoned Benghazi. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, who handled U.S. military supplementation of diplomatic security, recommended a pullout from Benghazi. “It was apparent to me,” he said, “that we were the last [Western] flag flying in Benghazi. We were the last thing on their target list to remove from Benghazi.”55
But the Obama administration was deeply fearful of offending the locals, especially given the administration’s newfound willingness to work with al-Qaeda across the Middle East. This was part and parcel of the administration’s pusillanimous approach to the Arab Spring: in building a new coterie of supposed Islamist allies, the United States could not afford to offend. The principle of nonoffense was the rationale behind the Obama administration’s befuddling and sickening decision to leave American personnel in Benghazi virtually unprotected.
And so security at the mission was disastrous. Nordstrom told Congress that the State Department had hired Libyan militia members to provide security—they called themselves the “17th of February Martyrs Brigade.” That group is al-Qaeda sympathetic, and for months before September 11, 2012, carried the al-Qaeda black flag on its website. As Newsmax reported, “Several entries on the militia’s Facebook page openly profess sympathy for Ansar al-Sharia, the hardline Islamist extremist group widely blamed for the deadly attack on the mission. . . . Just a few days before Stevens arrived in Benghazi, the Martyrs Brigade informed State Department officials they no longer would provide security as members of the mission, including Stevens, traveled through the city.”56
In the spring of 2012, Nordstrom stated, “we saw and noted an increasing number of attacks and incidents targeting foreign affiliated organizations.” Nonetheless, “bec
ause of Libyan political sensitivities, armed private security companies were not allowed to operate in Libya. Therefore, our existing, uniformed static local guard force, both in Tripoli and Benghazi were unarmed. . . .”57 Unarmed guards in the middle of Benghazi, a terrorist haven, thanks to politically correct concerns about Libyan sensitivities.
In his written testimony, Nordstrom expressed confidence in the security plan. But in his spoken testimony, Nordstrom told Congress that security was “inappropriately low” and said that he, along with Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, was worried about the flow of terrorists into Benghazi. Nordstrom worried, too, that he didn’t think he could rely on the “17th of February Martyrs Brigade.” They weren’t experienced and hadn’t been paid in months. According to Nordstrom, he had “no idea if they would respond to an attack.”58
Documents released by the State Department show repeated requests for more security. On November 30, 2011, Nordstrom wrote to Deputy Chief of Mission Joan Polaschik and State Department staffer G. Kathleen Hill, complaining about the security dropping precipitously in Benghazi. “Is there a plan for a closure of operations in Benghazi or will we be at this level for some time? If we have such a small footprint, we could really utilize the armored vehicles that are there,” Nordstrom wrote. Hill wrote back, irked at Nordstrom: “This came up in conversations with Chris Stevens as well. . . . The plan for Benghazi staffing calls for 3 State (PO, IM/Mgmt reporting officer) plus DS (3–5) plus 1–2 TDYs (temporary staffers) at any given time. With that how many cars does Benghazi need?” On February 11, 2012, Shawn P. Crowley, a foreign service officer at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, wrote, “Apologies for being a broken record, but beginning tomorrow Benghazi will be down to two agents. . . . We have no drivers and new local guard contract employees have no experience driving armored vehicles. . . .”