One year ago, in June 2012, the “National Security Five” — five members of Congress led by Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) — called attention to U.S. government infiltration by Muslim Brotherhood (MB) operatives. Based on disturbing information from court evidence and documents, correspondence, media reports, congressional briefings, and public statements, they found that individuals with questionable loyalty to the United States held high-level security clearances and worked in key national security positions. Tragically for the security of the United States and the safety of its citizens, these five earnest members of Congress, armed with ample evidence, were roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats, and their request for investigations was ignored.
Unfortunately for our country, this response is not atypical, but simply another in a series of thwarted or abandoned investigations over decades whose outcomes have critical national security implications for America.
A mere 20 years ago, responding to pressure from then-President Clinton to de-emphasize Arab international terrorism, FBI head Louis Freeh shifted the agency’s focus from foreign terrorists to domestic terrorists or “rightwing extremists.” As a direct consequence, 40 boxes of evidence from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 that would have revealed valuable information about Al Qaeda operations were never reviewed and key evidence, including the presence of Arab nationals at U.S. flight schools, was ignored.
In the same way, serious evidence of Middle Eastern involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, injured more than 680 people and damaged 324 buildings within a 16 block radius was ignored. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) alluded to this in his 2006 Chairman’s Report for the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on the attack. Rohrabacher cited suspicions of meetings and phone calls between bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and convicted 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) mastermind Ramzi Yousef. Similarly, the attack strategy and mechanics resembled the first WTC bombing. Finally, multiple witnesses reported seeing Hussain Hashem al-Hussaini, an Iraqi connected to Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, in the company of McVeigh prior to the bombing, leaving the truck used in the attack, and driving away prior to the blast. These significant similarities didn’t even warrant an investigation by the Clinton administration.
The Clinton administration also ignored the findings of Able Danger, an 80-person military intelligence program (1999-2001) created to gather intelligence on Al Qaeda networks. The program’s findings were presented to the Pentagon more than a year prior to 9/11. The intelligence unit identified 60 terrorists inside the United States, including a Brooklyn cell headed by Mohammed Atta and three other terrorists later involved in 9/11. This crucial information was ignored by the Clinton Department of Defense (DoD), which chose not to act on it and not to pass it on to the FBI. Two members of the Able Danger team, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer and Navy Commander Scott Philpott, attempted to arrange meetings on three occasions to transfer the open-source information about Al Qaeda to the FBI and to warn the government about upcoming attacks. But Clinton administration lawyers under the direction of Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick thwarted their efforts and Able Danger was shut down before 9/11 occurred. Although Able Danger intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer provided intelligence from its investigation to the director of the 9/11 Commission, that information was not included in the final report and Lt. Col. Shaffer was not permitted to testify. Ultimately the DoD denied the accuracy of the information and retaliated against him. When Shaffer first published his book, Operation Dark Heart, the DoD bought and destroyed all 9,500 copies.
Remarkably, Able Danger had identified the threat to the USS Cole two weeks before the attack and the role played by the Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, a major funding, recruiting, and fundraising source for Al Qaeda in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Once limited to Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, thanks to U.S. policies, has metastasized around the world, and is in the consolidation/training phase for the new jihad.
By Raymond Ibrahim:
Americans pay attention to terrorists when they blow up battleships, skyscrapers, and embassies. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the real threat lies in the calm before the storm.
The last ten years have been relatively secure in the U.S. Since 9/11 there have been no major terrorist attacks executed on our soil before Boston, and no large loss of American lives. This has lulled Americans into a false sense of security.
But our government should know better.
In fact, the very same U.S. policies that created al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s—leading to the horrific attacks of 9/11—are today allowing al-Qaeda to metastasize all around the Muslim world. As in the 80s, these new terrorist cells are quietly gathering strength now, and are sure to deliver future terror strikes that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.
To understand this dire prediction, we must first examine the United States’ history of empowering Islamic jihadis—only to be attacked by those same jihadis many years later—and the chronic shortsightedness of American policymakers, whose policies are based on their brief tenure, not America’s long-term wellbeing.
In the 1980s, the U.S. supported Afghani rebels—among them the jihadis—to repel the Soviets. Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and countless foreign jihadis journeyed to Afghanistan to form a base of training and planning—the first prerequisite of the jihad, as delineated in Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones.
Al-Qaeda—which tellingly means “the base”—was born.
The U.S. supported al-Qaeda, they defeated the Soviets, shook hands with Reagan, Afghanistan became ruled by the Taliban, and for many years all seemed well.
But it wasn’t. For over a decade al-Qaeda, unfettered in Afghanistan, trained and plotted. Then came the strikes of 9/11, which were portrayed by the talking heads as a great and unexpected surprise: “What happened? Who knew? Why do they hate us?”
Had al-Qaeda not secured a base of operations, 9/11 would not have occurred.
But if Reagan helped create the first al-Qaeda cell in relatively unimportant Afghanistan, Obama is helping to create numerous, more emboldened, al-Qaeda cells in some of the most important Islamic nations.
He is doing this by helping get rid of Arab autocrats who were effective at suppressing jihadis (even if for selfish reasons), while empowering some of the most radical jihadis who were formerly imprisoned or in hiding.
And all in the name of the “Arab Spring” and “democracy.”
“Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” President Reagan counseled in his farewell address. We would do well to heed his advice as President Obama attempts to lead America backwards, to September 10. Make no mistake: That was the not-so-subtle message he sent last week during his speech at the National Defense University—a speech that was so full of inaccuracies that one is left to conclude the president is either living in an alternate universe or willfully disregarding the facts. Just consider some of the statements he made.
1. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.”
In fact, Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others during his shooting rampage at Ft. Hood in November 2009—an attack authorized by al Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen (AQAP). Since the U.S. Army—no doubt following orders far up the chain of command—refuses to classify the Ft. Hood shooting as a terrorist attack, the survivors’ injuries and acts of bravery cannot be categorized as “combat related.”
In addition, the Boston Marathon bombing was a large-scale attack carried out by individuals who were radicalized to jihad and trained by jihadist elements in Russia.
Moreover, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, inspired and trained by AQAP, almost took down a passenger plane in December 2009; and Faisal Shahzad, trained by jihadists in Pakistan, deployed an IED in Times Square in 2010. Just as catching a thief in the act doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed a crime, the fact that these attacks failed does not mean they were not attacks.
2. “The core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat…They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.”
Like a five-year-old, the president seems to believe that if he says something often enough and loud enough, it will become true. In fact, al Qaeda affiliates did carry out the attacks on Benghazi. No matter what the final draft of those infamous talking points said, several of the attackers were al Qaeda operatives.
3. “Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.”
In fact, American acquiescence and aloofness have allowed extremists to gain a foothold in these places.
The Ansar al Sharia Brigade, the Islamist terror group linked to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, continues to operate freely in that Libyan city, according to U.S. military officials.
The group remains active in the Mediterranean port city, operating patrols and checkpoints, and earlier this year reached an agreement with other Islamist groups allowing it to operate openly, said military officials familiar with intelligence reports from North Africa.
The group “continues to spread its ideology in the Benghazi area, particularly targeting youth,” said one official, who noted that the lack of central government security was the key reason the militia has not been suppressed.
The officials disclosed details of the group’s activities on condition of anonymity.
Ansar al Sharia also is using Facebook to publicize its activities, including charitable work in poor areas, and is constructing some buildings. It also claimed to be operating a medical clinic in Benghazi. Other activities include repairing schools and holding conferences for local youth.
According to the officials, the group successfully exploited the weakness of security authorities in Benghazi and Libya in general to boost its presence. The group is attempting to reinvent itself as a humanitarian and charitable organization after the Sept. 11 attack.
The FBI suspected within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that the American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki may have purchased tickets for some of the hijackers for air travel in advance of the attacks, according to newly released documents reviewed exclusively by Fox News.
The purpose of these flights remains unclear, but the 9/11 Commission report later noted that the hijackers had used flights in the lead-up to the attacks to test security and surveillance.
The heavily redacted records – obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of information Act request – suggest the FBI held evidence tying the American-born cleric to the hijackers just 16 days after the attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
“We have FBI documents showing that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought three tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and into Las Vegas, including the lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Fox News.
He added that the records show the cleric, killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, “was a central focus of the FBI’s investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn’t cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance.”
One FBI investigative report known as a 302 summarizes the bureau’s investigation of Al-Awlaki’s Visa transactions. While heavily redacted, the document indicates a credit transaction for “Atta, Mohammed — American West Airlines, 08/13/2001, Washington, DC to Las Vegas to Miami,” the document says.
The mid-August flight, according to the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which first investigated the attacks, was one of Atta’s numerous and crucial surveillance flights.
“On August 13, Atta flew a second time across country from Washington to Las Vegas on a Boeing 757 (seated in first class) returning on August 14 to Fort Lauderdale,” the 9/11 report reads.
The FBI documents also show a credit card record for a “Suqami, S. —-Southwest Airlines, 07/10/2001, Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando.” Satam al-Suqami was one of the muscle hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, which slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
The third individual, identified in the records is a “W. al-Sheri — National Airlines, 08/01/2001, San Francisco to Las Vegas to Miami.” This appears to be either Waleed al-Shehri or Wail al-Shehri. The two brothers were also muscle hijackers, according to the 9/11 Commission report.
As part of its ongoing investigation of the cleric, Fox News was first to report in the special “Fox News Reporting – The Secrets of 9/11,” broadcast in September 2011, that the cleric was an overlooked key player in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board last week issued a devastating report on the events leading up to the Sept. 11 assassination of four Americans at our Benghazi consulate. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has still not faced questioning by Congress or the media more than three months after the tragedy.
A series of excuses has conveniently allowed her to escape cross examination until after the ARB report was released. Clinton sails right along, now preparing the first steps for what is widely expected to be her 2016 presidential campaign.
Last week, however, Sen. Bob Corker asserted that no new secretary of state be confirmed until Clinton testifies. Corker, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee starting in January, was joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Their idea provides a strong incentive to committee Chairman John Kerry, now tapped as Clinton’s successor, to schedule her testimony.
The starting point for questioning Clinton is realizing that the Benghazi debacle embodies both policy and management failures. The administration’s utterly wrong-headed view of the Middle East created an atmosphere that fostered tragically erroneous management decisions. Clinton’s blithe disregard of the actual political reality in Libya and four years of not attending to seemingly mundane management issues represented a palpable failure of leadership directly contributing to the Benghazi tragedy.
The ARB did not blame specific individuals, citing instead “systemic” failures. Clinton’s deputies, testifying in her absence on Dec. 20, conceded that State had not “connected the dots” as security deteriorated in Libya and the Middle East generally.
But in any organization, there is only one “first chair,” and Clinton must answer why she (and President Obama) was so convinced that the war on terror was over and al Qaeda defeated; that “leading from behind” in overthrowing Khadafy had succeeded, and that the Arab Spring was bringing stability and democracy to Libya and the region more broadly.
The Benghazi tragedy disproved all these assertions, and Clinton is accountable for the broad policy failures, not just the deadly specifics. Congressional hearings should go well beyond the ARB report. The basic questions Clinton now must answer are straightforward: What did she know; when did she know it — and what did she do about it, before, during and after the Sept. 11 attacks? Here are some elaborations:
* Before the attack, was Clinton aware of the security threats to our consulate and other international presences in Benghazi? Did she know about repeated Tripoli embassy requests for enhanced security? If not, why not?
Libya was a centerpiece of supposed success in Obama’s foreign policy, not some country of small significance and low threat levels. It is important to establish not only the actual paper trail in this case, but even more importantly why, on such a critical foreign-policy issue, it did not automatically come to Clinton’s seventh-floor office.
* On Sept. 11, what were Clinton and Obama doing? We need a minute-by-minute chronology. When was she first told of the attack, and what was said? When and how many times did she speak with the president? What help did she ask for? Was it denied, and by whom? When did she retire for the evening?
* And in the tragedy’s aftermath, Clinton must explain how the administration came up with its story that the Benghazi attack grew out of a demonstration against the now-famous Mohammed video trailer. Clinton herself referred to the video at the Sept. 14 ceremony when the remains of the four murdered Americans returned home. On this point, the ARB was crystal clear that “no protest took place” before the attacks.
Obama will hold office for four more years, and Clinton apparently aspires to succeed him. Their worldview and its policy consequences must not be allowed to escape scrutiny as they did in the just-concluded presidential campaign. Most of the media have certainly shown little interest in exposing administration failures. Clinton’s testimony may be the last chance to do so for a long time.
ORLANDO, Fla. — WFTV has uncovered an Orange County imam’s past ties to the so-called Blind Sheik, whose extremist group is blamed for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Channel 9′s Kathi Belich broke the story of Marcus Robertson’s arrest last year. On Monday, she obtained new documents in the case that detail even more disturbing information.
Federal prosecutors said Orange County Imam Abu Taubah, aka convicted felon Marcus Robertson, has murdered people, attempted assassinations, took hostages and tried to kill police officers, all to fund attacks on U.S. soil.
So where are the charges?
Last year, months before the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutors said Robertson planned an attack on U.S. military personnel overseas.
So where are the charges?
Authorities said Robertson was bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik. Rahman’s extremist Islamic group was blamed for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Authorities said Robertson led a band of thieves who robbed banks and the government in the 1990s. He was even accused of giving Rahman $300,000 for a much bigger New York attack on the Washington Bridge, tunnels and government buildings.
Rahman is in prison, and Robertson served four years, but federal prosecutors said he’s training others to kill overseas.
They said Robertson and Jonathan Jimenez committed tax fraud to send Jimenez on a jihad journey from Orlando to Mauritania to kill U.S. military personnel, possibly with a suicide bombing.
The FBI said Jimenez was worried they’d all get caught, because he said Robertson wasn’t just talking about the Quran here at the Masjid Al-Ihsaan mosque in East Orange County, he was talking about the military, and people were bringing weapons and ammunition.
The FBI said they worked on the plan in Robertson’s East Orange County home and said phone taps and confidential informants show that just months before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Robertson taught Jimenez to kill officers first and to kill Marines, because they’re “fighters and warriors on the battlefield.”
The feds won’t name the other suspects.
The FBI said Robertson was in a rush to get Jimenez to Mauritania last year, but he was arrested 19 days before Sept. 11, 2011.
The U.S. didn’t consider Ansar al-Sharia a threat—until they showed up in Benghazi on Sept. 11. Eli Lake on the truth behind Libya’s latest jihadists:
Mohammad Hannon / AP Photo
One of the main participants in the Sept. 11 anniversary assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission and Central Intelligence Agency annex in Benghazi is a group formed earlier this year called Ansar al-Sharia, according to the current U.S. intelligence assessment of the attack. Ansar al-Sharia, which translates as “supporters of Islamic law,” has many roles in Libya’s second city. It provides security for the city’s main hospital. It’s also a social-services organization and an ideological movement that seeks to bring its corner of eastern Libya under the rule of an Islamic government, according to the group’s own public information and published interviews with its leaders.
Before the attacks, the U.S. intelligence community didn’t consider Ansar al-Sharia a threat to American interests, and the group wasn’t a priority target for the CIA officers monitoring jihadists in Libya, according to U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigations into the Benghazi attacks.
Because Ansar al-Sharia wasn’t designated as a terrorist group or thought to have significant connections to al Qaeda, there were fewer resources deployed to monitor the organization’s members, these officials say. It also makes it tricky to go after the group’s leaders now. Under the war resolution Congress passed three days after the original Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush and President Obama have asserted the authority to kill or capture al Qaeda and associated groups all over the world. That resolution is the legal basis for the maintenance of kill lists maintained by the CIA and the military to send special operations teams or predator drones to Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Because Ansar al-Sharia was regarded by the intelligence community as separate and distinct from al Qaeda, the group managed to avoid being added to these target lists, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials.
Some analysts in the intelligence community disagreed with the official assessment, however. A public report released in August by the Library of Congress at the direction of a Pentagon organization that focuses on counter-terrorism research concluded that Ansar al-Sharia “increasingly embodied al Qaeda’s presence in Libya.” But this wasn’t the prevailing view.
“In general, Ansar al-Sharia was viewed as a local extremist group with an eye on gaining political ground in Libya,” said one U.S. official who is familiar with the intelligence assessment. “Of course, there were concerns that Islamist militias such as Ansar could help more violent extremists gain a foothold.”
One U.S. intelligence contractor working on the investigation into the Benghazi attacks said, “We were not focused on these guys.” Militias like Ansar al-Sharia, this person said, might be analyzed and monitored, but they weren’t the focus of the analysts who were maintaining kill lists and monitoring the broader war against al Qaeda.
Sensitive documents found amid the wreckage of the U.S. consulate shine new light on the Sept. 11 assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
BY HARALD DOORNBOS, JENAN MOUSSA:
BENGHAZI, Libya — More than six weeks after the shocking assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — and nearly a month after an FBI team arrived to collect evidence about the attack – the battle-scarred, fire-damaged compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens and another Foreign Service officer lost their lives on Sept. 11 still holds sensitive documents and other relics of that traumatic final day, including drafts of two letters worrying that the compound was under “troubling” surveillance and complaining that the Libyan government failed to fulfill requests for additional security.
When we visited on Oct. 26 to prepare a storyfor Dubai based Al Aan TV, we found not only Stevens’s personal copy of the Aug. 6 New Yorker, lying on remnants of the bed in the safe room where Stevens spent his final hours, but several ash-strewn documents beneath rubble in the looted Tactical Operations Center, one of the four main buildings of the partially destroyed compound. Some of the documents — such as an email from Stevens to his political officer in Benghazi and a flight itinerary sent to Sean Smith, a U.S. diplomat slain in the attack — are clearly marked as State Department correspondence.Others are unsigned printouts of messages to local and national Libyan authorities. The two unsigned draft letters are both dated Sept. 11 and express strong fears about the security situation at the compound on what would turn out to be a tragic day. They also indicate that Stevens and his team had officially requested additional security at the Benghazi compound for his visit — and that they apparently did not feel it was being provided.
One letter, written on Sept. 11 and addressed to Mohamed Obeidi, the head of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ office in Benghazi, reads:
“Finally, early this morning at 0643, September 11, 2012, one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the U.S. special mission and furthermore that this person was part of the police unit sent to protect the mission. The police car stationed where this event occurred was number 322.”
The account accords with a message written by Smith, the IT officer who was killed in the assault, on a gaming forum on Sept. 11. “Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures,” he wrote hours before the assault.
The State Department declined to comment directly on the documents, citing an ongoing investigation. “An independent board is conducting a thorough review of the assault on our post in Benghazi,” deputy spokesman Mark Toner said. “Once we have the board’s comprehensive account of what happened, findings and recommendations, we can fully address these matters.”
Obeidi, the Libyan official named on one of the printouts, said he had not received any such letter, adding, “I did not even know that the U.S. ambassador was visiting Benghazi.” However, a spokesman for the Benghazi police confirmed that the ministry had notified the police of the ambassador’s visit. “We did not receive that letter from the U.S. consulate. We received a letter from Ministry of Foreign Affairs Benghazi asking for additional security measures around consulate during visit of the ambassador. And the police provided all extra security which was asked for,” the spokesman said.
It is not clear whether the U.S. letters were ever sent, and if so, what action was taken before the assault on the evening of Sept. 11. But they speak to a dangerous and uncertain security environment in Benghazi that clearly had many State Department officials worried for their safety.
Since the fall of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime, the country’s powerful militias have often run roughshod over the police and national army — and often coopted these institutions for their own purposes. U.S. officials were certainly well aware of the sway that various militias held over Benghazi, given that the consulate’s external security was supposed to be provided by the Islamist-leaning February 17 brigade.
What exactly happened that night is still a mystery. Libyans have pointed fingers at Ansar al-Sharia, a hard-line Islamist group with al Qaeda sympathies, if not ties. Ansar al-Sharia has denied involvement, but some of its members were spotted at the consulate.
The document also suggests that the U.S. consulate had asked Libyan authorities on Sept. 9 for extra security measures in preparation for Stevens’ visit, but that the Libyans had failed to provide promised support.
“On Sunday, September 9, 2012, the U.S. mission requested additional police support at our compound for the duration of U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens’ visit. We requested daily, twenty-four hour police protection at the front and rear of the U.S. mission as well as a roving patrol. In addition we requested the services of a police explosive detection dog,” the letter reads.
“We were given assurances from the highest authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that all due support would be provided for Ambassador Stevens’ visit to Benghazi. However, we are saddened to report that we have only received an occasional police presence at our main gate. Many hours pass when we have no police support at all.”
The letter concludes with a request to the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs to look into the incident of the policeman conducting surveillance, and the absence of requested security measures. “We submit this report to you with the hopes that an official inquiry can be made into this incident and that the U.S. Mission may receive the requested police support,” the letter reads.
A number of other documents were found on the floor inside the TOC building. They are partly covered with ash, but legible.
A second letter is addressed to Benghazi’s police chief and also concerns the police surveillance of the U.S. consulate on the morning of Sept. 11. The letter also requests an investigation of the incident, and states that the consulate “takes this opportunity to renew to the Benghazi Police the assurances of its highest consideration and hopes for increased cooperation.” Benghazi’s head of police, Brigadier Hussain Abu Hmeidah, was fired by the government in Tripoli one week after the consulate attack. However, Abu Hmeidah refused to step down and is still serving as the head of police. He is currently on sick leave, according to his office manager, Captain Seraj Eddine al-Sheikhi, and was unavailable for comment.
The man who officially was appointed to succeed Abu Hmeidah as Benghazi’s police chief, Salah Doghman, said in a Sept 19 interview with Reuters: “This is a mess …When you go to the police headquarters, you will find there no police. The people in charge are not at their desks. They have refused to let me take up my job.”
The concerns about police surveillance exhibited in the letters to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Benghazi police chief cast further doubt on early reports that a spontaneous protest was to blame for the attack on the U.S. consulate — reports that the State Department has disavowed. They also appear to contradict an Oct. 9 State Department briefing on the consulate attack, during which a senior State Department official claimed that there had been no security incidents at the consulate that day. “Everything is calm at 8:30 p.m,” the official said. “There’s nothing unusual. There has been nothing unusual during the day at all outside.”
These letters were found a month and a half after the attack, despite a visit to the compound by FBI investigators. Other documents found at the TOC building include a printout of an unclassified Sept. 9 email between Stevens and David McFarland, the head of the U.S. Embassy’s political and economic section, inquiring about meetings for the ambassador’s upcoming visit; telephone numbers and names of embassy staff; and a hotel bill from Stevens’ 2011 stay at the Tibesti Hotel in Benghazi.
The continued threat to U.S. personnel in Benghazi may be the reason these documents escaped the FBI’s attention. With suspected militants still roaming the streets, FBI investigators only had limited time to check the consulate compound. According to a Benghazi resident who resides near the consulate, the FBI team spent only three hours examining the compound.
The FBI declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
Before getting to the documentary, the news headline of the day so far is that the Benghazi sacking may have been part of a larger campaign to drive the U.S. out of eastern Libya. Fox reports on that, building its case on the word of two military sources and the hundreds of attacks that led up to the deadly 9-11-12 assault.
The Sept. 11 attack was preceded by hundreds of security incidents in Libya over the past year. Several of them involved western targets in the Benghazi area, which could indicate a pattern.
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in June 6 with an improvised explosive device, planted in the ledge of the perimeter wall, was described as a probing attack to measure the response. This incident, coupled with attacks on the International Red Cross and an RPG attack on the British ambassador’s convoy — after which the British withdrew — suggest a pattern to drive western influence from the region.
Further, it fits with a broader effort by the Al Qaeda affiliate and the militant group Ansar al-Sharia to establish an Islamic state in eastern Libya. Libyan authorities are identifying Ansar al-Sharia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala as the commander of the attack, though Fox News was told the U.S. intelligence community is not going quite that far. Rather, Khattala is on the short list of suspects and was described as “one to watch.”
As noted earlier, the New York Times found him hanging out in the local posh hotel sipping a hipster drink. The idea that the 9-11-12 attack was part of a larger campaign squares up well with that August 2012 Library of Congress report in which Ansar al Sharia is described as taking a leading role in the attempt to Islamicize post-Gaddafi Libya. Drive the west out, humiliate America, be the strong horse — that seems to be the Islamist path to power in Libya. They were succeeding too. Lt. Col. Andrew Wood testified that by the time of the Benghazi attack, the American flag was the last western one flying in the city. The British and the Red Cross had already been driven out by attacks. The U.S. consulate, as insecure as it was, became a sort of forward outpost and weapons depot for the British mission. The weapons that the prime suspect in the attack claims to have found inside the compound may well have been the stored British arms. They’re surely now in the hands of the Islamist militias, along with who knows what other material and information they were able to scoop up the night of the attack and in the three weeks that followed between that night and the FBI’s arrival.
Now, to the documentary, which was produced by ConservARTive.com. It shows several things that I don’t think have been seen elsewhere. One of those is what may be Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ final interview. It was taped sometime in June 2012, apparently after the probing attack on the wall of the consulate. That attack was mounted to test the U.S. response. The U.S. evidently did not respond at all. The Islamists probably expected the U.S. to beef up security, but when no new security arrived, they probably took that as a green light to proceed.
The second piece of news in the documentary is footage of the Islamist show of force in Benghazi in June. That show of force was described in the August report, but footage has been scarce. You’ll see in the 10-minute documentary that it was your typical Islamist militia parade, with masked fighters manning guns mounted in pick-up trucks or waving AKs out the windows. Place yourself in the streets as an average Libyan. You’re happy that Gaddafi is gone but the country is in chaos. You mostly want to be left alone to live your life, but the west is evacuating the place and here’s a multi-battalion strength show of force parading down the streets in your town. They’re honking, waving guns, and the rest, while the westerners are taking down their flags and going home. Who appears to be the strong horse in your neighborhood?
The third new finding in the documentary is the explicit threat to attack the consulate to retaliate for the U.S. killing of a local al-Qaeda big shot. That comes at about the 3:53 mark. The threat aired in June. Its title: “Take U.S. Consulate in Retaliation for Abu Yaya Al-Libbi.”
As the security situation worsened, Ambassador Stevens puts up a brave face as you’ll see in the documentary, talking about education and health care to the press in the newly free Libya, while downplaying the increasing security threat and appealing to the average Libyan’s desire to be free. Behind the scenes, he and his security officers repeatedly asked the State Department for more help. We don’t know if sending more security to Benghazi would have kept him alive. We do know that the terrorists probed security with lower scale attacks in the summer and got no American response, and we do know what they did with that intelligence.
We also know what President Obama was doing with his intelligence in the weeks leading up to the attacks: He was paying little or no attention to it. He had it delivered to his iPad and…that’s all we know. He had attended fewer than half of his Presidential Daily Briefings in 2012 prior to the Benghazi and Cairo attacks.
Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.
by JANET LEVY:
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