But this was not a simple matter of protecting the identity of intelligence officers working there. There was something more sinister going on there that both the White House and the State Department were keen on keeping quiet. It is the answer to that question that the media has failed to grasp or pursue with any determination.

PJ Media is out with one explanation, which I believe is misleading and wrong on key points. According to Roger Simon:

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”

This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.

The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.

For starters, the “former diplomat” displays a woeful ignorance about past events. The film Charlie Wilson’s War tells the story of how a Texas Congressman got funds approved for an authorized CIA clandestine operation to purchase weapons and distribute those weapons to muslims fighting the Soviets. Wilson did not supply anything other than political clout. That operation was fully approved and sanctioned by Congress. So pardon me if the rest of the ramblings from this diplomat cause me pause.

Let me share with you what I know are some key facts in order to correct the claim offered up by Mr. Simon.

1. There was a Presidential Finding, briefed to the House and Senate Intel committees, for the CIA to collect/buy weapons in Libya as a means of disarming radical militia groups. Those weapons were supposed to be destroyed. So Simon is wrong about this effort. It was a covered intelligence activity. However, none of the intel committees have been given any proof/evidence that weapons were actually destroyed. No briefing on when and where such destruction took place. A guts of this program appeared in a NY Times piece last December:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats. . . .

The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some 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.

I have been able to confirm through a source involved in the operation in Libya that the CIA was working to purchase and collect shoulder fired surface to air missiles aka ManPads.

2. We know from public press reports that a ship carrying Libya weapons docked in Turkey and those weapons were off-loaded and sent to Syrian rebels. (Fox News’ Adam Housley did that story last fall).

A mysterious Libyan ship — reportedly carrying weapons and bound for Syrian rebels — may have some link to the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Fox News has learned.
Through shipping records, Fox News has confirmed that the Libyan-flagged vessel Al Entisar, which means “The Victory,” was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun — 35 miles from the Syrian border — on Sept. 6, just five days before Ambassador Chris Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed during an extended assault by more than 100 Islamist militants.

3.We know from press reports from Turkey that CIA Director David Petraeus made an unscheduled visit in March of 2012 to discuss Syria:

David Petraeus, the CIA chief, held meetings with top Turkish officials both yesterday and on March 12, the Hürriyet Daily News learned. Petraeus met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan yesterday and his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, head of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), the previous day.

4. A few weeks after this visit press reports appear claiming that the CIA was involved in arming the Syria rebels.

A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.

The weapons, 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 C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.

5. I have learned from a source who was on the ground in Libya that the CIA was also recruiting and training Libya surrogates to conduct combat missions. What we do not know for certain is whether or not these fighters were to be used in Libya and surrounding countries or were they sent, instead, to Syria.

6. I have heard via multiple sources, including experienced CIA field operators, that the CIA is using strong arm tactics and intimidation against personnel who worked in Benghazi and on that project back at Headquarters. This includes frequent polygraphs and demands to sign non-disclosure agreements. The Agency does not want anyone talking about what was going on at Benghazi. Members of the House and Senate intel committees, as further evidence of this pressure, have been denied access to the personnel who were at the Annex. This really is unprecedented. Based on my previous experience on clandestine operations, there is no such fear when the activity has been properly and fully briefed to Congress.

What the hell are they covering up? That is the critical, unanswered question. Until the CIA personnel and contractors who were working out of the Annex at Benghazi are fully debriefed, the mystery about the events of last September 11 will persist.

One final observation about Ambassador Stevens. The last time I recall an Ambassador being used to manage an intelligence activity that fell outside the control and direction of the CIA was in El Salvador and involved the efforts of Ambassador Corr to support White House operatives keen on arming the Contras.

The circumstantial evidence is very strong that Ambassador Stevens was supporting a White House directed clandestine program that was not briefed to Congress. This program focused on shipping weapons collected by the sanctioned/approved CIA program in Libya to rebels in Syria. That’s the most likely explanation for why Ambassador Stevens was meeting in Benghazi on the evening of 9-11 with a diplomat from Turkey. We will have to wait for more whistleblowers to come forward to sort all of this out. Stay tuned.

The picture emerging of what the Obama Administration is willing to do in the name of security is quite disturbing. The Constitution strictly limits the power of the Federal Government to conduct searches and seizures. Obama’s Justice Department is ignoring those proscriptions and conducting a wide ranging, unfettered investigation of the press. It is all about intimidation and control of the media.

In the case of the Associated Press, we now know that the Obama Administration really did not care about finding out who leaked. Instead, they wanted to control the timing of the release of the leaked information.

When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?

The reporters left the meeting to discuss the idea with their editors. Within an hour, an administration official was on the line to AP’s offices.

The White House had quashed the one-hour offer as impossible. AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer.

News today that the effort to illegally target the press focused on Fox News’ James Rosen. While the Obama team tries to justify the seizure of private emails as an act to protect our nation’s security, the truth is that the effort by the Obama Department of Justice is all about intimidation. It is a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution.

While some Republicans are up in arms about this, rightfully so, we are subjected to the sorry spectacle of Democrat hacks excusing behavior that is reprehensible and dangerous to the freedoms we are supposed to enjoy.

This attack on journalism would be bad enough, but when you tie it into the IRS abuse in going after conservative groups and the Obama Administration’s concerted effort to intimidate intelligence officers with information about the truth of what happened in Benghazi, the emerging picture of that of a fascist government keen on squashing all opposition and controlling the flow of information.

Does this alarm you?

Let’s take Ambassador Susan Rice. She was sent out on the Sunday talk shows on 16 September to push the lie–a total goddamn lie–that the protests were inspired by a “hateful video” and that Al Qaeda was not involved. Here is the CBS transcript from that day:

SUSAN RICE: They are not on the ground yet, but they have already begun looking at all sorts of evidence of– of various sorts already available to them and to us. And they will get on the ground and continue the investigation. So we’ll want to see the results of that investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–

BOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-Hm.

SUSAN RICE: –sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with him that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?

SUSAN RICE: We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with him that al Qaeda had some part in this?

SUSAN RICE: Well, we’ll have to find out that out. I mean I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.

The first draft of the CIA talking points was very specific about who was involved:

The crowd almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society. That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.

The White House wants you to believe that the reason this tidbit was excised from the final version of the talking points was in response to intervention by the FBI in order to protect the investigation. But that is total bullshit. In fact, the emails released also included news that the FBI had no problems with that being released. The only ones who had a problem with acknowledging an Al Qaeda attack on the anniversary of the first 9-11 were the White House and State Department political types.

Then we have the total discrepancy between DCM Hicks, who testified under oath, and the bogus Accountability Review Board report produced by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen. Shame on these men for their ineptitude and failure to do their job properly.

According to the ARB report, Ambassador Stevens went to Benghazi on his own:

The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington, per standard practice. Timing for his trip was driven in part by commitments in Tripoli, as well as a staffing gap between principal officers in Benghazi. Plans for the Ambassador’s trip provided for minimal close protection security support and were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy’s country team, who were not fully aware of planned movements off compound. The Ambassador did not see a direct threat of an attack of this nature and scale on the U.S. Mission in the overall negative trendline of security incidents from spring to summer 2012. His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments.

But that’s not what the number two man in the US Embassy in Libya said. He testified under oath to the exact opposite (the questioning starts at the two minute mark):

“According to [Ambassador] Chris [Stevens], Secretary Clinton wanted Benghazi converted into a permanent constituent post. Timing for this decision was important. Chris needed to report before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, on the physical and the political and security environment in Benghazi to support an action memo to convert Benghazi from a temporary facility to a permanent facility.”

What Hicks does not say, because he was in a public hearing, is that another reason for Stevens making the trip was to meet with the reps of Turkey to discuss the shipment of weapons and fighters from Libya to Syria. That part of this story remains hidden and shrouded in secrecy. Getting to the bottom of this is one of the reasons Chairman Issa will be grilling Pickering and Mullen behind closed doors.

The list of mea culpas by Obama administration officials involved in the Benghazi response and aftermath include: standing down the counterterrorism Foreign Emergency Support Team, failing to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, failing to release the disputed Benghazi “talking points” when Congress asked for them, and using the word “spontaneous” while avoiding the word “terrorism.”

The emergency response: “I wish we’d sent FEST”

The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as “FEST” is described as “the US Government’s only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide.” It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.

Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: “I wish we’d sent it.

The official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Patrick Kennedy, quickly dispensed with the idea. A senior State Department official Thursday told CBS News, “Under Secretary Kennedy is not in the decision chain on FEST deployment” but would not directly confirm whether Kennedy or somebody else dismissed the FEST.

Sharyl’s tour de force, at first glance, looks like she cribbed from me. But she did not. She got White House folks to confirm the things I was writing last October regarding the FEST and the failure to handle the Benghazi incident as a terrorist attack. Instead of using the CSG process–one that has been used by all Presidents since Ronald Reagan–the Obama White House chose to stand down and handle it as a political event. Still no explanation who at the White House or State Department decided to inject the video as a bogus scapegoat for the attack. More news to come.

Of particular note is this from the early draft of the CIA:

The crowd almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society. That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.

There is no ambiguity in that statement–the Intel community “KNEW” that extremists tied to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.

It also is worth noting that the judgment of the intelligence community was only disputed by the White House and then the Department of State. In fact, the emails released yesterday make clear that the first recipient of the CIA “white paper” was the National Security Staff (formerly known as the National Security Council) at the White House.

The impetus for substantive changes came from the White House and then, only after some back and forth between the White House and the CIA, the Department of State.

There are other telling facts in these talking points.

The video is not mentioned at all by the Intelligence Community. That only surfaces in email exchanges between the White House and Ambassador Susan Rice at the UN (the emails refer to this as “USUN”). An even that reference is minor.

Who the hell inserted the video as the explanation? Both Hillary and Barack were beating that drum for a two week period. Where did they get that info? It certainly did not come from the Intelligence Community.

Then there is the role of the Deputies Committee. As State Department whistle blower, Mark Thompson, testified last week, neither the CSG nor the Deputies Committee were activated to consider response options on the night of 9-11. That was handled strictly between Hillary Clinton, Pat Kennedy and the NSS (John Brennan, et.al.). But looky here–on Saturday 15 September the CIA reports in an email to DavidHP74:

Sir
Here are the inter agency approved points for the Hill. They were worked through the DC (aka DEPUTIES COMMITTEE) this morning and were then shot out for final approval.

Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton cared a whit about engaging the Deputies Committee to consider military and other responses to the attacks on the evening of 9-11 and the the morning of 9-12 in Benghazi. But when it came to constructing political cover? The DC was front and center.

The Administration is desperate to cast this as an inter-agency battle. There was no fight from the standpoint of the intel folks. They provided their judgments and then the political hacks proceeded to water down what had been a clear message–Al Qaeda was not on the run, it attacked us again on the night of 9-11 in Benghazi.

This story is troubling on several levels. First, it is a damning indictment of the incompetence of the CIA in its training of new case officers–the guy arrested, Ryan Fogel, was a total ass clown. Second, who in the CIA chain of command authorize this madness? Needless to say, the Russians are having a field day with this:

Stick a fork in Fogel. He’s done.

You do not do a recruitment of this type in Russia much less Moscow. And a cold pitch? Good Christ! Fogel, based on the tape recording, did not appear to have much of a relationship, if any, with the target. If so, why did he have to ask on the recorded phone call, “where are you?”

I applaud the Russians for exposing the shitty tradecraft of the CIA. Hopefully, this serves as a wake up call to John Brennan and crew to wake up and get back in the business of training case officers and their supervisors in the art of espionage. What was on display in Moscow was Keystone Cop amateur hour.

First there is the IRS story, courtesy of the Washington Post:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.

This has Republicans and many Democrats up in arms. But not all. Just go read some of the delusional bullshit at Daily Kos, who are insisting this is a Republican charade. Christ! What a pathetic group of assholes they are. Of course, if George W. Bush had gone after MoveOn and Kos we would be seeing a role reversal. Dems would be crying and some Republicans, I’m sure, would be making excuses and apologizing. Wrong is wrong folks, and the Obama Administration is beginning to mirror the Nixon Administration for its paranoia and vindictiveness.

Then there is the Obama Administration attack on the press.

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

Here again we witness an act that, if carried out by George W. Bush, would be considered an impeachable offense. But when done by Obama, the likes of Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo excuses it as justified and understandable.

More important it is clear to anyone who understands what happens in this type of investigation that the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records. Those records came from the phone company not from AP. They relate to dates and times of phone calls not content. Under the law such a subpoena is perfectly proper and under the law Justice and the phone company must notify the party (in this case AP) that records were subpoenaed.

I think AP protests just a bit too much and seeks to smear Justice (knowing full well that many Republicans will jump on this quickly).

Josh, you are despicable and a disgrace to the so-called profession of journalism.

My question to you, boys and girls. Which of these three will be the total undoing of the Obama Presidency?

To appreciate the depths of his deceit, go back and watch his responses to questions from Jake Tapper last October:

Now watch Carney’s getting skewered last week by the Press Corp:

I wrote previously about the process for producing talking points. Carney is selling a naive and inaccurate understanding of the CIA and how talking points are generated.

We know that the “talking points” were drafted by the CIA. What does that mean? An analyst, probably working in the Counter Terrorism Center aka CTC (most likely) was asked to put together a concise summary of the key facts surrounding the attack. As the analysts assembles the talking points, he or she will start coordinating with other analysts. In this case, for example, the CTC analyst will ask other analysts who work on the same issue or topic to review the prose and and approve the draft. This is called coordination.

Once the analyst secures the approval of colleagues with a substantive interest within his or her branch, the analyst must reach out to others with a substantive interest, such as the Libyan analyst. Once the Libyan analyst gives the CTC analyst recommended changes, two things happen. First, the analyst gives the Branch Chief a copy to edit. Second, the analyst then reaches out to analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the FBI and the National Counter Terrorism Center. Since this was an Unclass piece, the analyst probably would not coordinate with the National Security Agency aka NSA because there was no information drawn from signal intercepts. If such info had been included, then the brief would have had to classified at a least the SECRET level.

I recall getting into knockdown, drag-out verbal brawls with counterparts at DIA and, on occasion, at INR, over the wording and conclusions of pieces I was writing for the National Intelligence Daily. We would either reach a compromise or I would diplomatically tell them “no.” If I did the latter, then the person from the objecting agency had the option of writing a dissent. In other words, putting a separate paragraph into my piece indicating disagreement. Dissents were rare. We faced pressure from our respective bosses to work out our issues and reach consensus.

Once the inter-agency piece was coordinated, it then moved up the CIA hierarchy. The folks in the front office of CTC would go over the draft and then, ultimately, someone on the staff of the Director of Analysis. (Note, the Director of Analysis reports directly to the Director of CIA, i.e. Petraeus at the time). The only people left to coordinate with at this point would be the folks at the Director of National Intelligence–that’s Jim Clapper’s outfit.

The coordinated talking points, once approved by the DNI, would then be delivered to the National Security Council. We know that the talking points that came out of the CIA were reviewed and approved by the DNI’s staff. The talking points did not go out to any other Department or Organization for clearance at that point.

When the talking points were delivered to the Department of State policy types, which includes Public Affairs, it represented the collective judgment of the intel community. If the CIA genuinely did not want to talk about the role of Ansar Al Sharia or Al Qaeda in the attack then they would not have mentioned it. But the CIA talking points did include those points initially.

What I knew as the Directorate of Operations, which is now called Human Clandestine Services (aka HCS), does not produce talking points like this for policy makers. That is the work of the analytical side of the house. If HCS was intent on covering up its presence in Benghazi they could have insisted early on that the Analysts be more circumspect in the talking points. That was not done.

Mike Morrel’s role in this process is shameful. His decision to allow policymakers to dictate intelligence analysis is evidence of his incompetence. This is not to say that intel judgments are always correct. But the integrity of those judgments must be protected. Policymakers are under no obligation to accept those judgments, but if they choose to ignore them they do so at their peril.

Carney is grasping at straws to insist that the intel community genuinely believed that the attack was a “spontaneous event inspired by Cairo.” The actual intelligence tells a very different story. I have seen it and it is readily available to Congress if they choose to examine it. It is incumbent on Congress to demand the truth.

As I wrote last Friday, Jay Carney has exposed the lie pushed by the Obama Administration and discredited himself in the process.

So, with that little warm up let me address Juan Cole’s recent piece citing ten “myths” surrounding Benghazi.

1. Republican senators keep saying that it should have been “easy” to find out what happened on September 11, 2012, by simply debriefing US personnel who had been there. John McCain, Ron Johnson and the others who make this charge are the most cynical and manipulative people in the world. The Benghazi US mission was very clearly an operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that is the reason that the Obama administration officials have never been able to speak frankly and publicly about it. McCain and the others know this very well, and they know that their public carping cannot be “simply” answered because the answers would endanger sources and methods. The consulate was amazingly well-guarded by some 40 CIA operatives, many of them ex-special forces, in a nearby safe house. These were viewed by consular officials as “the cavalry.” It is still not clear what Ambassador Chris Stevens and the CIA were doing in Benghazi, and unless we know that we can’t know why they were attacked. (They were not overseeing the shipping of weapons to Syria; the Syrian revolutionaries complain bitterly that the US *prevents* them from getting medium and heavy weapons).

Well Juan, you have not been paying attention. The reason some of the Syrian revolutionaries complain so bitterly is that the US role in supplying weapons and fighters has been clandestine. But clandestine in a way akin to Iran Contra. Rather than sign a Presidential Finding and brief Congress, the White House and Hillary opted to back a secret program outside of the traditional intelligence channels. It was funded by the Saudis and Qataris. With no US funds involved then there was no need to brief Congress. You, Juan, are missing the point. Congress has not been told the truth, even within the secret confines of the Intel Committees.

2. Republicans keep posturing that their questions about Benghazi are intended to bolster US security. In fact, they are harming it. Republican hearings in the House of Representative have disgracefully revealed the names of Libyans talking to the US consulate, thus endangering their lives and harming US efforts to understand the situation in the country, since who would risk talking to the embassy if they know about Darrell Issa’s big mouth?

Democracy is a bitch, ain’t it. I do not recall you raising an issue about the Obama Administration outing a Pakistani Doctor who helped us confirm Osama Bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad. You cannot name a single Libyan who is in jail or dead because of what the Republicans have done. You cannot say the same for the poor Doctor wasting away in a Pakistani prison.

3. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the so-called “film,” the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that attacked the Prophet Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time confirms that there were such demonstrations that day. The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security videos.

Nope. Not true. There was no demonstration. There was an organized attack. The CIA issued situation reports, starting the evening of 9-11 and continuing until the morning of the 12th. I am told by friends who have seen those reports that there is no mention of any demonstration. But you do not have to take the word of my anonymous sources. We have the testimony of the man who became acting Ambassador in Libya, Greg Hicks, who testified last week under oath. He was in contact both with Ambassador Stevens and his security officer and testified there was no demonstration. It was a terrorist attack. And with respect to your secular-minded militia? They bailed and ran away.

4. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not dominated by “al-Qaeda,” contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university. While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist, tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya’s parliamentary elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief, called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.

Secular city, huh? You clearly are not paying attention to what is going on in Libya. US AFRICOM took steps this week to prepare for the evacuation of US personnel from all of Libya because of the rising threat of Islamic extremists. You really need to look at the news once in a while. Here’s what CNN reported the other day:

Several dozen combat-ready U.S. Marines stationed in southern Spain have been put on alert to potentially move into Libya and assist in the evacuation of American personnel if the unrest grows there in the coming days, a senior military official confirms to CNN.
The Marines have not yet moved from their base, but could be ordered to move closer to Libya so they could get there faster if a full evacuation is ordered.
A team of special operations forces also are on standby in Germany to assist, if needed.
The Marines in Spain are supposed to be ready to move within six hours of notification. By moving them closer, that time frame could be cut in half.

Your next point?

5. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city, members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012. In fact, one Senator John McCain said during a visit to Libya last February, ““We are very happy to be back here in Libya and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few months… We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged by what we have seen.” Doesn’t sound to me like McCain was running around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey Graham, who likewise didn’t issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.

You can insist that the Sun revolves around the moon. But the sincerity of your belief does not make it reality. The intel reports provided to State Department, many in classified channels, pointed to a growing threat. Just because Lindsey Graham and John McCain were as blind as you does not make your position correct.

6. Contrary to the “Libya-is-riddled-with-al-Qaeda” meme of the GOP politicians, there is a strong civil society and tribal opposition to fundamentalist militias in Benghazi, of which Amb. Chris Stevens was well aware. Tripoli-based journalist Abd-al-Sattar Hatitah explained in the pages of the pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat [Sept. 30, 2012, trans. USG Open Source Center]:

Jesus Christ!! You really have chugged the koolaid on Arab spring. If things were so secular and moderate we would not be moving Marines into position to evacuate our folks from Libya. Wake up man!

7. Al-Qaeda is not for the most part even a “thing” in Libya. The only formal al-Qaeda affiliate in the region is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a Libyan but an Algerian organization. Just calling all Salafi groups “al-Qaeda” is propaganda. They have to swear fealty to Ayman al-Zawahiri (or in the past, Usama Bin Laden) to be al-Qaeda. The main al-Qaeda connection in Benghazi is to Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in northern Pakistan by a US drone strike in June. Some of his close relatives in Benghazi may have been angry about this (depending on how well they liked him), but they are not known to form a formal al-Qaeda cell. There are also young men from Dirna in the Benghazi area, some of whom fought against the US in Iraq. Their numbers are not large and, again, they don’t have al-Zawahiri’s phone number on auto-dial. Sen. McCain was a big supporter of the US intervention in Libya and seems to have been all right with Abdul Hakim Belhadj being his ally, even though in the zeroes Belhadj would have been labeled ‘al-Qaeda.’

I agree with you that McCain and his ilk who backed the ironically named “Arab Spring” was blind to what was really going on in Libya. You are missing the point–radical Islamists that are ideologically and theologically in sync with what we conveniently label as Al Qaeda are flocking to Libya and taking control.

8. Ansar al-Sharia (Helpers of Islamic Law) is just an informal grouping of a few hundred hard line fundamentalists in Benghazi, and may be a code word to refer to several small organizations. There are no known operational links between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda. It is a local thing in Benghazi.

WRONG!! But to prove you wrong would require divulging specific intelligence. The conclusions drawn by the intelligence community on this point are not idle fantasies.

9. Leaders of Ansar al-Sharia have denied that they directed their organization to attack the US consulate and have condemned the attack.

DOUBLE WRONG! The identities and linkage on this point are backed up by significant evidence.

10. Lindsey Graham and others point to instances of political violence this past summer in Benghazi as obvious harbingers of the September 11 consulate attack. But it was a tiny fringe group, the Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades, that claimed responsibility for setting off a small pipe bomb in front of the gate of the US consulate last June. This is what the US statement said last June:

“There was an attack late last night on the United States office in Benghazi,” a US embassy official said, adding that only the gate was damaged and no one was hurt. The diplomat said a homemade bomb had been used in the attack on the office, set up after the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qadhafi and kept open to support the democratic transition “

You’d have to be a real scaredy cat to pack up and leave because of a thing like that, which is what Sen. Graham keeps saying should have been the response.

Look Juan, you are a typical academic. No real experience of having to actually protect people in a foreign environment. There were clear warning signs prior to the attacks on 9-11-2012. Those indicators alarmed the security professionals at the Embassy in Tripoli. Their requests for additional help were rejected. Investigators will prove conclusively that Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy is the one who pushed the decision to scale back security.

The bottomline from the events that we now know as the second 9-11 is that four Americans died because security had been scaled back prior to the attack and, when the attack came, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opted to deal with the event as a political crisis that had to be contained rather than confront it as a terrorist attack on the United States. You may share Hillary’s view, i.e., “WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?”

It makes a huge difference that the President of the United States and the Secretary of State decide to do nothing of substance when faced with a coordinated, organized terrorist attack. That kind of leadership failure only makes more terrorism likely.

Karl exposes Jay Carney as a liar or a dupe. There is no middle ground or grey area. According to the ABC scoop:

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack. . . .

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.
“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

This confirms what I wrote previously. Talking Points produced by the CIA (or any other member of the intel community for that matter) that is to be shared by other departments must go thru an extensive coordination process before that paper is delivered to the “consumer.” Who was the consumer in this case? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The now documented decision by Hillary’s press flack and Obama’s White House National Security fiction writer (e.g., Ben Rhodes) to remove substantive parts of the talking points that referred specifically to Al Qaeda and Muslim Extremists. Compare for yourself one of the first drafts:

Benghazi Talking Points Timeline Friday 442pm

By Saturday morning, State Department and the White House had whittled the points down to this:

Benghazi Talking Points Timeline Saturday 1126am

You tell me–does the change in language change the substance of the talking points? You bet your ass it does. Hillary and the White House did not want to admit that Al Qaeda, who they claim was on the run. Not so fast. Al Qaeda kick our ass and killed four Americans last September.

And what did Barack and Hillary do? Nothing but try to concoct a bullshit story in order to cover their pathetic asses.