Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (14 page)

Maguire left the agency after serving as deputy chief of station in the massive Baghdad embassy in 2004, and continues to track jihadi groups as a private contractor. He believes the assassination of General Younis was planned by Abdul-Jalil and Belhaj to cement their control over the rebels.

“Belhaj picked the right guy to kill. He eliminated the one guy in the Libyan system who would have been a problem for them because of his Special Forces background and his ties to the West. He was the most serious risk they would have faced. He would have kept the Muslim Brotherhood at arms length, and kept Qaddafi’s massive arms stockpiles under control,” Maguire told me.
34

With Younis out of the way, the Islamists and their Qatari backers were in charge. And, now, they had the Americans in tow.

7

HOUSE OF WAR

The Hillary Clinton/Obama doctrine of separating the jihadis from the proponents of political Islam was getting people killed, and not just in Libya. In Afghanistan, the United States was supporting President Hamid Karzai (good), while fighting the Taliban (bad). But at the same time we were fighting the Taliban of the Haqqani faction (bad), we were negotiating with the Taliban of Mullah Omar (now good), apparently forgetting that Mullah Omar was the leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan who had sheltered Osama bin Laden. As the White House increased the use of armed drones to kill suspected terrorists, ordinary citizens throughout the Muslim world felt targeted and joined the jihad. American soldiers were dying as a result of this intellectual muck.

Hillary Clinton told Congress there was no point trying to “distinguish between good terrorists and bad terrorists.” But what exactly did that mean? Did the United States plan to fight or to talk with the Haqqani faction, asked Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)? “Both,” Clinton answered. The U.S. policy was to “fight-talk-build,” she explained.
1

The inability of the administration to tell the difference between friends and foes was as profound as it was dangerous. Friends, you help; foes, you defeat. That’s a concept as old as warfare itself, but this administration seemed to stand it on its head by threatening traditional U.S. friends and befriending our new foes. Obama’s terrorism advisor, John Brennan, further muddied the waters by claiming that jihad was not a problem for the United States because it was a holy struggle.

The President’s strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.
2

I first learned about jihad and the doctrines of Islamic law from dissident Iranian ayatollah Dr. Mehdi Rouhani in Paris in the 1980s. He explained that jihad was indeed about “purifying” one’s community, as Brennan explained, but by purging it of corruption, deviancy, and non-Muslims.

Islamic doctrine, or Sharia law, divided the world into two competing spheres: the
Dar al Islam
, and the
Dar al Harb
, Rouhani taught. The House of Islam was the land and territories controlled by Muslims, which needed to be purified of corruption and deviancy. This was the task al Qaeda arrogated to itself by waging jihad against the ruling family in Saudi Arabia. The
Dar al Harb
(House of War) was the rest of the world, the infidels. The duty of the good Muslim, Rouhani explained, was to help make non-Muslim countries submit to Islamic rule. For the most part, this was to be done without violence, just as Muslims in Brussels have established Sharia zones in the administrative capital of Europe and claim that by having large families they will become the majority in all of Belgium by 2030 and submit that nation to Sharia law.
3
However, it was also the duty of Muslims to wage violent jihad when called upon by a legitimate ruler. “If you want to find a moderate mullah in Iran,” Rouhani joked, “look no further than Ayatollah Khomeini. He’s the most moderate of them all.”

The administration’s attempt to parse between violent and nonviolent Islamist groups was a distinction without a difference. The only distinction that really mattered was the line dividing the Islamists from truly secular groups, who rejected the idea of Islamic law governing the political and social institutions of society. As we have seen, from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya, the better-organized and better-funded Muslim Brotherhood and its allies quickly defeated their secular competitors. This is the group whose motto since its creation in 1928 by Egyptian Hassan al-Banna has been: “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and dying in the way of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

The Muslim Brotherhood credo had the merit of being much clearer than Hillary Clinton’s description of administration policy.

When asked about the Muslim Brotherhood at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as the Brotherhood was poised to take over Egypt, Director of National Intelligence Lieutenant General James Clapper called it “largely secular.” Clapper was just repeating what he was being fed by U.S. government intelligence analysts, who had been steeped in the politically correct doctrines of the Obama administration. To NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, who had worked in the Middle East for many years and seen how the Brotherhood operates, Clapper’s comment showed a “wild misreading of this organization.”
4

THE AGENCY ANALYST

One of those intelligence analysts, Quintan Wiktorowicz, was hired by the White House in January 2011 to implement the president’s outreach policies toward the Muslim world. It is no coincidence that he took up his new position right at the start of the Arab Spring. He lent an academic patina to the White House policy of shunning moderates and empowering Muslim supremacists from Dearborn, Michigan, to Benghazi. Obama instinctively knew that he preferred Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to Google executive Wael Ghonim. Quintan Wiktorowicz explained why he was right.

Wiktorowicz had just returned from two years at the U.S. Embassy in London, from 2009 to 2011, where he’d been sent by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to study Britain’s Prevent program. Set in motion after homegrown Muslims killed fifty-two commuters during attacks on London subways and buses on July 7, 2005, Prevent was touted as a deradicalization program, which would prevent future terrorist attacks by marginalizing violent groups and steering young at-risk Muslims away from radical Muslim clerics. It proved to be an abysmal failure, says Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a specialist in Islamic ideology and irregular warfare.

“Just as Britain was waking up to the fact that all their counterradicalization policies were bankrupt and were actually empowering the bad guys, [Wiktorowicz] was sitting there taking notes,” Dr. Gorka told a conference of U.S. policymakers in September 2013. Shortly after Wiktorowicz left London, the British ditched the Prevent program and revamped their approach to the Islamist threat. “So he’s got the wrong recipe, and this bad recipe is what we’re now living in America,” Dr. Gorka said.
5

Wiktorowicz separated the Islamists into two main groups: those he called
purists
, or nonviolent Islamists, and the jihadis. The purists included preachers such as al-Qaradawi, who championed
dawa
, proselytizing the faith. They also included political Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Wiktorowicz argued that the United States should invest in these allegedly nonviolent Islamists, in the hope that they could deter or marginalize their violent brethren, al Qaeda and its affiliates.

But there was a problem. “Every single al Qaeda leader was first a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Dr. Gorka pointed out. “It’s a completely overlapping diagram. There is no hermetic separation between purists, politicians, and violent terrorists.”

Beyond that, the two groups of Islamists were bound by the same ideology. “Despite the fact that the nonviolent jihadists, the stealth jihadis, outnumber the violent jihadis by factors of thousands, they both have the same theocratic goals: undemocratic societies from Washington to Cairo. They argue amongst themselves, but the arguments are almost exclusively about timing and tactics,” Gorka explained.

Wiktorowicz was instrumental in getting the FBI and the U.S. counterintelligence community to abandon all teaching on Islam that highlighted the Islamic ideology of supremacy and jihad. He also helped craft new guidance for federal and local law enforcement authorities that pushed political correctness to silly and dangerous extremes. He argued successfully that the United States was not at war with jihadi Islam, but with “violent extremism,” an amorphous, undefined “ism” that had nothing to do with Islam. He succeeded in getting the White House to issue that view as an official policy statement in August 2011.
6
Muddying the waters even further, Wiktorowicz argued that al Qaeda and obscure sovereign citizen groups in the United States posed equal threats to the United States, even referring to them in the same sentence as “violent extremist groups” the U.S. government had to combat.
7

The tragic irony is that Wiktorowicz himself seemed to acknowledge the fatal flaw of his own approach. “For reformist Salafis (i.e., the purists, or political Islamists he championed), there is great concern that the Muslim community is not ready to engage in jihad, either against incumbent Arab regimes or the United States,” he wrote. “It is not that jihad is
rejected
as a tactic of religious transformation, rather, reformists believe that several prior phases are necessary before a jihad is permissible.”
8
In other words, as Dr. Gorka put it, it’s just a matter of timing and tactics.

Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, a renowned scholar of Islam who advised the British General Staff on Islamic law, warned that the Obama administration’s approach of cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood was foolhardy.

“The [Obama administration] view that Islam and the United States are compatible is extraordinarily short-sighted. Islamists all share the same aim, the creation of an Islamic state ruled by Sharia. This is an end result completely incompatible with freedom, equality or democracy. The threat from al Qaeda is an ideology which is rooted in a classical interpretation of Islam,” Dr. Sookhdeo explained. “Trying to win the war of ideas without ideology is foolhardy.”

From Egypt to Libya to Syria, the United States tried to separate violent from nonviolent Islamists, supporting the political Islamists in the hope they would neutralize the jihadis. “I believe this is a very dangerous policy,” Sookhdeo declared. “We are engaging the wrong kind of Muslims. Instead of dealing with those who share our values, who share our ethos, our fundamental principles, we engage and back those who seek our destruction.”
9

EXTORTION 17

Among the Americans who fell victim to the administration’s confused policy were some of our most undisputed heroes, the best of the best of the Special Forces community: SEAL Team 6, also known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. These are the men who took out Osama bin Laden in a well-planned raid in May 2011.

You and I were never supposed to know about the involvement of SEAL Team 6 in the bin Laden raid. But, because of leaks at the very top of the Obama administration, we know an awful lot about Operation Neptune Spear that once was highly classified. Those leaks ultimately may have cost the lives of seventeen members of SEAL Team 6 as well as thirteen other U.S. warriors in Afghanistan when their Chinook CH47-D helicopter was shot down by the Taliban on August 6, 2011. It was the single biggest loss of life in the history of the Navy SEALs.

Karen and Billy Vaughn were the parents of one of those men, thirty-year-old Aaron C. Vaughn. “The day after the bin Laden take-down, we got a frantic call from Aaron in Afghanistan, telling us to clean our social media of any reference to him or his buddies,” Karen told me. “ ‘Mom,’ he said: ‘we’ve been outed. There’s chatter that they’re going after our families. You’re in danger.’ ”

Aaron Vaughn was referring to braggadocio comments made by Vice President Joe Biden on May 3, 2011, when he identified “our brave Navy SEALs” for the successful bin Laden raid. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was disgusted at Biden’s loose lips, and chastised him publicly for putting the family members of the Navy SEALs in danger.

And Biden wasn’t alone. At an awards ceremony at CIA Headquarters on June 24 to honor the men and women who had participated in the thirteen-year manhunt of bin Laden, then CIA director Leon Panetta disclosed the name of the specific unit that had carried out the raid and its commander, even though a producer of the Hollywood film
Zero Dark Thirty
was present. The event was classified top secret, as were Panetta’s remarks. Needless to say, filmmaker Mark Boal did not have security clearance.
10
The White House was pushing for full cooperation with the filmmakers in the hope of using the movie as a prop for the president’s reelection campaign the following year. Security be damned.

Just one week after Biden’s initial disclosure, U.S. military intelligence reported that a force of more than one hundred Taliban fighters were making their way into the Tangi Valley in Afghanistan, where they knew U.S. Special Forces teams were operating. “The Taliban’s goal was to shoot down a NATO helicopter in retaliation for the bin Laden raid,” Karen Vaughn told me, summarizing what she had learned from a 1,300-page after-action report by Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt.

When Aaron Vaughn came back for home leave that summer, “something was different,” Karen remembers. “He had a haunted look, as if he knew something was about to happen.”

Twenty-five-year-old Navy cryptologist Michael Strange also came home that summer on leave. “Usually it was, see you in three months, make sure the beer is cold,” said his father, Charles Strange. “This time, my son grabbed me by the biceps and said, ‘Dad, I got to make out a will.’ ”

The call sign of the helicopter that flew them to their death on the night of August 6, 2011, was
Extortion 17
. The after-action investigation, stamped SECRET, was declassified for the families, who made it available to me. Despite an extraordinary level of detail, it left many key questions unanswered.

For starters, the mission itself made little sense. Earlier in the day, a team of U.S. Army Rangers had choppered into the Tangi Valley seeking out “Objective LEFTY GROVE,” the code name for Taliban commander Qari Tahir. During the fighting, a force of nine or ten suspected Taliban escaped and moved deeper into the valley. The Rangers initially requested that an AC-130 Spectre gunship take them out, but the Task Force commander “was unable to determine whether the group was armed and therefore could not authorize the strike,” wrote Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt.
11
Why the Task Force commander was unable to determine that the men were armed when the Rangers reported that they were walking in single file, carrying AK-47s and RPG-7 tubes, went unexplained in the report.