Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (38 page)

When the agency finally transmitted the talking points to the State Department and the White House that afternoon, they went nuts. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland insisted that any mention of Ansar al-Sharia be taken out. She also wanted all mention of the CIA warning removed, because it “could be abused by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings, so why do we want to feed that either?” Hillary’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, played the role of enforcer during the final editing process on Saturday morning.

CIA Director David Petraeus was so disgusted when he saw the watered-down version that he nearly pulled the plug on the whole thing. “No mention of the cable to Cairo, either?” he wrote to his deputy, Michael Morell, who had negotiated the final copy with top White House and State Department aides. “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use these. NSS’s call, to be sure; however, this is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get for [unclassified] use.”
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Like so many things about Benghazi, the White House only released the talking points emails kicking and screaming many months later. They initially made them available for members of Congress to consult in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on Capitol Hill, but insisted that they were not allowed to take notes. Accusations of stonewalling and footdragging from the five Republican committee chairs investigating Benghazi in their “Interim Report” in April 2013, went unheeded. In the end, it took threats from Senate Republicans to block the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA chief to get the White House to release the one-hundred-page email chain.
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Calls from the Sunday talk shows started coming in late Friday afternoon and on Saturday, but Hillary Clinton refused to go. She had always hated the Sunday talk shows. She may also have been worried that one of the hosts would actually ask her a real question about what she knew and when she knew it. So, at White House request, Susan Rice became the designated water carrier.

In nearly identical statements on five morning TV shows, Rice claimed that the attack on Benghazi was a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video” and that the administration did “not have any information that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Her mention of the “hateful video” is significant, since the video did not appear in any draft of the CIA talking points the administration claimed were the sole basis of her information. It was never mentioned even in the back-and-forth email discussion. So, clearly, Susan Rice had been briefed by White House officials Denis McDonough and Tom Donilon, Morell, or by Hillary Clinton’s advisors, who together were coordinating the cover-up. The notion that she was presenting the “best evidence” given her by the intelligence community, as the White House claimed, was yet another lie.

At the first congressional hearing on the attacks, convened by House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee chairman Representative Darrell Issa on October 10, 2012, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy played coy over the video protest claim. “There were reports that we received saying that there were protests. And I will not go any farther than that. And then things evolved. Period.” When pressed by Issa why he wouldn’t go any further, Kennedy said he couldn’t discuss the “reports” in open session.
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Journalist Stephen Hayes wrote the best analysis of the talking points and believes the reference to the protests most likely grew out of a real-time communications intercept between one of the participants in the attacks and a superior. “In that intercept, the participant mentioned that he’d seen the protests in Cairo and then gave an update on the attack in Benghazi,” Hayes told me. “As I understand it, there was no causal link between the two in that original communication. So, contrary to administration claims, no one ever said:
We saw the Cairo protest and then decided to launch an attack
. But that mention of Cairo was used to explain Benghazi. I can’t say with certainty that it was done on purpose, but given everything else we know about how they misused and abused the intelligence to tell the story they wanted, it’s not a stretch.”

Even more significant was the fact that the CIA had already received a reporting memo from the chief of base disputing claims of any protest, “calling the attacks what they were, and offering a detailed report on the participants,” Hayes added.
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As this book went to print, it emerged that Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell “downplayed or dismissed reporting from his own people in Libya” as he deleted key information from the final version of the talking points used by Susan Rice, according to Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge. Among the information he discounted were situation reports from the CIA station chief in Tripoli and his deputy in Benghazi that included “raw intelligence reporting” clearly indicating there was no protest that sparked the attacks, and the testimony of survivors on the ground who gave their accounts of the attacks in a secure video-teleconference three days later. When CIA personnel in Libya learned the agency was drafting talking points that would blame the attacks on an Internet video, they felt so strongly they emailed Morell directly to insist there had been no protest.

Since retiring from the agency, Morell has taken several high-profile assignments for the administration, and gone to work for Beacon Global Strategies, a company cofounded by Andrew Shapiro, the former State Department official in charge of MANPADS collection and Philippe Reines, described by the
New York Times Magazine
as Hillary Clinton’s “principal gatekeeper.” Reines went to the State Department with Clinton in 2009 as her spokesman, and was promoted to become deputy secretary of state. Whenever his boss came under scrutiny for her conduct during and after Benghazi, Reines was sent out on the attack.
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Morell’s apparent suppression of evidence led to fresh calls to Speaker Boehner to appoint a select committee to investigate Benghazi, from family members of the fallen and from ninety national security professionals, including more than two dozen retired U.S. flag officers.
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Morell was called back by the House intelligence committee to give public testimony on his actions on April 2, 2014. Under intense grilling for over three hours, he insisted that he gave greater weight to analysts in Washington, D.C., who based their assessment on press reports than to his own station chief in Tripoli or to the GRS officers who tried to rescue Chris Stevens in Benghazi. It was a stunning admission verging on professional incompetence. Morell apparently preferred falling on his sword than admitting that he had skewed the intelligence for the political benefit of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. “These allegations are false,” he said.

Few members of Congress were convinced by his performance. “Morell lied,” Senator Lindsay Graham told me that afternoon. “The administration created a story for their political benefit at the expense of the dead.”

Hillary and Obama were desperate to cover up their failed policies in Libya and throughout the region. They didn’t want reporters or Congress nosing around into who knew what and when they knew it about CIA warnings, lax security, gun running in Benghazi, or the missing MANPADS. They certainly didn’t want information about the Iranian connection to come out just before the election, since the president was still hoping that Valerie Jarrett could work her back channel to the Supreme Leader in Tehran to convince the Iranians to come to the table in time for the foreign policy debate with Romney at the end of October.
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And it was personal. Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) revealed at a town hall meeting that just two days after the attacks, Hillary “screamed at a member of Congress who dared suggest that this was a terrorist attack” during a closed-door briefing.
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I believe they latched on to the tiny Salafist protest in Cairo because it fit their worldview that America was “hateful” and was misrepresenting Islam. They wanted Muslims to understand that the United States “is not at war with Islam,” as Obama stated repeatedly. They even had the State Department spend $70,000 of taxpayer money to produce a sixty-second television spot for Pakistani television, explaining that America had absolutely nothing to do with producing the “hateful video” and thoroughly condemned it.
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At the ramp ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base to welcome home the bodies of the four dead Americans on September 14, Hillary Clinton put on her face of deepest scorn. The attacks, she said, were caused by “an awful Internet video that we had
nothing
to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it
is
senseless. And it is totally unacceptable.” She privately then promised Charles Woods, father of Navy SEAL Ty Woods, “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” She made a similar vow to the mother of Sean Smith. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who covered the Benghazi scandal over the protests of her bosses, pointed out the obvious: “Why would we be out to get the people who made the video more than the people who carried out the attacks?”
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Attkisson left CBS in frustration on March 10, 2014, over their refusal to air more of her Benghazi coverage.

Hillary Clinton knew how to use government against people she identified as her enemies. The Egyptian Coptic Christian who made the amateur video she falsely claimed provoked the Benghazi attacks was arrested at midnight by five Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and thrown in jail without bond for a parole violation. He was ultimately sentenced in federal court to an additional year in prison and only released in late September 2013. As Rich Lowry of the
National Review
pointed out, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s real “crime” was that “[h]e exercised his First Amendment rights.”

The truth, of course, is that the violent hatred Islamists turned on the United States in Benghazi had little to do with public statements of our leaders, even less an Internet video. It grew out of an Islamist worldview that wanted the West out of the Muslim world altogether, and was nurtured by every drone strike on every village in Pakistan and Yemen. In every battle, they danced in the blood of the infidels.

Former Tripoli Military Council commander Abdelhakim Belhaj explained their thinking the day after the Benghazi attacks in an interview with a local radio station, according to a transcript posted on the station’s website (translation courtesy of Walid Shoebat):

I am indeed a member of the [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group]; I’m proud of it; I will not deny that. For this, I have spent the best years of my life in the prisons, under torture and I’m still a member of this group. I will not give up on its edicts. Everyone must know this in the West, before the East.

I’ve committed jihad operations in all parts of the globe from Morocco to Yemen to Somalia to Algeria, even to Afghanistan and Pakistan. I give great respect to [al Qaeda leader] Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri and to the first teacher, Abu Musaab al-Zarkawi. I was saddened when Hassan al-Qaidi in Pakistan was martyred. Me and my brothers . . . have formed a committee in Tripoli and we will not allow any foreigner, no matter who he is, to dictate what we do.

. . . There is no place for America, Great Britain, and all the West in Libya. Libya is a nation of Islam and jihad. The light of Islam will shine forth from it despite the noses of everyone. The weapons are here and the mujahideen from every corner of the earth are here with us and we have all the weaponry—that was prohibited before—with us now. We will not hesitate to use it against anyone who touches the land of Libya and that is the end of this discussion.
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This is the Libya that Obama and Hillary brought into being.

This is the Libya that murdered Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty.

CONSEQUENCES

When Greg Hicks saw Susan Rice talk about a protest at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, he said, “My jaw dropped.”

The Internet movie was “a nonevent,” he told Congress. He also tried to tell his hierarchy in the State Department, but got chewed out by his immediate boss, Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones, and subsequently demoted because he wouldn’t buy into the cover-up.

Just before Rice appeared on CBS’s
Meet the Press
, Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf told host Bob Schieffer in no uncertain terms that the terrorist attack in Benghazi was planned and premeditated. “It was planned by foreigners who arrived in Libya a few months before,” he revealed. That dovetails with the information that I have presented in this book.

Magariaf had gone to Benghazi two days after the attacks to lay a wreath in commemoration of Chris Stevens and his colleagues, a trip that Greg Hicks said involved “great personal and political risk.” During that trip, he took to heart the plea from Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones, who initially asked him to deny and rebut statements from other Libyan government officials blaming the attacks on former Qaddafi regime elements. Hicks said that Magariaf’s performance in Benghazi “was a gift for us from a policy perspective.”

But when Magariaf heard Susan Rice talk about demonstrations and an Internet video, he was furious. “He was insulted in front of his own people, in front of the world. His credibility was reduced. His ability to lead his own country was damaged,” Hicks said. “A friend of mine who ate dinner with him in New York during the UN season told me that he was still steamed about the talk shows two weeks later.”
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Susan Rice had just called the Libyan president a liar—or worse, a fool. Hicks believed that the insult prompted Magariaf to slow-roll approvals for an FBI forensics team to go to Benghazi. “It was a long slog of seventeen days to get the FBI team to Benghazi, working with various ministries to get, ultimately, agreement to support that visit,” Hicks said. When they finally reached the burned-out diplomatic compound in Benghazi on October 4, journalists and looters had already pored through the wreckage. And the main Quds Force team was long gone.