My Two Cents on Benghazi

The right wing media is exploiting the Benghazi disaster as an opportunity to diss President Obama and personally blame him for the entire fiasco.  Fox News is especially all over the story.

EXCLUSIVE: CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to "stand down," according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to "stand down."

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters.

I don't doubt any of the above facts. Most news reports have pretty much included the same information. But here's the problem: the military and the CIA have a long history of hating each other. The CIA is a secretive and covert organization that pretty much operates without any scrutiny whatsoever. Moreover, the CIA literally controls the US State Department and always has. Benghazi was not the US Embassy, which is in Tripoli. The CIA is notorious for creating these consulates as bases of operation for CIA missions, missions that typically include arming and funding radicals and jihadists for the purpose of destabilization of a nation and regime change.  It's been going on at least since the days of Jimmy Carter who funded and armed the Afghan Mujuhadeen, now the Sunni Islamist Taliban, to fight the Soviets.  The CIA was a key 'on the ground' player in Afghanistan during the Cold War and is directly responsible for arming some of the most dangerous folks on the planet.

Unfortunately, the US has a very long history of being in bed with radical Sunni Wahhabist Salafist Islamists and the top of this disturbing pyramid goes straight to the House of Saud, the kingpin of Wahhabist Sunni Islamist terror.  It's no coincidence that 15 of the 19  911 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia.  The foreign policy of the US is to support, fund and arm radical Sunni jihadists and we've been doing it for a long time.  The US government and the CIA backed and supported Pakistan's nuclear arms program, along with Saudi Arabia.  Pakistan used to be a nation teeming with radical Sunni Islamists but now, courtesy of the US and it's Saudi alliance, is a nuclear armed radical Sunni Islamist nation.  It's only a matter of time before some zealot Sunni nutjob seizes control of Pakistan's nukes and starts firing away.  Moreover, Pakistan was once a benign Muslim nation until Saudi and Gulf Sunni money and madrassahs started pouring into the nation to radicalize the population.

The hardcore neocon website, familysecuritymatters.org, is accusing Obama of being an ally of Al Qaeda.

Arms Flow to Syria May Be Behind Benghazi Cover-Up

Stevens was tasked with helping to coordinate U.S. assistance to the rebels, whose top military commander, Abdelhakim Belhadj, was the leader of the Al Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). That means that Stevens was authorized by the U.S. Department of State and the Obama administration to aid and abet individuals and groups that were, at a minimum, allied ideologically with Al Qaeda, the jihadist terrorist organization that attacked the homeland on the first 9/11, the one that's not supposed to exist anymore after the killing of its leader, Osama bin Laden, on May 2, 2012.

The above assessment is erroneously ludicrous on several levels.  First, Al Qaeda isn't even an organization with the power to do anything.  Al Qaeda is, however, just one of many, many Islamist groups funded by our friends the Saudis and the CIA. Nothing, however, stops the neocons from accusing Obama of being an appeaser of radical Islamists.  In fact, it was only a few short months after 911 when President Bush entertained Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at his Crawford, TX ranch in April 2002.  Few international dignitaries got invites to the Bush ranch but the Saudis were always welcome.  The Saudi-Bush family connections date back to the days of the George Herbert Walker Bush.

If there's a concern about US presidents and government officials being all warm and cozy with 911 jihad terrorists, look no further than the Bush family affection for radical Sunni jihadists.

The Bush-Saudi Connection - The Bush Crime Family has a very long history of being very close to the evil House of Saud.

The absolute favorite photo of the neocons is the photo of Obama bowing before the Saudi King according to protocol.  US presidents have bowed before many foreign leaders according to the prevailing custom.  At least Obama wasn't kissing and holding hands with King Abdullah, the King of Islamist Sunni terror.  Bush was being overtly and outwardly affectionate with King Abdullah while Obama was just being polite and respectful.  Big difference!

George Herbert Walker Bush is also a former CIA director with deep ties to the organization and its clandestine operations.  The CIA has been funneling arms and money to dissidents of all religious and political stripes for decades and such folks were probably on the CIA payroll.  This is nothing new.  Again, it's important to note that the US State Department is heavily staffed with CIA, officially, and unofficially through US Aid programs.  Even neocon Glenn Beck chirped in on the issue.

Glenn Beck Explains How Obama Used Ambassador Stevens to Funnel arms to Libya and Syria

It's probably true that Ambassador Stevens was carrying out a CIA mission under the guise of a State Department consulate but this is quite common.  Obviously, something went very wrong and what most probably went wrong is that the Islamists the CIA trusted and were doing business with turned on them when they saw an opportunity to humiliate the US by successfully attacking the Benghazi consulate.  Also, the issue of the mysterious mission of Ambassador Stevens is being raised.

How US Ambassador Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked To Jihadist Rebels In Syria 

....there was a CIA post in Benghazi , located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" ... and that its security features "were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died."

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In any case, the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.

The entire Benghazi fiasco is covered with CIA fingerprints.  But the burning question is this:  why didn't the US military come to the rescue of the CIA?

The CIA kind of functions as its own military, much to the consternation of the US military.  The CIA is also decisive and is not gnerally hampered with too much in the way of chain of command restrains.  Conversely, the US military is heavily a top down chain of command operation.  Getting somebody to make a decision can be very difficult depending the potential blowback of the situation.

The entire attack was over within a matter of hours but during the attack urgent messages were coming out of the Benghazi consulate.  The Benghazi timeline is here.  More interesting is that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta wiggled out of the situation by proclaiming that the military didn't have enough information to warrant putting forces at risk which is the equivalent of Panetta giving a birdie to the CIA.

Panetta on Benghazi attack: 'Could not put forces at risk'

The U.S. military did not get involved during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last month because officials did not have enough information about what was going on before the attack was over, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Thursday.

Where was the military and why didn't it respond to CIA calls for help?  Panetta claims the military didn't have enough time.  Another critical factor that is missing in the analysis is the location of the US military presence in Libya.  Nobody seems to know if the military was anywhere on the ground in Libya, obviously something that neither the US government or the military wanted disclosed.

What is known is that the Benghazi consulate was a CIA front engaged in weapon smuggling to Syrian Jihad rebels.  President Obama knows what the CIA does, even if he doesn't know what the CIA is actually doing because that's how the secretive and unaccountable CIA has always operated.  The CIA is one of those things that nobody in government ever wants to talk about because, well, the CIA is very dangerous, it kills folks, it arranges assassinations and exactly who it reports to isn't exactly clear although formally the CIA Director reports to the president.  It's been speculated by many CIA observers that the CIA is really nothing more than the private and personal military of the New World Order, the banksters and resource seeking corporatists.  It's also widely believe that the CIA is self-funding through the drug trade.

The CIA is the Biggest Drug Dealer on the Planet

President Kennedy said he wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.  According to James Douglass who wrote JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why it Matters, the CIA murdered JFK.  Douglass writes "We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy.  That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious.  The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it."

That the CIA is feared by the political class is an understatement.  But what makes Benghazi so intriguing is that it's increasingly more difficult to cover-up dastardly CIA deeds given the explosion of non-government controlled alternative media.   The Benghazi cover-up, bungled and clumsy as it was, was solely to protect the CIA and its mission, whatever the cost.  Ambassador Stevens and those who worked with him were not victims but were active participants in the CIA's work.  Most probably, Stevens wasn't an ambassador at all, just a CIA operative masquerading as an ambassador.  Moreover, it's probably also true that the military just didn't want to get involved, assuming it could have done something, because of its natural hostility toward the CIA.

I  believe that Obama was probably horrified by what happened in Benghazi but when your lust for power is so great that you decide to bed down with the CIA spooks and spies, anything can happen.  At the end of the day, Benghazi was just another Fast and Furious gone bad.  Republican attempts to capitalize on the Benghazi fiasco are indeed shabby and reckless.  If anything, Republicans worship the CIA and its evil and secretive missions far more than the Obama and the Democrats.