>>6556742
continued…
Those who have watched all the hearings and waded through the reports know that months before the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and the two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, U.S. intelligence agencies had been warning of possible attacks on American personnel and other assets in Benghazi. So many reports were given to the State Department that it is impossible to explain why all of them were ignored. But they were.
According to the January 15, 2014, report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (“SSCI”), those repeated warnings began with a June 12, 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report that noted growing ties between al Qaeda in the Benghazi area and local Libyan terrorists. Another report, less than a week later (June 18), said that conditions were “ripe” for more attacks and that Libya was becoming a “safe haven” for terrorists. Such reports continued in steady stream. One, in August, noted that the “safe havens” were covering more and more territory and warned that terrorist operations might even be strong enough to attack European targets from Libyan bases.
Between March and August of 2012, western targets were attacked at least 20 times in Benghazi by terrorists using increasingly powerful and sophisticated weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices. Several of these assaults were directed at the convoys of foreign diplomatic personnel. On April 10, Ian Martin, in charge of the special United Nations Support Mission in Libya, survived an explosion from a homemade bomb. The convoy of Dominic Asquith, the British ambassador to Libya, was hit by a grenade on June 11. Asquith was not injured, but the United Kingdom promptly closed its mission the next day. During this period terrorists also attacked UN and Red Cross officials and detonated IEDs planted at the American Temporary Mission Facility, the headquarters of Ambassador Stevens.
In March, Eric Nordstrom, the head security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, made the first of a series of requests for increased security in the country. His requests, which continued at least into July, were not denied; they were ignored. Later, in June, Ambassador Stevens began making similar requests, which the State Department did not honor; and, as a report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence puts it, the Benghazi mission “continued to be understaffed and under-resourced.” Colonel Andrew Wood, commander of the Site Security Team (SST) at the Benghazi mission, testified in an October 10, 2012, hearing of the House Oversight Committee that three Mobile Security Deployment (MSD) teams were withdrawn from Benghazi over the course of the year despite Stevens’s repeated requests for additional security.
By the time Stevens attended an Emergency Action Committee meeting on August 15, all three of the MSD teams were gone, as was Wood’s SST. The EAC is an interagency panel that meets in embassies and other facilities around the world when those facilities face major security threats. And the Benghazi mission was certainly threatened. On August 8, Stevens sent a cable to Washington observing that “a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape”; he calls these incidents “targeted and indiscriminate attacks.” At the EAC meeting a CIA representative claimed that Benghazi was home to about 10 Islamist training camps, some of them al Qaeda affiliated. At the same meeting, an unnamed “regional security officer” said that he was concerned—justifiably, it turned out—about the mission’s ability to defend itself.
About 60 armed terrorists entered the mission unimpeded at 9:42 p.m. on September 11, 2012. They set fire to the barracks holding Libyan militia troops, who were supposedly acting as a “security force,” and, minutes later, set fire to the building where Ambassador Stevens was. One of the five Diplomatic Security Service agents on duty immediately relayed the situation to the nearby CIA Annex, the embassy in Tripoli, and the State Department in Washington. Stevens was moved to a “safe room.”
Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya, received a call from Stevens five minutes later, and the ambassador told him the consulate was under attack. Hicks later told the press that he and everyone else in the Libya mission believed it was a terrorist attack “from the get go.” At about that time, a security team based in Tripoli consisting of seven men—at least two of them Delta Force operators—was ordered to Benghazi. It had to charter an aircraft to fly there, and didn’t arrive at the Benghazi airport until about 1:15 a.m. It spent three hours negotiating with Libyans for transportation and a security escort to get to the Annex.
moar…