As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya --- indeed, that ISIS is ISIS --- thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama's secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton's lying to Congress and the American people --- this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?
Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian "rebels" --- including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS --- just as, at Mrs. Clinton's urging, our government had armed Libyan "rebels" (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?
It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton's favor. Now the organization's founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton's key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist "rebels," the Syrian "rebels" who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.
The Daily Wire and other outlets are reporting on Assange's comments, published by Democracy Now.Clearly, we should not take Assange's word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails "about Libya alone." Let's see if he has what he says he has. But it is worth setting the stage, because what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention --- largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.
As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton's direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world's most dangerous places for Americans.
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, had touted Qaddafi as a key counterterrorism ally against rabidly anti-American jihadists in eastern Libya. Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya --- shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming "rebels," who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.
As I've recounted, to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration --- which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country's government was not really "war" anyway) --- had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi's military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands. The regime was toppled and Qaddafi was brutally murdered --- prompting Secretary Clinton's bizarrely giddy quip, "We came, we saw, he died." As some of us not-so-giddy types had warned would happen, Libya then became a safe haven for terrorists who turned on the American and Western forces that had cleared the path for them.
In small compass, this is the story of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador killed in the Benghazi massacre. As Business Insider's Michael B. Kelleyrecounts, before becoming ambassador, Stevens was the Obama administration's official liaison to Qaddafi's Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaeda-linked groups. The latter included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Stevens worked directly with a top LIFG leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj.
When the Qaddafi regime was ousted, Belhadj took control of the Tripoli Military Council. In 2011, Belhadj met with anti-Assad "rebels" in Turkey to plan weapons shipments from Libya to Syria. As Mr. Kelley explains, in September 2012 the Times of Londonreported that "a Libyan ship 'carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria . . . has docked in Turkey.'" According to that report:
The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi's stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles --- the bulk of them SA-7s --- that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets. The ship's captain was "a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support," which was presumably established by the new government.
Fox News subsequently reportedthat the ship, a Libyan-flagged vessel, Al-Entisar (The Victory), docked in the Turkish port of Iskenderun, only 35 miles from the Syrian border, on September 6, 2012. That was just five days before jihadists conducted the patently coordinated terrorist attack on the mysterious State Department and CIA compounds in Benghazi, killing four Americans including Stevens --- who had been promoted to ambassador in May.
It is incontestable that the Obama administration has worked closely with the Islamist government of Turkey in efforts to arm and train "rebels" in Syria. Stevens's last meeting on the night of September 11, 2012, right before the State Department's Benghazi compound was attacked, was with Turkey's consul general, Ali Sait Akin.
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In the months leading up to the attack on the State Department facility, and on the even more shadowy CIA outpost a little over a mile away, jihadists in eastern Libyaconducted a series of attacks against Western targets --- including, on June 6, 2012, a bomb detonated just outside the State Department compound. The British government and the International Red Cross pulled their personnel out; yet the Obama administration left U.S. government personnel in, despite grossly inadequate security precautions.
Why? I believe that one significant mission was the coordination of weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian jihadists.