WND EXCLUSIVE Probe of military experts finds U.S. 'switched sides' in terror war Published: 16 hours ago
Jerome R. Corsi
Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff reporter. He
has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The
Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Who Really Killed Kennedy?"
NEW YORK – The Obama White House and the State Department under the
management of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “changed sides in the
war on terror” in 2011 by implementing a policy of facilitating the
delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya
attempting to oust Moammar Gadhafi from power, the Citizens Commission
on Benghazi concluded in its interim report.
In WND interviews,
several members of the commission have disclosed their finding that the
mission of Christopher Stevens, prior to the fall of Gadhafi and during
Stevens’ time as U.S. ambassador, was the management of a secret
gun-running program operated out of the Benghazi compound.
The
Obama administration’s gun-running project in Libya, much like the
“fast and furious” program under Eric Holder’s Justice Department,
operated without seeking or obtaining authorization by Congress.
WND reported Monday
that in exclusive interviews conducted with 11 of the 17 members of the
commission, it is clear that while the CCB is still enthusiastic to
work with Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Select
Committee on Benghazi, and hopeful that Boehner is serious about the
investigation, various members of the CCB, speaking on their own behalf
and not as spokesmen for the commission, are expressing concerns,
wanting to make sure the Gowdy investigation is not compromised by
elements within the GOP.
The Citizen’s Commission on Benghazi’s
interim report, in a paragraph titled “Changing sides in the War on
Terror,” alleges “the U.S. was fully aware of and facilitating the
delivery of weapons to the Al Qaeda-dominated rebel militias throughout
the 2011 rebellion.”
The report asserted the jihadist agenda of
AQIM, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other Islamic terror groups
represented among the rebel forces was well known to U.S. officials
responsible for Libya policy.
“The rebels made no secret of
their Al Qaeda affiliation, openly flying and speaking in front of the
black flag of Islamic jihad, according to author John Rosenthal and
multiple media reports,” the interim report said. “And yet, the White
House and senior Congressional members deliberately and knowingly
pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist
organizations in order to topple a ruler who had been working closely
with the West actively to suppress Al Qaeda.”
The report
concluded: “The result in Libya, across much of North Africa, and beyond
has been utter chaos, disruption of Libya’s oil industry, the spread of
dangerous weapons (including surface-to-air missiles), and the
empowerment of jihadist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Muslim
Brotherhood.”
Christopher Stevens: ’1st U.S. envoy to al-Qaida’
In
the WND interviews, several members of the citizens’ commission,
speaking for themselves, not for the commission, added important
background to the interim report’s conclusion.
“In early 2011,
before Gadhafi was deposed, Christopher Stevens came to Benghazi in a
cargo ship, and his title at the time was envoy to the Libyan rebels,’
which basically means Christopher Stevens was America’s very first envoy
to al-Qaida,” explained Clare Lopez, a member of the commission who
served as a career operations officer with the CIA and current is vice
president for research at the Washington-based Center for Security
Policy.
“At that time, Stevens was facilitating the delivery of
weapons to the al-Qaida-related militia in Libya,” Lopez continued. “The
weapons were produced at factories in Eastern Europe and shipped to a
logistics hub in Qatar. The weapons were financed by the UAE and
delivered via Qatar mostly on ships, with some possibly on airplanes,
for delivery to Benghazi. The weapons were small arms, including
Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and lots of ammunition.”
Lopez
further explained that during the period of time when Stevens was
facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-affiliated militia
in Libya, he was living in the facility that was later designated the
Special Mission Compound in Benghazi.
“This was about weapons
going into Libya, and Stevens is coordinating with Abdelhakim Belhadj,
the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, other
al-Qaida-affiliated militia leaders and leaders of the Libyan Muslim
Brotherhood that directed the rebellion against Qadhafi as an offshoot
of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” Lopez said. “Many of the individual
members of the al-Qaida-related militias, including the LIFG, and the
groups that would later become Ansar Al-Sharia, were Muslim Brotherhood
members first.”
According to the interim report, as detailed by
Lopez, a delegation from the UAE traveled to Libya after the fall of
Gadhafi to collect payment for the weapons the UAE had financed and that
Qatar had delivered to the Transitional National Council in Libya
during the war.
“The UAE delegation was seeking $1 billion it
claimed was owed,” the interim report noted. “During their visit to
Tripoli, the UAE officials discovered that half of the $1 billion worth
of weapons it had financed for the rebels had, in fact, been diverted by
Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the Muslim Brotherhood head of the Libyan TNC, and
sold to Qaddafi.”
According to information discovered during
the UAE visit to Tripoli, when Jalil learned that Maj. Gen. Abdel Fatah
Younis, Gadhafi’s former minister of the interior before his late
February 2011 defection to the rebel forces, had found out about the
weapons diversion and the $500 million payment from Gadhafi, Jalil
ordered Abu Salim Abu Khattala, leader of the Abu Obeida Bin al-Jarrah
brigade to kill Younis.
“Abu Khattala, later identified as a
Ansar al- Shariah commander who participated in the 11 September 2012
attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, accepted the orders and directed
the killing of Gen. Younis in July 2011,” the interim report noted.
Abu
Khattala is currently in custody in New York awaiting trial under a
Department of Justice-sealed indictment, after U.S. Delta Force special
operations personnel captured him over the weekend of June 14-15, 2014,
in a covert mission in Libya. Abu Khattala’s brigade merged into Ansar
al-Shariah in 2012, and he was positively identified to the FBI in a
cell phone photo from the scene of the attack on the U.S. mission in
Benghazi.
The language of the interim report made clear why the sequence of events is important.
“The
key significance of this episode is the demonstration of a military
chain-of-command relationship between the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood
leadership of the TNC and the Al Qaeda-affiliated militia (Ansar
al-Shariah) that has been named responsible for the attack on the U.S.
mission in Benghazi,” the interim Rreport concluded.
“What we
have here is the Muslim Brotherhood leadership of the revolution giving a
kill order to a Muslim militia affiliated with al-Qaida, which then
carried it out,” Lopez summarized. “This chain-of-command link is
important even though it has not yet received enough attention in the
media.
A big ‘oh no’ moment
“After Gadhafi is deposed
and Stevens was appointed U.S. ambassador to Libya, the flow of weapons
reverses,” Lopez noted. “Now Stevens has the job of overseeing the
shipment of arms from Libya to Syria to arm the rebels fighting Assad,
some of whom ultimately become al-Nusra in Syria and some become ISIS.”
Lopez
distinguished that “al-Nusra in Syria still claims allegiance to
al-Qaida, while ISIS has broken away from al-Qaida, not because ISIS is
too violent, but out of insubordination, after Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the
leader of ISIS, wanted to run his own show inside Syria as well as
Iraq, thereby disobeying orders from al-Qaida leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.”
She noted that in this period of time, after the fall of
Gadhafi and before the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the Benghazi compound,
Stevens was working with Turkey to ship weapons out of Libya into Syria
for the use of the rebels fighting Assad.
According to the
authors of the bestselling book “13 Hours,” on Sept. 11, 2012, before
the attack on the Benghazi compound started, Stevens had dinner with
Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Stevens reportedly escorted the
Turkish diplomat outside the main gate of the Benghazi compound to say
good-bye to Akin at approximately 7:40 p.m. local time, before he
returned to Villa C to retire for the evening.
Kevin Shipp, a
former CIA counterintelligence expert who worked on the seventh floor at
Langley as protective staff to then-CIA Director William Casey, again
speaking for himself in his interview with WND, agreed with Lopez that
the gun-running operation Stevens managed is a secret the Obama White
House and Clinton State Department have sought to suppress from the
public.
“The shocking part, maybe even a violation of
international law that the Obama administration has been terrified to
have fully revealed, is that Stevens as part of his duties as a State
Department employee was assisting in the shipment of arms first into
Libya for the al-Qaida-affiliated militia, with the weapons shipped
subsequently out of Libya into Syria for use by the al-Qaida-affiliated
rebels fighting Assad,” Shipp told WND.
“Very possibly, these gun-running activities could be looked at even as treasonable offenses,” he said.
Shipp
further noted that in gun-running operations in which the CIA wants
deniability, the CIA generally involves a third party.
“The way
the CIA works is through a ‘cut-out,’ in that you get Qatar to transport
the weapons and you facilitate the transport. So now the third party is
to blame,” he explained.
“Qatar probably would have been able
to pull this off without any attribution to the CIA if the Benghazi
attack had not happened. The attack basically shed the light on this
operation the White House, the State Department and the CIA were trying
to keep quiet,” he said.
“The attack on Benghazi was a big ‘oh no’ moment.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/01/generals-conclude-obama-backed-al-qaida/#KW9rYvYDWZg0eTtQ.99
