Here’s Why Hillary Clinton Resisted Designating Boko Haram As A Terrorist Organization

Here’s Why Hillary Clinton Resisted Designating Boko Haram As A Terrorist Organization

BY HAYES BROWN MAY 8, 2014 AT 1:40 PM UPDATED: MAY 8, 2014 AT 3:08 PM

"Here’s Why Hillary Clinton Resisted Designating Boko Haram As A Terrorist Organization"

 

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Hillary Clinton in 2012, at one of her last events as Secretary of State

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/KEVIN LAMARQUE, POOL

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week tweeted out support for efforts to recover the more than two hundred girls kidnapped almost a month ago, saying “We must stand up to terrorism” and using the now ubiquitous #BringBackOurGirls hashtag. But now conservatives are angrily pointing out that she had refused to list the Nigerian group behind the kidnapping as a terrorist organization during her time at the State Department, threatening to turn the latest push against the group into a political football.

That the State Department under Clinton declined to name Boko Haram to a list of terror groups maintained at Foggy Bottom is true. But in making the point, an explosively titled article from the Daily Beast focuses more on the politics of the issue in light of the new interest in Boko Haram, rather than the actual reasoning behind the State Department’s decision. After drawing attention to Clinton’s tweet, the story continues on to note that what the former first lady “didn’t mention was that her own State Department refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, after the group bombed the U.N. headquarters in Abuja,” quoting named and unnamed Republican sources as the crux of its argument.

But there were multiple valid reasons for the State Department to disagree with the Justice Department and other agencies dealing with counterterrorism — such as the FBI and CIA — who urged State to place Boko Haram on the Foreign Terrorists Organization (FTO) list. “Designation is an important tool, it’s not the only tool,” a former State Department official told the Beast. “There are a lot of other things you can do in counterterrorism that doesn’t require a designation.” This includes boosting development aid to undercut the causes of unrest and deploying the FBI to assist in tracking down Boko Haram, both of which the U.S. actually did.

In addition, Clinton didn’t act in a vacuum to determine not to designate Boko Haram back in 2011. Scholars on Twitter who focus on the region, terrorism broadly, and Islamist groups in particular were quick to point out that not only were there few benefits and many possible costs to designation, many of them had argued against listing Boko Haram several years ago. In a letter to the State Department dated May 2012, twenty prominent African studies scholars wrote Clinton to implore her to hold off on placing Boko Haram on the FTO list. Acknowledging the violence Boko Haram had perpetrated, the academics argued that “an FTO designation would internationalize Boko Haram, legitimize abuses by Nigeria’s security services, limit the State Department’s latitude in shaping a long term strategy, and undermine the U.S. Government’s ability to receive effective independent analysis from the region.”

The Nigerian government also wasn’t exactly clamoring for U.S. assistance against Boko Haram back in 2011. At the time, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad — the actual full name of the group commonly called Boko Haram — was a threat only within Nigeria. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson described the group in 2012 testimony to the Senate as “not monolithic or homogenous” and “composed of several groups that remain primarily focused on discrediting the Nigerian government.”

“As Boko Haram is focused primarily on local Nigerian issues and actors, they respond principally to political and security developments within Nigeria,” Carson went on to say. In speaking with the Daily Beast, he defended that analysis: “There always has been a reluctance to accept our analysis of what the drivers causing the problems in the North and there is sometimes a rejection of the assistance that is offered to them.” And though the group has become more radicalized as the years have gone on, committing more and more atrocious crimes and latching further onto extremist Islamic ideology, the strategy of seeking to discredit the Nigerian government appears to still be the case even in the recent kidnapping of the three hundred girls kidnapped last month.

The U.S. government also wasn't exactly ignoring the presence of Boko Haram as a source of violence in Nigeria. In June 2012, with Clinton still at the helm at Foggy Bottom, the State Department designated Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and several others with ties to the organization as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” That designation made the individuals’ “property interests subject to U.S. jurisdiction and prohibits U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with or for the benefit of these individuals.” Shekau is now infamous for producing a nearly hour long video in which he took credit for the kidnapping of the schoolgirls in Nigeria.

Conservative media has latched onto the narrative as more evidence that the Hillary Clinton that they've railed against as the cause of the Obama administration’s supposed cover-up of the Benghazi tragedy is the real Hillary. Articles aggregating the Beast’s piece appear at The Blaze, the Daily Caller, and National Review, all in similarly condemnatory terms. And if giving a preview of what’s to come, CNN host and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tweeted: “Congress should hold hearings on why Clinton State Dept refused to tell truth about radical Islamist Boko Haram in Nigeria.”

The State Department did finally name Boko Haram to the FTO list in 2013, when it became clear that the arguments against designating the group were no longer enough to prevent their addition and under pressure from lawmakers who were preparing to legislatively force the administration to do just that. In doing so, however, State — now under the leadership of John Kerry — took care to implore Nigeria that more needed to be done to combat Boko Haram aside from just military action.

“These designations are an important and appropriate step, but only one tool in what must be a comprehensive approach by the Nigerian government to counter these groups through a combination of law enforcement, political, and development efforts, as well as military engagement, to help root out violent extremism while also addressing the legitimate concerns of the people of northern Nigeria,” the State Department statement read.

UPDATE

Media Matters has even more on the State Department’s decision to not name Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, including Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S. Adebowale Adefuye in 2012 flatly opposing the designation.

After SCOTUS Ruling, Sectarian Prayer Quickly Becomes Christian-Only Prayer

After SCOTUS Ruling, Sectarian Prayer Quickly Becomes Christian-Only Prayer

By: Hrafnkell Haraldssonmore from Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Saturday, May, 10th, 2014, 7:33 am

The blood from the gaping wound inflicted by the Supreme Court on the First Amendment with its Town of Greece v. Galloway ruling, was not even dry yet, when Roanoke County Supervisor Al Bedrosian proposed excluding non-Christian prayer from pre-meeting invocations.

The Roanoke Times reports Bedrosian’s reasoning, if it can be called that:

I think America, pretty much from Founding Fathers on, I think we have to say more or less that we’re a Christian nation with Christian ideology, If we’re a Christian nation, then I would say that we need to move toward our Christian heritage.

Satanists are already lining up to offer prayers to Beelzebub, but according to Bedrosian, “The freedom of religion doesn’t mean that every religion has to be heard.”

Um, yes, it really does. That’s what “freedom” means. Everyone has it. Equally. Period. The First Amendment guarantees it.

Contrary to Bedrosian, contrary to Tony Perkins, religious freedom is owned in equal quantity by every American.

He says, “If we allow everything … where do you draw the line?”

Well, that’s the point. You don’t. There is no line. All religions are equal before the law, the only place where such distinctions matter.

If Bedrosian is free to think that his religious is more equal than others, atheists are equally free to say no religion at all matters, and Satanists that their religion is equal to, or better than, Bedrosian’s.

And of course, Bedrosian is wrong about the whole “Christian nation” thing as well. The Founding Fathers never said, or even implied, such a thing, and Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli is explicit in its denial of the United States as a Christian nation:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

It was such a small step from allowing government-sponsored prayer to excluding non-Christians, and it is an equally small step from excluding non-Christians to excluding the wrong type of Christians. We have already seen Rick Santorum say that mainline Protestants are not really Christian:

[W]e look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.

It won’t be long, with that sort of thinking in place, before your average ELCA-type Lutheran finds he is not allowed to pray before a town council meeting. If, as Santorum says, mainline Protestants are under the influence of Satan, their prayers will be no more welcome than those of Satanists.

Mainstream Christians need to take notice. Much is made of a supposed “Judeo-Christian” tradition (by Religious Right figures like Rick Santorum), but in suggestions like this, one sees how little the “Judeo” means to conservative Christianity, because not only are Satanic prayers excluded, and Muslim, and Hindu and Pagan – but Jewish.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has sent a letter to the board, advising it that their proposal violates the Supreme Court’s May 5 ruling:

In vowing to discriminate against non-Christians, Supervisor Bedrosian ignores what the Supreme Court actually said in Galloway,” the letter says. “Although upholding the challenged prayer policy, the Court also made clear that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits legislative bodies from excluding non-Christian prayer givers or otherwise discriminating in selection.

But then they were told, along with everyone else. that allowing sectarian prayer at all violated the First Amendment.

Their attitude then was “so what?” The Supreme Court agreed: so what, indeed?

The First Amendment has already been violated by the Cinco de Mayo Massacre, and the Religious Right would violate it again – and again, to get its way, and there is no guarantee the Supreme Court would not simply wink at them as they do.

It is no secret at all that the Religious Right from its inception has desired to impose a pseudo-Christian theocracy on the American people based on a heretical atrocity they insist is orthodox Christianity, but one which imposes a weaponized Jesus in place of his actual teachings.

This is precisely what the Founding Fathers sought to forbid.

As AU executive director Barry Lynn said, “This is why the decision is so troubling, and I can imagine we will be seeing a lot of ‘Christians only’ talk from local boards.”

They will be spreading like hell-fire.

Photo from columbiafavs.com

After SCOTUS Ruling, Sectarian Prayer Quickly Becomes Christian-Only Prayer was written by Hrafnkell Haraldsson for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Sat, May 10th, 2014 — All Rights Reserved

Top 10 Reasons GOP Benghazi Witch Hunt Is Just a Campaign Fundraising Ploy

Published on Friday, May 9, 2014 by Informed Comment

Top 10 Reasons GOP Benghazi Witch Hunt Is Just a Campaign Fundraising Ploy

by Juan Cole

Since Obamacare is increasingly a wildly popular success, the GOP is flailing around looking for an issue, any issue to help fundraising for the fall congressional campaigns. In a vote that will live in infamy, the House GOP has decided to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi consular attack yet again. They may as well exhume poor Ambassador Chris Stevens’ body and steal the gold from his teeth fillings.

CNN reports:

Since they insist on continuing to purvey the same falsehoods about Benghazi (which I visited a few months before the tragic attack), I continue to post much the same refutation. Some of these points are being revised from an earlier posting.)

1. Republicans keep posturing that their questions about Benghazi are intended to bolster US security. In fact, they are harming it. Republican hearings in the House of Representative have disgracefully revealed the names of Libyans talking to the US consulate, thus endangering their lives and harming US efforts to understand the situation in the country, since who would risk talking to the embassy if they know about Darrell Issa’s big mouth? Moreover, the constant baseless Republican drumbeat about the Benghazi events has caused the State Department to pull dependents from Tunis and Tripoli and keep only a skeleton crew there. These steps have limited US diplomatic activity in two transitional countries of the Arab upheavals of 2011, and so damaged US interests. The real, actual Libya needs US aid and training but all the GOP wants to do is discourage career diplomats from having anything to do with it. This standoffishness on the actual Libya is a US security problem waiting to happen. Sen. John McCain knows better than to behave this way.

2. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the so-called “film,” the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that attacked the Prophet Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time confirmed to me that there were such demonstrations that day. Likewise, Reuters correspondent Hadeel Shalchi, who was on the scene in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, wrote:

The ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and the other Americans were killed after Islamist gunmen attacked the U.S. consulate and a safe house refuge in Benghazi on Tuesday night. The attackers were part of a mob blaming America for a film they said insulted the Prophet Mohammad.

In December ’13 a long NYT article by David Kirkpatrick, based on months of research in Benghazi, which most of the House GOP couldn’t find on a map, confirmed that the militants who gathered in front of the consulate were motivated by anger over the film. Kirkpatrick did challenge the characterization of this gathering as a civil demonstration, saying it was a band of extremists. But my interlocutor in Benghazi did report anti-film demonstrations in Benghazi that day. The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security videos.

3. What the House should really investigate is who really funded and encouraged the production of that get-up ‘film’ attacking Islam, “The Innocence of Muslims.” It was redubbed after being shot, such that the cast had no idea they were in a bigoted attack film. The makers of the film, including a far right wing American militia figure, sent it determinedly to Egyptian hard line Salafi Muslims until part of it was finally shown on a Salafi television channel. They were clearly trying as hard as they could to provoke attacks on US facilities. Isn’t this a sort of terrorism in itself? Was it a Republican Party black money group hoping to provoke a diplomatic hostage crisis that would damage President Obama’s chances of reelection? Why did GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney keep comparing President Obama to former president Jimmy Carter in spring of 2012? Carter had been bedeviled by the Iran/ US embassy hostage crisis. Had Romney’s speech writers heard from the US Islamophobic network that there was likely to be embassy trouble that summer and that it might make Obama look weak? Why are GOP leaders so determined to deny that the film helped provoke the Benghazi attack? Are they afraid that sooner or later a link between GOP funders and the film will emerge, and they want to hold themselves harmless? Why do Muslim-hating political campaigns break out regularly every two years in the US, pushed by Republican candidates? Will there be another one in summer-fall of 2014?

4. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not dominated by “al-Qaeda,” contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university. While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist, tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya’s parliamentary elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief, called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.

5. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city, members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012.

In fact, one Senator John McCain said during a visit to Libya February 2012, ““We are very happy to be back here in Libya and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few months… We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged by what we have seen.” Doesn’t sound to me like McCain was running around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey Graham, who likewise didn’t issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.

6. Contrary to the “Libya-is-riddled-with-al-Qaeda” meme of the GOP politicians, there is a strong civil society and tribal opposition to fundamentalist militias in Benghazi, of which Amb. Chris Stevens was well aware. Tripoli-based journalist Abd-al-Sattar Hatitah explained in the pages of the pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat [Sept. 30, 2012, trans. USG Open Source Center]:

“It appears that the simple rule Benghazi’s people thought of applying was based on other experiences in which the radical Islamists or militants in general managed to grow, prosper, and expand by seeking protection from the tribes, as happened in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. But the civil movements which became very active [in Benghazi] after the fall of Al-Qadhafi’s regime were the ones that formed alliances this time with the tribes, the notables, wise men councils, and civil society figures against the militants. This is akin to the “Sahwat” in Iraq. The alliance managed to expel the brigades from the town and encouraged the nascent Libyan authorities to tighten their restrictions on all armed manifestations…

He adds that [a meeting by secular notables with the tribes] was also attended by representatives from the army chiefs-of-staff and the Interior Ministry as well as a number of members from the National Congress (parliament). “All civil society organizations also took part with us. Everybody consented to issuing the statement against the presence of the [fundamentalist] brigades and we distributed 3,000 copies. “

After the attack on the US consulate, tens of thousands of people in Benghazi demonstrated against the violence and in favor of the US and Stevens. Then they attempted to sweep the fundamentalist militias from the city.

7. Al-Qaeda is not for the most part even a “thing” in Libya. The only formal al-Qaeda affiliate in the region is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a Libyan but an Algerian organization. Just calling all Salafi groups “al-Qaeda” is propaganda. They have to swear fealty to Ayman al-Zawahiri (or in the past, Usama Bin Laden) to be al-Qaeda. The main al-Qaeda connection in Benghazi is to Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in northern Pakistan by a US drone strike in June. Some of his close relatives in Benghazi may have been angry about this (depending on how well they liked him), but they are not known to form a formal al-Qaeda cell. There are also young men from Dirna in the Benghazi area, some of whom fought against the US in Iraq. Their numbers are not large and, again, they don’t have al-Zawahiri’s phone number on auto-dial. Sen. McCain was a big supporter of the US intervention in Libya and seems to have been all right with Abdul Hakim Belhadj being his ally, even though in the zeroes Belhadj would have been labeled ‘al-Qaeda.’

8. Ansar al-Sharia (Helpers of Islamic Law) is just an informal grouping of a few hundred hard line fundamentalists in Benghazi, and may be a code word to refer to several small organizations. There are no known operational links between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda. It is a local thing in Benghazi. This point was confirmed by Kirkpatrick’s NYT report

9. Leaders of Ansar al-Sharia have denied that they directed their organization to attack the US consulate and have condemned the attack.

10. Lindsey Graham and others point to instances of political violence summer 2012 in Benghazi as obvious harbingers of the September 11 consulate attack. But it was a tiny fringe group, the Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades, that claimed responsibility for setting off a small pipe bomb in front of the gate of the US consulate last June. This is what the US statement said last June:

“There was an attack late last night on the United States office in Benghazi,” a US embassy official said, adding that only the gate was damaged and no one was hurt. The diplomat said a homemade bomb had been used in the attack on the office, set up after the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qadhafi and kept open to support the democratic transition “

You’d have to be a real scaredy cat to pack up and leave because of a thing like that, which is what Sen. Graham keeps saying should have been the response. Likewise the same small cell was responsible for attacks on the office of the Red Cross and on a convoy of the British consulate, which injured a consular employ. Security isn’t all that great in Benghazi, though actually I suspect the criminal murder rate is much lower than in any major American city. I walked around freely in Benghazi in early June, 2012, and couldn’t have disguised my being a Westerner if I had wanted to, and nobody looked at me sideways. A pipe bomb and a shooting, neither of them fatal, did not stand out as dire in a city full of armed militias, most of them grateful to the US and Britain for their help in the revolution. You can understand why the Red Cross packed it in after a couple of attacks, but the US government is not the Red Cross.

© 2014 Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He is also the author of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

Benghazi Mystery Explained!?!

Benghazi Mystery Explained!?!

Report from London links CIA Covert Op with Turkey, Syria

by William Boardman / April 19th, 2014

Answer offered by Seymour Hersh Gets Little Public Attention

“Benghazi” is one of those knee-jerk labels that right-wing folks slap on a story they don’t actually understand but have determined the “right” answer to anyway. It’s a hot button, not an argument, like the “IRS scandal,” which the right is finally beginning to admit it got wrong because it ignored the law as written. “Fast and Furious” is another of some two dozen, mostly less-well-known right-wing thought substitutes that aren’t supported by persuasive evidence (meanwhile, the scripted herd of Obama-haters pretty much remains silent about real Obama administration scandals, like civilian murder by drone or massive global surveillance, the sorts of things that throw the left into denial).

The latest explanation of “Benghazi” comes from a non-partisan reporter, so that’s a start, and it provides a credible framework for most of the anomalies associated with Benghazi. Even better, official spokes-people universally either refused to comment on the story, or denied it flatly. So there’s hope.

“Benghazi” as a political story began with the Obama administration’s strangely dishonest early responses to the killing of four Americans in Libya on September 11, 2012. The story got legs when Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney immediately falsified what the administration was saying, and was followed by just about every Republican who’s talked about it since perpetuating one lie or another. Nobody has seemed interested in the truth, which especially makes sense from a Republican perspective, since “Benghazi” provided a handy rhetorical cudgel with which to pound the table and the president in order to appear “tough.” But why has the Obama administration remained so opaque, tossing out one red herringafter another for Republicans to gleefully chase, but still not offering a persuasive narative?

Even when Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer recently told Republicans to give up on Benghazi – “the public is now tired of it” – he was still clinging to the party line that there was a real scandal to be found somewhere, even though neither he nor anyone else seemed to know what it could be even though they were sure it was “worse than Watergate.”

If some truth about Benghazi is available, does anyone want to know?

So far, every report – from Congress and the executive branch and most media – has come t5o conclusions with serious critiques that fall short of scandal. Despite a variety of shortcomings and contradictions in the administration’s responses since September 2012, none of the investigations has produced a credible, fact-based explanation for the administration’s obviously misleading response at the time or its apparent stonewalling since. This changed on April 6, 2014, when the London Review of Books published “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” a long article by Seymour Hersh, focusing on evidence that the sarin nerve gas used in Damascus in August 2013 was likely a false flag gassing by rebel forces made to look like it was done by the Syrian government, in order to fool the United States into attacking Syria.

Hersh’s analysis of how Turkish and Syrian agents almost managed to dupe the United States into going to war based on a lie (they’d seen that work before, right?), is the focus of his article, in which Benghazi is only a tangential element. The “Libyan spring” began in Benghazi and anyone who wanted to know could easily learn that the region was hot with jihadists among anti-government rebels.

By early 2012, Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi had been overthrown and killed. The U.S. had established a foothold in the Libyan turmoil. The U.S. also had access to Gaddafi’s significant weapons cache, which was largely unneeded in a Libya already awash in arms. But those weapons had other uses, one of which was to support the rebels in Syria trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Reportedly, Turkey was already operating the Benghazi airport, primarily to fly humanitarian aid to Syria, but also to smuggle arms to the rebels. Since the U.S. and Turkey both wanted Assad gone, the CIA helped set up a more extensive, covert supply line to those rebels. As Hersh reports:

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI [Director of National Intelligence] spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)

Libyans attacked both the consulate and the CIA safe house in 2012

CIA director David Petraeus apparently ran the rat line operation (his spokesperson denies there was such an operation) at the same time the FBI was investigating his extra-marital operations. (The CIA secretly coordinated its activities with Britain’s MI6.) Coincidentally or not, Turkish media reported an unscheduled meeting in Ankara between Petraeus and “his Turkish counterpart on Sept. 2 in Istanbul during which the spy chiefs discussed the Syrian crisis and the Arab republic’s possible transition process,” without providing further detail other than noting that this was the CIA director’s second visit to Ankara in six months. The Turkish report noted that a month earlier, U.S. and Turkish delegations met to discuss how “to coordinate ongoing efforts to extend humanitarian aid to Syrians and to produce a common road map to shape a possible post-Baathist era. The meetings also raised the issue of the need for a smooth transition in Syria to avoid chaos in the country in the event that President Bashar al-Assad’s government collapses.”

Equally circumstantial, and despite earlier security warnings, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, had come to Benghazi for a dinner meeting with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin on September 11, 2014, , reportedly for a discussion of furthering weapons transfers. The attacks started later, after 10 p.m., leaving the ambassador and three other Americans dead. Soon after that, the CIA role in the rat line operation was severed, but the operation continued with the shell companies that had been established (staffed with American mercenaries), and with British, Turkish, Saudi, and Qatari backing. Whether another covert American agency replaced the CIA is uncertain.

Running for re-election in 2012, President Obama is unlikely to have wanted to disclose an ongoing covert operation, especially one which was politically dangerous, since it was arming Syrian rebels of all stripes, including jihadists, who were supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Worse for the Obama administration, the operation was arguably illegal, and at best controversial. According to Hersh:

The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation…. for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.)

What’s better than watching Republicans chase imaginary wild hares?

Even today, disclosure is limited by official secrecy. Much of Hersh’s information comes from a “highly classified annex” to the January 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi. Distribution of the annex was limited to eight ranking Congresspersons and the staff who wrote it. Hersh says he has not seen the annex but has talked to one or more people who have. According to them, the only purpose of the Benghazi consulate was to provide cover for the nearby CIA station and its gun running operation.

Given all that, what better tactic could the Obama campaign find in 2012 than letting Republicans make up and chase down imaginary conspiracy theories, only to come up empty time and again? Yes, the Obama administration ended up looking suspicious: incompetent, disingenuous, or dishonest. But that’s a political hit that seems far easier to take than what might have resulted from telling the truth in all its detail.

The CIA gun-running aspect of Benghazi has been part of the story pretty much from the start, reinforced by the September 14 London Times report of the arrival in a Turkish port of a 400 ton arms shipment on a Libyan ship, The Victory with a captain from Benghazi. The story was picked up by Business Insider, which proceeded to run with it – in the wrong direction if you assume that the most important question was whether Ambassador Stevens knew there were Libyan arms going to Syria. At the same time, Paula Broadwell, by then known as the CIA director’s mistress, publicly suggested that the attack on the CIA annex in Benghazi was meant to free Libyan prisoners there, a story plant that has the feel of a deliberate wild goose chase (which of course the CIA “adamantly denied”). By May 2013, Business Insider was again focusing on the Libyan weapons freighter and quoting Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, on the same day that he announced he was “considering” a run for the presidency in 2016, telling CNN:

I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria…. I never have quite understood the cover-up — if it was intentional or incompetence — but something went on. I mean, they had talking points that they were trying to make it out to be a movie when everybody seemed to be on the ground telling them it had nothing to do with a movie…. Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation going on at the CIA annex? I’m not sure exactly what was going on, but I think questions ought to be asked and answered.

Perhaps the clearest, and most vitriolic, expression of the Benghazi gun-running plot came from rising right-wing celebrity blogger Katie Kieffer of Minnesota, whose April 29, 2013, post began: “Liberals don’t want honest Americans like you to have guns. Liberals just want to arm foreign rebels in crapshoot attempts to ‘end global violence.’ But liberals feign ignorance when the rebels they arm end up being criminals who kill innocent Americans like the late U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.” In other words, the new right-wing Benghazi memecame down to this: Obama gave weapons to some jihadists– some jihadists killed Americans in Benghazi ­– therefore Obama is a murderer – and, no, we don’t have any evidence for that.

“Benghazi” outbursts continue, but most media ignore Hersh’s claims

A year later, as some 70 demonstrators prepared to protest Hillary Clinton’s satellite appearance at a San Diego healthcare event, the current right-wing version of Benghazi goes like this:

Is it not inconceivable to you that a Muslim terror attack, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, that resulted in the death of four Americans, would not only go uninvestigated but also unpunished as well? That is exactly what the Obama White House is doing. President Obama and then-Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton allowed a Muslim terror attack against the US Consulate in Libya to occur unchallenged, while they watched it in real-time on White House satellite feeds. Then Obama started firing staff to perpetuate the coverup.

The assertion that they “allowed a Muslim terror attack” derives from an anonymous claim that unnamed sources gave unspecified warnings that the consulate was in danger. The “satellite feeds” refer an anonymous report that two drones, one replacing the first, observed the attacks and had the capability to send signals the White House could receive. The “staff firing” reference is about thePetraeus resignation after his extra-marital affair became public.

Hersh’s story has had little or no coverage in corporate media, which were pretty much of one mind that the sarin attacks of 2013 were the work of the Assad regime, because they bought the official story that no one else had the capability to do that. Hersh’s article casts credible doubt on that assumption of certainty, and provides a more plausible motivation than whatever self-destructive impulse was assigned to Assad. Much of the Twitter backlash against Hersh is merely ad hominem sputtering and their debunkings of Hersh’s debunking of the official version of events were inconclusive, as Interventions Watch wrote: “The article has caused much consternation among those people in the corporate media and the NGO community who are 100% certain that the Assad regime was responsible for the attacks.”

So now there are new Benghazi questions coming from new directions:

• Is it possible that the Benghazi attack was orchestrated by the Islamist president of Turkey for the sake of freer rein in helping Syrian Islamist rebels?

• How much credence should be given to the YouTube recording of Turkish officials discussing a false flag operation designed to provoke a war between Turkey and Syria? (Turkish officials have not denied the authenticity of the recording, but they claim it was manipulated and have shut down the YouTube site in Turkey.)

• Have the arms shipments from Libya to Syrian rebels included any chemical weapons? Or biological weapons?

• What did the White House know, and when did the White House know it?

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first published in Reader Supported News. Read other articles by William.

This article was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2014 at 3:17pm and is filed under CIA, Disinformation, Espionage/"Intelligence", Guns, Media,Military/Militarism, Obama, Syria, Weaponry.