Plausible Deniability

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John Sexton:

One Year Later: Why We Were in Benghazi

It has been nearly a year since the attack which killed four Americans in Benghazi. During that time various minute-by-minute accounts of the attack have been published. In addition, the administration’s decisions to refuse additional security requests and to revise its talking points after the attack have been examined in detail.

But Benghazi may be a case where most observers have missed the forest for the trees. This is not an attempt to add new information so much as it is to collate the information that already exists from the most reputable journalistic sources.

To begin with, Benghazi was a CIA operation involving weapons, one which had no cover beyond a small mission that provided a diplomatic fig leaf for the effort. Officially the CIA was there to track and collect dangerous weapons left over from the war that ousted Qaddafi. But the evidence suggests the CIA was also either tacitly or actively involved in a multi-national effort to ship those weapons to Syrian rebels. Our covert effort in Benghazi, Libya was connected to our escalating involvement in Syria.

The general outlines of this CIA effort have been reported. One fact which has not been highlighted is that the UN arms embargo of Libya, which the United States helped pass in 2011, makes shipping weapons in or out of the country a violation of international law. Indeed, the way the UN resolution is written even knowingly allowing such shipments to take place may be a violation of the agreement.

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As CNN reported in August, there were 21 people, presumably CIA, at the Annex in Benghazi the night of the attack. It is possible that they missed the surface-to-air missiles being delivered to Syrian rebels. And it is possible that when the shipment arrived in Turkey the CIA agents working there again missed them (as they had the smaller shipment a month earlier).

An alternative explanation is that the CIA was, as the Times has reported, shopping for weapons to fill the pipeline. With the Russians continuing to sell attack helicopters to the Assad regime, surface-to-air missiles would represent a much needed game-changer on the ground.

When asked by CNN the State Department maintained its personnel were there to help the new Libyan government destroy dangerous weapons. However State pointedly refused to speak for “other agencies.” In other words, take it up with the CIA. But the CIA did not respond to inquiries.

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There is more and you should read it. But to make a long story short, we were breaking the law, first by shipping arms to Libyan rebels, then by shipping arms from Libya to Syria. The American public might not have approved either. This is the kinda stuff that got Ronnie Raygun in trouble. That would certainly explain the cover-up.

But it doesn’t explain everything, like why we never reacted to the initial attack or why we still haven’t gone after the people whodunnit. This is where my pet theory comes in.

Covert ops have a long history of spinning out of control because of the secrecy and lack of accountability that are built in to a “covert” operation. Read the Church Committee Report if you want examples.

So here we have a covert op which is also illegal and could be politically damaging to Barack Obama. Then somebody comes up with a bright idea – what if these weapons we were collecting in Libya were “stolen” my some militants and then sent to Syria? That would give our government “plausible deniability” (a Watergate-era term) if the story was exposed.

Of course it hopefully would remain a secret forever, at least from the American public.

So these weapons are gathered up and stored in a warehouse in Benghazi where security is intentionally lax. Under the pretext of some demonstration one of the local militias we are working with will “steal” the weapons and deliver them for shipment to the Syrian rebels.

But only the militia leaders know the plan, the militia members think they are really attacking the consulate. Some of them set it on fire, trapping Ambassador Chris Stevens and another man inside where they die of smoke inhalation. When the militia leaders realize what happened they rescue the two men and rush them to a hospital but it is too late.

The death of the two former navy SEALs could have been an unfortunate accident as well. I’m not going to lay out the whole theory but the attack on the CIA annex happened six hours after the attack on the consulate. Those two men were killed when a mortar round hit their rooftop position. Meanwhile our military forces sat on their hands and Barack Obama was whereabouts unknown.

Here is a strange fact – nobody on either side appears to have been shot that night. Two armed attacks took place. Both locations had armed guards. But there is not a single report of a gunshot victim, dead or alive.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the official story is pure bullshit.

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