The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
Vol: 136 Issue: 24 – Thursday, January 24, 2013
It Makes a Difference, Mrs. Clinton It was the appearance that we’d all been waiting for.  We’d heard from most everybody else, but not word one from Hillary Clinton about the Benghazi affair.  As Secretary of State, this is her bailiwick and so the naïve among us thought that, at last, we’d get some answers.
We had especially hoped to get an answer to the question, “why did you blame a spontaneous protest gone bad?” together with some kind of explanation for why orders were issued not to help them.
More than that, why didn’t the compound have any of the standard security features?  No bulletproof glass, reinforced ballistic-resistant doors, no ‘safe room’ — the facility was not even located behind reinforced walls.
Why didn’t the Benghazi mission have trained security personnel?  According to Congressman Darrell Issa, the Obama administration intentionally withdrew security personnel and equipment from the mission in Benghazi for political reasons, so as to “convey  the impression that the situation in Libya was getting better, not worse.”
If that isn’t true, why didn’t Hillary address that issue in the hearing?  First, let’s look at what we know about the Benghazi raid, for that is what it was. Ambassador Chris Stevens was stationed in Libya as a liaison to aid the Libyan “opposition” (mainly al-Qaeda, we now know) win in their effort to topple Ghadaffi.
In short, the Obama administration elected to support individuals and groups that were allied ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda.
After Ghadaffi’s murder, Stevens was tasked with funneling weapons from Libya to the Syrian “rebels” (who are also mainly al-Qaeda), which is why no government will openly aid the Syrian rebellion.
In addition to facilitating arms transfers, Stevens’ duties also included therecruitment of Islamic jihadists from Libya and elsewhere in North Africa who were willing to personally go into combat against the Assad regime in Syria.  The U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi served as a headquarters from which all the aforementioned activities could be coordinated with officials and diplomats from such countries as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Just before the Benghazi debacle, rumors started to circulate that the Islamist government in Egypt was demanding the release of the blind sheik, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, Omar Abel-Rahman.
The  pro-al Qaeda group responsible for the armed assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is called “The Imprisoned Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades”.
Then, on the night of September 11, 2012, the U.S. mission in Benghazi was attacked by a large group of heavily armed terrorists.  Over the next 7 hours, Americans stationed at the diplomatic mission and at the nearby CIA annex issued 3 urgent requests for military back-up, all of which were denied by the Obama administration.
For the kidnappers, it should have been a cake-walk; Steven’s was unguarded in an unprotected sub-standard villa doubling as a diplomatic mission.  The Obama administration ordered first responders to stand down and leave Stevens protection to his Libyan bodyguards.  Stevens was left wide open.
Nobody was expecting three actual heroes to refuse the orders to stand down and rush to the embassy’s defense.  The administration planned to make it look like a demonstration gone bad where kidnapping Ambassador Stevens seemed like an afterthought.
By the time the violence was over, 4 Americans were dead: Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALS, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who fought valiantly (but unsuccessfully) to drive away the attackers.
The kidnappers never expected Sean Smith or Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty to put up the kind of fight that they did — they no doubt thought they’d walked into an ambush.  The embassy defenders had killed more than sixty attackers before it was all over.
There is a reason why all the rest of the Americans had been shot, while Ambassador Stevens was not.  Ambassador Stevens was asphyxiated by the smoke while he hid in his office.  Recall the video of the attackers saying “Allahu Akkbar! He’s alive!” when they first dragged him out, before rushing him to a hospital.
If the goal was to kill Americans in retaliation for some movie, then why the short-lived joy that the principle target had seemingly survived?
So when Hillary Clinton was asked why the administration kept up the charade about a random act of violence instead admitting it was a coordinated terror attack she resorted to theatrics.  Since she obviously had no answer she could offer that would make sense, she had a temper tantrum.
(Get used to that.  We’ll see a lot more of them from Obama officials before this is over.)

“With all due respect, the fact is we have four dead Americans. Whether it was because of a protest or because guys outside for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans. What difference at this point does it make?”

It makes a big difference if these Americans were set up by the administration with the State Department’s assistance as a way of releasing Abdel Rahman.
Is it even possible?  Read the timeline and see if you come up with another explanation that makes more sense to you.
I’d like to read it.
Assessment:
Former US prosecutor Andrew McCarthy was the federal prosecutor who put Omar Abdel Rahman behind bars for the first World Trade Center Bombing.  In an interview with Newsmax, he shared his fears that the Obama administration will find a way to trade him away.

“I’m still concerned about that,” acknowledged McCarthy in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. “I never was very concerned that they would release him to the terrorists as a sort of a quid pro quo in the middle of a violent jihadist attack and hostage situation.”
McCarthy was referring to recent reports that the al-Qaeda-linked militants who seized a natural gas complex in Algeria offered to release American hostages in exchange for two people being held in the United States — the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in the 1993 bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a 40-year-old Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three, who was convicted of attacking U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Before going on, it struck me as interesting that in all this trade talk, nobody is talking about trading for that Pakistani doctor that helped us get bin-Laden and got tossed in a Pakistani jail for it.
McCarthy finds himself asking many of the same questions.  Keep in mind that McCarthy isn’t some conspiracy nut — he’s the guy who put these guys away.

“You have a seven-hour siege by Jihadists against Americans in Benghazi,” he said. “When did the president find out about it? We have reason to believe it was early on in the seven-hour period. Under circumstances where you had American military assets within an hour of the place where Americans were under attack, what directives did the commander in chief give to protect Americans? And if he did give orders to protect Americans, why weren’t those orders carried out? If he didn’t give them, that in and of itself is an amazing maleficence, and amazing dereliction of duty.”

McCarthy believes that Congress would be remiss if legislators fail to press Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for answers to such questions when she testifies before House and Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

“She should not only be made to confront those questions, the key question in my mind is why did we have a diplomatic installation of some kind in Benghazi at all? We know that it was doing normal diplomatic work,” according to McCarthy. “In Libya, that’s done in Tripoli. It’s not done in Benghazi. It hasn’t been clear — and the State Department certainly hasn’t made it clear — of what in the world that installation in Benghazi was for in the first place. But it’s utterly irresponsible for the government to have diplomatic installations, or frankly any other kind of installation, in a place where we can’t protect American lives and American property.”

In the end, maybe it makes no difference whether this was a coordinated al-Qaeda attack aimed at kidnapping an American diplomat to trade for Abdel Rahman, or whether it was a random act of violence spawned by a movie.
What makes a difference is the answer to the question, why did you leave him unguarded and recall the rescue teams — if this was merely some kind of random attack?
How dumb do you think we are? 

Archives of past issues of The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest plus many other Omega Letter member features can be found at: www.omegaletter.com