President Obama’s once seemingly unstoppable march toward re-election hit what he might call “bumps in the road” in Benghazi, Libya,
late on Sept. 11, 2012. It might be more accurate to describe the
effect of the well-planned and -executed, military-style attack on a
diplomatic facility there as the political equivalent of a devastating
improvised explosive device on the myth of the unassailability of the
Obama record as commander in chief.
Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez
at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional
investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what
happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official
cover-up now known as Benghazigate.
The evidence suggests that the
Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating,
enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant
in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American
diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj
and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities
for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the
immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around
the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.
One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens
was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of
and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and
that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms
recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Fox
News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel
carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of
Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms
— including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles —
apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.
What
cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days
of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a
larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could
make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.
Investigative journalist Aaron Klein
has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such
thing. He observes that although administration officials have done
nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility
where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein
describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major
public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern
security official, “routinely used by Stevens
and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments
on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the
rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”
We know that Stevens‘
last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified
“Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional
arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein
reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security,
our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to
fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”
It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez
observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated
with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As
their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never
know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis
to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs
killed along with Stevens.
What
we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly
pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article,
“Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to
supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are
going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular
opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it
seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive
scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not
only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably
against us and our allies as well. That would explain his
administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters
through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.
Frank J.
Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy
(SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of
Secure Freedom Radio on WRC-AM (1260).
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