Foreign Policy In Focus

Who would you believe: JSOC operatives past and present or the U.S. government?

Benghazi: The Definitive Report is the title of an e-book published on February 12 by William Morrow. It's written by two editors at SOFREP.com, the unofficial special operations site: Brandon Webb -- a former Navy SEAL -- and Jack Murphy -- a former Army Ranger and Green Beret. What's unique about the report is its bipartisan appeal. Its fodder for those who would attack the State Department, the administration, and the CIA from both the right and the left. Sure enough, it's caused ripples in Washington and garnered significant attention from the mainstream media.

To sum up, Webb and Murphy allege that the  Benghazi terrorist attack, during which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, was mounted by Islamist militants in retaliation for attacks on them by JSOC forces. Worse, the authors claim, neither Stevens nor CIA director David Petraeus knew about the raids, which were ordered by President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, who was acting outside the command structure. 

Webb and Murphy also declare that Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell was leaked by the members of his personal protection detail in conjunction with members of the CIA who were unhappy with his emphasis on paramilitary activities over traditional espionage.

About Brennan, Murphy told Human Events:

The Senate should not confirm him as the new director of the CIA and Brennan should not continue in public life. … "I think we need to let this guy go."

Meanwhile, Eli Lake, the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and Newsweek, writes:

… while the book is filled with juicy revelations that promise to shock even the most casual followers of counterintelligence gossip, government officials, including spokesmen for the National Security Council and Special Operations Command, dispute some of the key claims. … Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command, declined to discuss specific missions, but said “all U.S. Special Operations Forces work inside the established military chain of command,” and wouldn’t  “work in a foreign country without the knowledge and permission of the U.S. ambassador or chief of mission.”

The book also claims elements of the U.S. government either allowed or ran an operation to funnel weapons collected in Libya to Syria. The authors write, “[Ambassador] Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict.” … but Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says there was no program to send weapons from Libya to Syria. “This has no basis in reality and is completely made up,” he says. Hillary Clinton also denied any knowledge of this when she was asked about it by Sen. Rand Paul during last month’s hearings on the Benghazi attack.

Hmm, two spokespersons, plus Hilary Clinton during a hearing: that's all you've got, Eli? From the Human Events piece:

Because of the sensitivities involved, the authors double-source the claims in the book, he said. Many more stories were left out because there was no independent confirmation.

It all comes down to who you want to believe: the U.S. government or JSOC operatives past and present? In my case, it's more personal -- who do I want to believe: the U.S. government or my nephew? (By way of "full disclosure," as they say, Jack Murphy is my wife's sister's son.)

U.S. foreign policy and a weakened CIA may have sown the seeds for disaster.

Mitt Romney embarrassed himself at the second presidential debate when he tried to score points against President Obama over the attack on the U.S. Benghazi consulate. As you no doubt recall, he claimed that the president didn't label it an "act of terror" for two weeks. However feeble a "gotcha" it would have been, as debate moderator Candy Crowley informed Romney, the president used the words in a press conference the day after the attack.

Romney supporters then mounted a brief campaign in an attempt to kill the messenger (Crowley) by insisting that correcting Romney showed partisanship on her part. The right has continued to make the case that the president and his administration were unprepared for the attack and responded poorly. In fact, some thought this would be critical to election results.

Specifically, the right asked:
1. Why wasn't the consulate more secure, especially with al Qaeda in the region?
2. Why weren't U.S. forces able to fend off the attackers?
3. Why is the Obama administration hiding the truth about the attack?

Obama supporters brushed them off. But is there any truth to the right's concerns about the Benghazi attack? At Counterpunch, Melvin Goodman, who writes about the decline of the CIA [I'm not exactly sure what constituted its peak -- RW], answers in the affirmative, but for reasons more complicated than the right believe.

It’s now apparent that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was no ordinary consulate; in fact, it probably was. … the diplomatic cover for an intelligence platform and whatever diplomatic functions took place in Benghazi also served as cover for an important CIA base. 

Furthermore

Any CIA component in the Middle East or North Africa is a likely target of the wrath of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role in the global war on terror waged by the Bush administration and the increasingly widespread covert campaign of drone aircraft of the Obama administration. … The U.S. campaign to overthrow Gaddafi didn’t clean the slate of these abuses; it merely opened up the opportunity for militants and Islamists to avenge U.S. actions over the past ten years.

In other words, speaking as the former CIA analyst that he is, Goodman writes

Americans are devoting far too much attention to whether a so-called proper level of security in Benghazi could have prevented the attack, instead of trying to learn the motives and anticipate the actions of these militant organizations.

The CIA should have learned from a previous incident. 

The CIA failure to provide adequate security for its personnel stems from degradation in the operational tradecraft capabilities of the CIA since the so-called intelligence reforms that followed the 9/11 attacks. Nearly three years ago, nine CIA operatives and contractors were killed by a suicide bomber at their base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan in the deadliest attack on CIA personnel in decades.

Virtually every aspect of sound tradecraft was ignored in this episode.

But not much improved between then and the Benghazi attack.

The security situation in Libya, particularly Benghazi, was obviously deteriorating; the consulate was a target of a bomb in June. … Overall security for the consulate had been in the hands of a small British security firm that placed unarmed Libyans on the perimeter of the building complex. The CIA contributed to the problem with its reliance on Libyan militias and a new Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for its personnel in Benghazi.

On the night of the attack, the CIA security team was slow to respond to the consulate’s call for help. [Also] Ambassador Christopher Stevens was an extremely successful and popular ambassador in Libya, but he had become too relaxed about security in a country that had become a war zone.

Meanwhile, at GQ, Sean Flynn, who recently wrote the definitive account of the Utoya kilings, also provides one for Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens's final days. He concludes:

Even the apparently important operational question—namely, was there enough security—seems irrelevant, because there can never be enough to prepare for every scenario. "The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented—there had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya," a senior State Department official said. "In fact, it would be very, very hard to find an attack like that in recent diplomatic history."

But we'll give Goodman the final word.

The Benghazi failure is one more reminder of the unfortunate militarization of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, in the wake of 9/11 that finds our major civilian intelligence service becoming a paramilitary center in support of the war-fighter.

U.S. policies toward the Middle East were more of a factor in protests against "Innocence of Muslims" than insults to religion.

It's tough to deny that Denis Hamill (younger brother of Peter) makes a good point in his September New York Daily News column titled Radical Islamic terror 'flicks' insult humanity far more deeply than an idiot film about Muslims by a felonious con man. He's referring, of course, to the video Innocence of Muslims that's poured gasoline on fire in the Muslim world.

Suppose New Yorkers decided to retaliate and storm all their diplomatic outposts, killing ambassadors and other innocents because we were outraged by an Islamist film that we found offensive? … And, believe me, we have lots more than one dopey fictional film to be offended by.

Go online and you’ll find authentic real-life footage detailing radical Islamist atrocities that any rational person would find far more blasphemous to the human spirit than anything in the YouTube trailer that has set the Muslim world ablaze.

Start with these … videos:

1) The beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl on an Al Qaeda website, perhaps one of the most evil videos ever shot.

2) American hostage Eugene Armstrong being beheaded in Iraq.

3) Hooded terrorists killing Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

4) The second plane smashing into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

5) Human beings leaping to their doom from the Trade Center.

6) The collapse of the twin towers as people are obliterated inside.

7) A woman being stoned to death for adultery in Saudi Arabia.

8) The bodies of four U.S. contractors hanging from a bridge above the Euphrates River in Fallujah, Iraq.

Earlier in the piece he said:

I’m having a hard time believing that Islamic extremists from more than 20 countries actually hold 300 million Americans responsible for a single amateur film, an incoherent anti-Islamic screed made by a convicted felon on parole for credit-card scams.

Okay, maybe one or two offended people could be that dumb. But no way could tens of thousands of folks in 20 countries believe the same line of nonsense that this film is representative of the entire American people.

It's tough to deny that, as a progressive, it's difficult to explain the response of many Muslims. But those protesting may be under the impression that the video was the trailer for a mainstream film allowed to be distributed to movie theaters  in the United States, as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was.

At al Jazeera, quoted at Race for Iran, Flynt Leverett provides a likely explanation.

If it hadn’t been this film, it would have been something else that triggered an outburst—a manifestation of very, very deep-seated, longstanding resentment in Arab and Muslim societies about many important aspects of American foreign policy toward the region. When Americans think about this, they will tend to want to say that this a cultural issue—that there is something about Islam or that Arabs are insufficiently modernized to be able to keep something like this film in proper perspective. I think that it’s Americans who are having a cultural problem here, and who aren’t really able to keep things like this film in proper perspective. The proper perspective, at least from the vantage of the Muslim world, is that the United States has been, for many years now, an aggressive and a repressive force in the region.” 

Also, it must be recalled that it probably wasn't Innocence of Muslims per se that elicited the most violent responses, but extreme Islamists using it to stoke reaction to the film for their own purposes. As Christian Science Monitor reported yesterday (September 23), "news reports have suggested that there was no video-related anti-US protest before the armed attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three other men."

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

Cross-posted from IPS Special Project Right Web's Militarist Monitor.

The deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic personnel in Libya raises a host of uncomfortable questions about the long-term ramifications of U.S. overseas interventions, the impact of Islamophobic media on U.S. international relations, and the ability of the United States to defend its diplomats in unstable or hostile environs.

It also calls into the question the efficacy of the NATO intervention in Libya, which left behind a weak central state and a fractious, violent political order susceptible to penetration by radical groups like the Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades, the al-Qaeda-aligned Libyan organization suspected of using protests at the U.S. mission as a pretext for carrying out the attacks.

The Mitt Romney campaign, however, has raised none of these issues. Instead—in language reportedly approved by the candidate himself—Romney fumed that it was “disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Despite withering bipartisan criticism of both the timing and the substance of the statement, the Romney campaign has refused to disavow it.

The remark was an apparent reference to a statement issued by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where boisterous crowds had gathered to protest a bizarre anti-Islamic U.S. film that had been leaked to the Egyptian media. In language not vetted by Washington, the embassy staff condemned efforts to “hurt the religious feelings” of Muslims, which the Romney campaign construed as “an apology for our values.” Not only was the statement made in Cairo—not Benghazi, where the actual violence occurred amid similar protests—but it was issued hours before the U.S. personnel in Libya had been attacked.

Although some Republicans condemned the Romney campaign’s response as “craven” and “irresponsible,” a number of campaign surrogates and supporters took to the airwaves to double down. After repeatedly dodging a reporter’s questions about the timeline of the events (how could the administration be faulted, after all, for a statement issued before the violence had occurred?), Romney adviser Richard Williamson mused inanely that the occasion called for the president to “stand up for our values and [be] willing to lead from the front.” On Twitter, Donald Rumsfeld attributed the attacks to “perceived American weakness,” although presumably Twitter’s 140-character format left him no space to address the 12 embassy attacks that occurred during the last Bush administration.

But beyond a sordid new occasion for old “no apology” talking points, some observers have read baser motives into the Republican response. Romney’s remarks, wrote Adam Serwer, “don't merely assign responsibility for the incident to, say, poor leadership or a failed foreign policy. Instead, Romney's remarks suggest that Obama has very specific personal motivations: When violent religious radicals slaughter Americans, Obama is on the side of the radicals.” Serwer lumped the implications in with “a very well-developed narrative, popular on the fever swamps of the right where questions about Obama's citizenship or faith linger” and likened them to attacks leveled by the conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza.

But if Romney kept such implications to a dog whistle, other Republicans raised them to a fever pitch. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, for example, tweeted that it was “sad and pathetic” that “Obama sympathizes with [the] attackers in Egypt.” Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican notorious for his insistence that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” concluded simply that President Obama was “just apologizing because he doesn’t like America.” And after Obama called Libyan president Yusuf al-Magariaf to thank him for the Libyan government’s assistance in tracking down the perpetrators of the attack, FoxNews.com ran a story headlined “Obama Calls Libyan President to Thank Him after U.S. Ambassador Murdered.”

Amid the Beltway chatter, a new group of Libyans assembled outside the U.S. consulate in Benghazi holding signs condemning extremism and expressing remorse for the previous day’s violence. In an episode fraught with missed opportunities and debased rhetoric, they may be the only ones actually apologizing.

The cold, dead hand of Salafi extremism was once again on display in Benghazi.

According to Robert Worth of the New York Times, "the attack on the American Embassy in Cairo — unlike the one that killed [Ambassador to Libya Christopher] Stevens — appears to have been spontaneous, led by Egyptians genuinely angered by news of the film clip, distributed on YouTube, which portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a confused, bloodthirsty pedophile of uncertain parentage." 

As for the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, it

… might have less to do with any intrinsic Muslim intolerance than with the ideological chaos that reigns in the Arab world, where extremists routinely exploit popular anger and invoke Islam to draw attention to fundamentally political and even internecine goals. … Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle East studies at Princeton University, said, “It’s true that there are sanctions against insulting the Prophet, but this is really about political or symbolic opportunists, who use religious symbols to advance their own power or prestige against other groups.”

In other words, Salafi extremists exploit Middle-Eastern anger against the United States just like Pastor Terry Jones, thanks to whom the offending film went viral, exploits American anger against Islam.

Meanwhile, from the Department of Silver Linings

… there were outpourings of rage across Libya on Wednesday against the killers and against the Salafis more generally. In addition to demonstrations in Tripoli and Benghazi, Twitter was inundated with pro-American messages by young Libyans; several of them pleaded for the United States Marines to come and crush the Salafis.

Likewise, it behooves Americans to remember that Salafism, especially at its most extreme, such as al Qaeda, does not define Islam.