— by Odysseus
On September 11th, 2012, The Cassandra Times reported that the Obama administration’s version of what had happened that day in Benghazi, Libya, namely, the attack on the United States consular staff and the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens was patently nonsensical. Shortly after our announcement, other public figures began to follow our line of reasoning and weighed in on the scandal.
Now, in 2016, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seeks the Presidency of the United States, it is time for the rest of the Benghazi story to be told. As usual, we here at The Cassandra Times will tell you what the controlled info-tainment industry will not. Even though we have no special sources or access to any classified information, if we can figure it out, so can they. But they will not share the truth with the American people for political reasons of their own.
In the summer of 2012, the United States government was engaged in the attempted overthrow of the Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad. The United States had foolishly but successfully engineered the overthrow of relatively secular and moderate regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, which were aligned with the West, and the, at least, co-operative Libya. In place of these countries’ autocratic but relatively moderate leaders, the Obama administration had encouraged the installation of political leaders and parties that had a more religious, fundamentalist Islamist leaning.
According to this new strategy of wooing Islamists into becoming a sort of American ally, rather than defeating them, the Obama administration sought to provide armaments to the Free Syrian Army. The administration believed this group to be less radical than Al Qaeda and wanted to assist it in its fight against Assad’s Syrian army. Since the Obama administration viewed Egypt’s then-President Mohammad Morsi of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood to be “moderate”, we know that the administration’s capacity for interpretation of the geopolitical situation was, at best, optimistic, and, more probably, blinkered.
The Obama administration sought plausible deniability for its arms shipments to the Free Syrian Army. It either knew that, during the presidential election year of 2012, the American public would vehemently disagree with its snuggling up to Islamists or wanted to avoid global recognition that America was once again meddling and engineering the foolish overthrow of another relatively moderate and secular Middle-Eastern government. So, the administration hired private military contractors from the global pool of former military personnel called “the circuit” or mercenaries. These former military men were highly skilled operators, frequently drawn from American, British, South African, Australian, Canadian, or allied special forces and elite units.
In this instance, British contractors were hired to investigate which anti-Assad forces on the ground in Syria were suitable for “arming”. Once the contractors located a seemingly suitable group, arrangements were made for these contractors to travel to Libya to acquire the weapons that were floating around following the overthrow of Libyan dictator, Colonel Moammar Qaddafi. The administration wanted to acquire rifles, ammunition, and other light infantry weapons that would be untraceable to the United States or to Great Britain and sought weaponry which would have the pre-established origin of already being in the Middle East region. The bulk of the weapons had fallen into the hands of the Islamist terror group Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQM), which is Al Qaeda’s North African franchise.
Business being business, both in Washington and in the Middle East, the Obama administration started doing business with the local Al Qaeda franchise AQM, to buy arms and ship them to the Islamist Free Syrian Army. Since the arms would be shipped to other Islamists in Syria in an attempt to overthrow a secular Middle Eastern regime, AQM was more than happy to take the Obama administration’s money. President Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton wanted to get weapons to Syria without the American people or the Republicans knowing that they were willing to buy the weapons from Al Qaeda. This scheme was accomplished through deniable assets and military contractors like former British soldiers, who were familiar with the region and spoke Arabic. By September 11, 2012, these contractors had been running the operation successfully for some time and were smuggling weapons from Libya to Syria. Then, a fly entered the ointment.
Apparently, there was another parallel operation going on in Libya, which also used private contractors and likely worked for a different American agency than the one that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama used for smuggling weapons to Syria. One or both of these secret private contractor-run operations were controlled by or affiliated with longtime Clinton advisor Sydney Blumenthal. Hillary Clinton had used Sydney Blumenthal to erect her own clandestine and parallel intelligence operation in Libya, just as it was later discovered that she had surreptitiously set up her own private e-mail server to bypass official government communications.
Secretary Clinton’s other secret operation and its contractors were trying to locate and secure shoulder launched surface to air missiles that had been in Qaddafi’s arsenal. A shoulder launched anti-aircraft missile, or MANPAD, is a nightmare weapon in the hands of terrorists. A terrorist with a MANPAD does not need to plant a bomb aboard a passenger aircraft. He can simply sit out a half mile from the end of the runway and shoot a large, fat, and slow passenger plane out of the sky. MANPADs, from the Stinger to its Russian, Chinese, and Indian copies, are designed to shoot down armored and fast moving military aircraft. It is pathetically easy for MANPADs to shoot down civilian passenger planes. Although the MANPAD genie escaped from the bottle in the 1990s and passenger planes began to be shot down with them, it remains in the world’s best interest to limit the availability of MANPADs as much as possible.
Consequently, an effort was made in Libya to round up MANPADs either by Hillary Clinton’s secret Sidney Blumenthal Brigades or by some other US intelligence service. Based upon Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ background and his prior history of employment, we at The Cassandra Times believe that he was somehow involved in this effort to recover the MANPADs. He was no ordinary ambassador, but a highly skilled area specialist with deep ties to intelligence operations.
The British contractors, who purchased weapons for the Islamist Free Syrian Army, were given the additional, optional task of purchasing any MANPADs that they may come across in their dealings with AQM. At some point, while they explored buying MANPADs in addition to providing an ongoing supply of weapons to Syria, the British contractors became aware that a blood relative of the influential AQM individual that they were working with had been captured by western forces. This relative was held and interrogated in that group’s efforts to locate the MANPADs. However, the local franchise of Al Qaeda (AQM) did not distinguish between the British contractors and the other agencies who were each working on a different mission related to the MANPADs. Even though it was, from the beginning, a tenuous working relationship with the Obama administration’s operatives, AQM viewed the capture of the blood relative as a betrayal of trust in their working relationship regarding the Syrian arms sales and shipments.
On the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, AQM sought to demonstrate its power and also to get revenge for the “betrayal” of the deal it had made with representatives of the Obama administration. Ambassador Stevens’ presence in Benghazi and location were well known to its people. Ambassador Stevens himself was known to AQM’s forces in Libya. It is possible that he was intentionally lured by AQM to Benghazi with the prospect of acquiring manpads, while the actual intent was to kidnap him. AQM’s plan was to exchange Ambassador Stevens for the detained cousin or brother of the AQM bigwig who had been selling arms to the Free Syrian Army. Predictably, it all turned into a dog’s breakfast for everyone.
Ambassador Stevens was not successfully kidnapped by AQM. Instead, he died in the fighting at the consulate as did Sean Smith, the technical support specialist who was probably from the CIA’s Office of Technology. CIA spook tech support personnel are not combat qualified. The private contractors who were guarding the CIA annex in Benghazi defied Secretary Clinton and President Obama’s “stand down” orders and went to help their fellow Americans at the consulate at the cost of some of their own lives.
We can surmise what was going on in Washington, based on the actions, inactions, and subsequent fabrications. The Obama administration had a top priority to create a rapprochement with the Islamic world. This was the reason for the administration foolhardily undermining westernized and relatively secular Middle Eastern governments and their replacement with Islamist regimes. President Obama’s inner circle absolutely did not want the American people to learn, on the eve of the 2012 presidential election, about yet more Islamist attacks on Americans. They knew that such a revelation would prove that President Obama’s beliefs and efforts were, at best, not working or, more likely, a naive fool’s errand and strategic blunder of historic proportions. Worse yet, the dead ambassador and intelligence operative along with footage of the burning consulate buildings, as widely seen on the global network news, threatened to expose at least two, if not more, highly sensitive ongoing intelligence operations.
Even worse still, the exposure of these intelligence operations would magnify President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s failed attempts to change global strategic trajectories by revealing the administration’s getting in bed with AQM’s Islamists. The frantic wailing, hair pulling, and scrambling in Washington probably made a Keystone Kops runabout look like the Buckingham Palace changing of the guard in comparison.
Secretary Clinton and President Obama absolutely refused to order formal military assets, like aircraft or uniformed US special forces personnel, to be sent into this situation even to save lives. To do so would entail official acknowledgement of US ties to what had transpired with one or both of these operations. These operations had been set up to be “deniable” and denying them was exactly what the Obama administration intended to do. To President Obama, these spies had the duty to die quietly to avoid embarrassing him and his policies. Never ones to admit an error of either fact or judgement, President Obama and Secretary Clinton needed a cover story as to what happened in Benghazi, which put them in quite a bit of a pickle.
The easy and most obvious explanation would have been for the administration to simply state that this was yet another Al Qaeda terrorist attack on American interests on the anniversary of 9/11. In fact, this is what we here at The Cassandra Times believed at the time. However, it was President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s greater knowledge of what was happening and their fear of discovery that caused them to react in such a bizarre fashion. Whereas the world saw a terrorist attack on American interests on the anniversary of 9/11, they saw an intelligence fiasco that needed sweeping under the rug. In addition, President Obama and his closest advisors desperately wanted to avoid acknowledgement of yet another “Islam” related attack on the very eve of his re-election. They had spent four years trying to give Islam a kinder and gentler image so they could not afford to be demonstrably proven wrong.
The subsequent cover story was so ridiculous that it could only have been concocted by President Obama himself and his consigliere/court-jester Valerie Jarret. The Islamic apologist in chief tried to invent a narrative that both absolved radical Islam from blame for the attacks and yet also covered up his own administration’s incompetent meddling and clandestine operations. Under the umbrella of protocols in place to protect ongoing intelligence operations, Secretary Clinton and President Obama launched a disinformation campaign that the killing and rioting were the fault of the west — all while burying their bungling spy capers – because some guy in Los Angeles made an obscure YouTube video that nobody had heard of but that incited Libyan Muslims to riot. Always seeking to feign indignation, President Obama wanted immediate action to somehow punish this obscure patsy. Setting aside the shockingly unconscionable act of both setting up an innocent filmmaker for “insulting Islam” and then actually incarcerating and punishing him for it, all to cover up his administration’s bungling incompetence, this fairytale was never a believable story and it accomplished none of its goals.
Only someone as inexperienced, ideological, and foolish as President Obama or his counselor Valerie Jarret — or perhaps his spiritual advisor Reverend Jeremiah Wright — would buy such poppycock for even a nanosecond. But that is what they went with. Secretary Clinton proceeded to parrot this nonsense because she has such a low opinion of the American people’s intelligence that she expected to get away with it, and she was indignant to even be questioned about it. She went on to lie to the families of the dead contractors, Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and Sean Smith. She has continued to use national security protocols that were designed to protect intelligence operations to hide her blunders and malfeasance, in much the way that previous President Richard Nixon tried to hide the Pentagon Papers. She used the “security oaths” sworn by the American contractors to keep them quiet, under threat of prosecution and imprisonment, about their knowledge of what really happened in Benghazi.
Hence, the book and movie “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” strikes a very careful balance of telling the story of what happened in Benghazi without exposing the underlying classified context. The full breadth and depth of Secretary Clinton and President Obama’s foolhardy new “strategy” for remaking the Middle East and Syria can only be fully understood when one realizes that the “Free Syrian Army” that they were arming is now the core element of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Their deceit continued when they insist upon officially calling ISIS the “Islamic State of the Levant”, resuscitating an ancient term for Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, so they can avoid drawing attention to their bungled Syrian policy. More recently, they have turned to mouthing the trendy sounding Arabic term for ISIS of “Daesh” since nobody was buying their “Levant” language manipulation. By saying “Daesh”, they attempt to simultaneously distract from their Syrian bungle and also appear enlightened, superior, and better informed than us mere mortals, just as they believe that rolling their “Rs” when saying Raoul Castro in Spanish portrays them as cosmopolitan. They know that this is what smart and worldly looks like to the stupid and credulous.
As is our mission, our loyal readers are welcome to get the true story in context at The Cassandra Times, where we have signed no security oaths to the administration, are not participants in any incestuous journalistic national security intelligence relationship, nor are we trying to cover up for certain political leaders and their administration’s shocking incompetence. This is the real story, as we see it.