#Benghazi, #Syria & The CIA : A Timeline of Key Media Coverage

#Benghazi, #Syria & The CIA : A Timeline of Key Media Coverage
With CIA officials set to testify behind closed doors at a classified hearing, it’s a good point to recap some of what has already been published about the CIA’a role in Benghazi. We know there’s been a cover-up. We know there’s been intimidation not to talk. Now, we’re beginning to be able to put together the pieces why.

October 15th. 2012: YouTube Video showing Syrian rebel with SA-7 Surface To Air Missle

October 19th, 2012: How US Ambassador Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked To Jihadist Rebels In Syria

…there’s growing evidence that U.S. agents — particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens — were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi’s stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot downSyrian helicopters and fighter jets.

November 12th, 2012 : Why did Paula Broadwell think the CIA had taken prisoners in Benghazi?

Paula_BroadwellIn an Oct. 26 speech at the University of Denver, she said that Libyan militants had attacked the post to retrieve some fellow fighters who’d been taken prisoner at the nearby CIA annex. She also seems to suggest that Petraeus himself knew about it, implying that he may have been her source. Here’s the relevant passage from the speech, transcribed in full here by Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell.

Now, I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually, um, had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that’s still being vetted.

The challenging thing for General Petraeus is that in his new position, he’s not allowed to communicate with the press. So he’s known all of this — they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in, in Libya. Within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening.

The CIA is flatly denying this. “CIA adamant that Broadwell claims about agency holding prisoners at Benghazi are not true,” The Post’s Greg Miller tweeted. Fox News cites a single anonymous source saying that the CIA annex had prisoners at the time, and “multiple intelligence sources” as saying that the annex had at different times held prisoners.

November 14, 2023 : The Petraeus affair: A lot more than sex

The scandal surrounding the decorated four-star Army general who once ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involves questions of national security, politics and even the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.

Petraeus, 60, resigned Friday after acknowledging he had an affair with a woman later identified as his biographer, Paula Broadwell, 40, a fellow West Point graduate who spent months studying the general’s leadership of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

May 15h, 2013: CIA role in Benghazi underreported

To really understand the push-pull over the bungled talking points in the wake of the Benghazi attack, you have to understand the nature of the U.S. presence in that city.

Officially, the U.S. presence was a diplomatic compound under the State Department’s purview.

“The diplomatic facility in Benghazi would be closed until further notice,” then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced last October.

But in practice - and this is what so few people have focused on - the larger U.S. presence was in a secret outpost operated by the CIA.

About 30 people were evacuated from Benghazi the morning after the deadly attack last September 11; more than 20 of them were CIA employees.

Clearly the larger mission in Benghazi was covert.

May 20th, 2013: The Benghazi Scandal Grows

CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version — produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers — was a shadow of the original.

DCIA David Petraeus The original CIA talking points had been blunt: The assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist attack conducted by a large group of Islamic extremists, including some with ties to al Qaeda.

These were strong claims. The CIA usually qualifies its assessments, providing policymakers a sense of whether the conclusions of its analysis are offered with “high confidence,” “moderate confidence,” or “low confidence.” That first draft signaled confidence, even certainty: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”

May 22nd, 2013 How Petraeus Turned the CIA into the Good Guys in Benghazi:

The CIA has been quite effective in limiting the public discussion of its role in Benghazi. The existence of the CIA annex — where two people died in the second round of attacks in September — was classified. It wasn’t clear till a month after the attacks that the Benghazi post was mostly CIA, that two-thirds of the people evacuated were agency employees. CNN’s Jake Tapper reports that the State Department strongly objected to the talking points because it “felt it was being blamed for bungling what it saw as largely a CIA operation in Benghazi.” And Tapper suggests the CIA was going CYA, too: “Current and former U.S. government officials tell CNN that… Petraeus may have been reluctant to conclude it was a planned attack because that would have been acknowledging an intelligence failure.” There was a big debate within the CIA to even reveal that two Navy SEALs who died in Benghazi were CIA employees, and Petraeus didn’t attend their funerals.

Auguest 3, 2013:Intrigue Surrounding The Secret CIA Operation In Benghazi Is Not Going Away

At about 9:40 p.m. local time on Sept. 11, a mob of Libyans attacked a building housing U.S. State Department personnel. At 10:20 p.m. Americans arrived from a CIA annex located 1.2 miles away, to help the besieged Americans. At 11:15 p.m. they fled with survivors back to the secret outpost.

Armed Libyans followed them and attacked the annex with rockets and small arms from around midnight to 1:00 a.m., when there was a lull in the fighting.

Glen Doherty, a former Navy SEAL and CIA security contractor, was with a team of Joint Special Operations Command military operators and CIA agents in Tripoli at the time of the attack. When they received word of the assault on the mission, Doherty and six others bribed the pilots of small jet with $30,000 cash for a ride to Benghazi.

At about 5:15 a.m., right after Doherty’s group arrived, the attackers began shooting mortars at the annex, leading to the death of Doherty and fellow former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Tyrone Woods.

At 6 a.m. Libyan forces from the military intelligence service arrived and subsequently took more than 30 Americans — only seven of whom were from the State Department — to the Benghazi airport.

So the CIA’s response to go to the mission where Ambassador Christopher Stevens was located, after being held back for 20 minutes, saved American lives but also ended up exposing the annex.

August 13, 2024:Exclusive: Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings.

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”

Another says, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

 

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