the only thing that makes the benghazi affair deserving of the media shitstorm about the incident was the fact that a u.s. ambassador was directly implicated in an arms-running operation, and that his “allies” turned on him in the end, and murdered him when he tried to reign them in and bring the operation under direct control of the cia. so as to make the entire operation go “black” or “dark.” consider the significance of the evening of sept. 11, 2012 in the chaos of post-khadafi libya if the people storming the cia compound had not been resolute enough to risk coming under fire from even one armed american, but nevertheless had to be convinced of this by the use of deadly force.
in this fantasy scenario, there may have been a spirited protest which was fired upon by zealous security people who wanted to disperse the crowd before it became unmanageable. the full light of the world’s media – much of europe being just a hop across the mediteranean sea – would have been focused on the why the safety of a u.s. ambassador was threatened by protesters. and likely there might have been a news outlet somewhere in the world that would disclose that the protesters included friends and relatives of people who were said to be held inside the facility ambassador stevens was visiting – far from the actual u.s. embassy.
so, we know the cia has had numerous “dark” detention facilities scattered around the world. we also know that the u.s. has been arming terrorists in syria – who car-bombed turkey this weekend (5/11/13). where would be a better place to set up a secret detention facility than in a country torn apart by civil war? with entire arsenals up for grabs?
to continue with the fantasy scenario…suppose all of this came right out into the open in the international press – that the u.s. had set up a gun-running operation in libya to arm terrorist militias in syria, and that it was now engaged in a power struggle for control of the smuggling network with their libyan “islamicists” allies?
not a good story, and ambassador stevens would have had to resign in disgrace, and possibly end up in prison, whereas obama would have had to do something hugely sinister to make sure the public was too terrified to remember that embarrassing benghazi thing. there was the matter of his re-election to consider.
who would have been the winner in this imaginary scenario, and the benghazi affair had disgraced an ambassador, cost obama re-election, and possibly led to the collapse of the free syrian army? no one.
i can hardly see a romney administration being hesitant to get involved in either syria or iran in a more direct, official capacity. they could even call it a nato operation, with the help of the u.k. and france.
nothing good was happening in that compound, that night or any night after it had become a cia “darkops” site. if you want a good idea of what the implications of these types of secret operations are, delve into the iran-contra scandal that hounded the reagan white house – even after he left office, former advisers, aids, and cabinet members in his administration were being tried and jailed. i believe the final total was 46…
the point is, in both of these cases, cia cocaine smuggling rings were developed to help fund darkops. reagan’s network was revealed and collapsed, whereas the cia’s current network is still relatively intact, thanks largely in part to a lazy-ass american media always looking for an easy story to beat the next deadline, and greatly abetted in the cover-up by the hyper-ventilating, rabidly-rightwing windbags who keep shouting “benghazi! birth certificate! anti-christ!” but display a disappointing lack of curiosity about what was going on there. and don’t get me started on the liberals. if this had happened under a republican administration, there would be trials. but, so long as the cocaine smuggling can continue, no harm means no foul.
Don’t Believe What Either Party Is Saying About The Benghazi Attack
While Hillary Clinton jumps on a live hand grenade for the Benghazi attack, the White House has leaked to the AP its latest spin on the situation in Libya.
Apparently the U.S. has drones and SEALs on standby around the Mali and Eastern Libya area in case intelligence officers are able to locate those responsible for the consulate attack — which is hardly news. Though the timing is convenient, the position is unchanged from military options on the table Sept. 13, two days after the attack, when CNN reported that “drones and warships” were patrolling the area around Benghazi.
All of which makes what’s really happening more disturbing.
The reality on the ground is that the drones and SEALs have not much to go on and intelligence officers can’t triangulate a legitimate target. In fact, there’s not enough supporting evidence to point the finger at any one particular group of “insurgents. “
Initially, the finger pointed at a group recently dubbed “Ansar al Shariah” (Partisans, or Soldiers of Shariah, depending on who translates). But following the attacks Ansar released a statement saying it “didn’t participate in this popular uprising as a separate entity … the brigade didn’t participate as a sole entity … rather, it was a spontaneous popular uprising.”
The statement has since been corroborated by evidence on the ground. But like all statements coming from “terrorists” groups following attacks, diplomats in Washington simply replaced, or more accurately, washed it out with statements more convenient to their own domestic political ends.
Initially, for Obama and the Dems, the attack was just a protest gone horribly wrong. For Republicans, it was an “organized, planned, commando style raid.”
Republicans stated the use of weapons, like Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), mortars, and Ak-47s, as evidence of a more militaristic approach. Those same Republicans, just a year earlier, however, were arguing concertedly for the issuing of those weapons to that same exact populace — and largely looked the other way as Egypt and Qatar dumped those weapons into the country.
A few key graphs from a John Walcott and Christopher Stephen report out of Bloomberg this morning best illustrate the situation:
- While details of the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya last month may never be fully known, there is ample evidence neither the Obama administration’s initial accounts nor Republican portrayals of the incident are accurate.
- There is no intelligence suggesting that either the remaining core of al-Qaeda in Pakistan or its loose affiliates in Yemen and North Africa plotted, financed or directed the attack, which one of the U.S. officials described as amateurish.
- Instead, accounts from U.S. intelligence officials and Benghazi residents, along with evidence in the burned-out American diplomatic compound, point to a hasty and poorly organized act by men with basic military training and access to weapons widely available in Libya.
- “The partisan debate is feeding public misunderstanding of foreign events and the nature of diplomatic and intelligence work,” Paul Pillar, a former U.S. intelligence official, said in a telephone interview.
The report goes a step further when it says that Obama’s recent drone/warship report is basically the awkward position of political posturing, while intelligence forces him to publicly state that there isn’t enough “actionable” intelligence to mount a strike anywhere.
NOW TAKE A LOOK BACK: At Our Original Report On The Likely Story Behind The Libya Attacks
this article is one of the better ones on the affair, notable for not wanting to interpret the events so much as describe what was actually happening. from business insider. here’s more:
The CIA’s Benghazi Operation May Have Violated International Law
It’s public knowledge now that the U.S. mission in Benghazi was “at its heart” a CIA operation, and there is evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to Syrian rebels.
But don’t expect an confession from the CIA or the Obama administration.
“The CIA can’t admit their role because it compromises the cover of the facility, and that’s the most important thing,” Bob Baer, who spent two decades as a field officer in the CIA, told the Huffington Post. “You can never compromise cover.”
Since most of the Syrian opposition’s weapons are being handed out by the CIA, it would make sense that the heavy weapons that rebels are now using to shoot down regime aircraft came from a covert CIA operation.
The exposure of such an operation would raise serious issues since transferring arms to anyone associated with al-Qaeda—which may include some of the best fighters among the Syrian opposition—would violate a binding UN arms embargo that prohibits arms transfers by UN member states to countries or groups including al-Qaeda.
The Obama administration is equally hamstrung because any admission of gun-running would would validate Russia’s long-held position that it is arming radicals in Syria.
there’s more to read, from business insider
It is obvious that the CIA fingerprints are all over the Benghazi operation. It ran its own safehouse with what seems to be a score of actives. But as it turned out, not all the actives were CIA personnel. The Pentagon had issued a commercial contract shortly after the demise of Muammar Qaddafi a program to secure and/or buyback weapons that had belonged to the Libyan leader’s weapons stockpile. Of special importance was the reported plethora of hand-held ground-to-air weapons whose use by terrorists could be devastating.
The collection program was one reason for the CIA interest in Libya. The second should have been the presence of Islamist-infested armed gangs that had opposed Qaddafi. They had not disarmed; rather, they continued to operate in the Cyrenaica region and in Benghazi after the death of the Libyan leader. If the CIA made an effort to infiltrate or analyze the influence of jihadists groups operating around Benghazi and in eastern Libya, then the surprise attack on the US “consulate” on 9/11 underscores the fact that the effort was a failure.
But a weapons gathering program more than a year old cannot explain the large number of actives present in the CIA compound in September 2012.
Instead, the presence of a large safehouse with many actives indicates the direct CIA involvement in the movement of arms collected in Libya and shipped to rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.
As suggested here earlier ( http://econwarfare.org/viewarticle.cfm?id=5109 ) the direct U.S. involvement in support of Syrian rebel forces was initiated shortly after a Petraeus’s visit to Turkey in March 2012. It occurred shortly after the Turkish government demonstrated willingness to support the overthrow of the Assad regime. Still, neither Washington nor Ankara wanted to show its hand. Both sought to hide their involvement through an operation that remains clandestine (albeit barely so) to the present date. - there is more, from the Cutting Edge
Report: Launch of CIA ‘cocaine coup’ planned after Romney win
For more than a year the CIA has been trafficking 300 kilos of cocaine a month from Ecuador to Chile for export on to Europe, according to recent credible media reports from Santiago, the Chilean capital.
Proceeds from the 300 kilo-a-month business have been used to create a war-chest to finance a Cocaine Coup in Ecuador that was scheduled to be “green-lighted” after the expected win in the just-concluded U.S. Presidential election—expected, at least, by some Agency officials—of Mitt Romney.
An unexpected side effect of the revelation of the plan, which has received little publicity, has been to focus an observer’s attention on what’s going on in the drug trade in Ecuador lately. The country’s history in the drug business, almost as rich as Switzerland’s with banks, goes back a long way.
When it comes to efficiently moving drugs, this is far from Ecuador’s first rodeo, and the drug network there is one of long-standing, (Wikileaks PDF).
So too is its relationship with both the the CIA and DEA.
“The operation is similar to the one carried out by the Agency in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, the source said.”
For example, when famous CIA drug pilot Barry Seal was first caught smuggling cocaine way back in 1979, he picked up his huge load of cocaine—it was 45 kilos; those were more innocent times—in Guayaquil, one of Ecuador’s three major seaports.
The Americans recently convicted of laundering money for the Ecuador-based network are no parvenus, either. One is a prominent Louisiana attorney; the other an aviation broker in Oklahoma. And both took direction from a drug pilot with his own long pedigree in the drug trade.
Jorge Arévalo Kessler has been flying drugs out of Ecuador since 1989, he states in an affadavit at his trial. He is the nephew of a long-time Mexican Secretary of Defense, and was the personal pilot of disgraced former Mexican President Carlos Salinas.
His American connections are visible too. When finally arrested, Arévalo Kessler was flying a former U.S. military plane that was part of the 1990’s Forest Service scandal, involving planes intended for firefighting diverted into CIA covert drug running operations, the most spectacular result being the C-130 busted on a runway at Mexico City’s Intl Airport carrying cocaine worth $1 billion.
Or maybe the most spectacular result was this: 14 firefighters burned to death in an out-of-control forest fire in Colorado in August of 1994. No planes were available to help. They’d all been leased out on more lucrative assignments.
The story of the CIA-DEA’s earmarked 300 kilos a month in support of an alleged CIA cocaine coup begins with Fernando Ulloa. Ulloa was an Inspector in the Chilean Federal Police (Policia de Investigaciones, or PDI). Over a year ago, he uncovered a drug ring operating out of the local CIA and DEA stations; with assistance and support from Chilean political authorities and the Chilean Army, the ring trafficks 300 kilos of cocaine a month.
Mo
st cops see the world in black and white. So Ulloa immediately took his evidence to the Chilean Minister of the Interior in Santiago’s La Moneda Palace, mostly remembered for having been destroyed by the Chilean Air Force in the coup which took Socialist President Salvador Allende’s life in 1973.
No investigation was launched, however, and no action was taken.
When 10 Chilean police officials were recently charged with assisting a much smaller drug smuggling ring, the resulting public scandal gave Ulloa the opening (and the media coverage) to publicly accuse the Interior Minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, of covering up the much larger—and still active—CIA cocaine trafficking. - from mad cow morning news
A Tale of Cocaine Trafficking, Sex Crime Charges, Extraordinary Rendition & Julian Assange
As reported at Dailycensored.com on November 14, 2012, two sources have alleged that the CIA has been engaging in cocaine trafficking in Chile to fund an $88 million campaign to defeat President Rafael Correa in Ecuador’s upcoming presidential election: former British Diplomat Craig Murray, and Chilean journalist Patricio Mery Bell.
It is no secret that the US wants to see Correa defeated and the presidential election scheduled next month in Ecuador will see whether he is. He has enacted policies the US government considers adverse to US interests including closing the US military base in Ecuador. Moreover, it is likely the US sees the defeat of Correa as key to getting its hands on Julian Assange.
There is also the $19 billion judgment by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron for despoiling the Amazon rainforest. A group of the plaintiffs have recently begun initiating legal proceedings to seize Chevron’s assets in Canada, Brazil and Argentina.
The allegations of Cocaine trafficking are strikingly similar to cocaine trafficking by the CIA in the 1980s to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
Patricio Mery Bell is head of the Panorama news service in Chile. In October 2012, Bell arranged to meet with the Ecuadorian president while Correa was in Chile, to present evidence of CIA cocaine trafficking in Chile to fund Correa’s defeat.
On his way to meet with Correa, Patricio Bell was arrested and charged with assaulting a woman. His cell phone, which contained evidence to be presented to Correa, was confiscated and never returned.
see these previous posts for more on the fake-ass war on drugs:
Patricio Bell claims he was set up by the woman accusing him, and it has been reported that the she has ties to a CIA backed anti Castro groups in Miami. The charges against Bell are suspiciously similar to those against Assange, but the coincidences don’t end there.
Craig Murray is the other person who has disclosed allegations that the CIA was trafficking cocaine in Chile to fund the defeat of Correa in Ecuador. Murray had two independent sources, one in the UK the other in Washington.
Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who exposed torture, renditions and collusion between the CIA and British MI6. He was subsequently charged with extortion for sexual purposes and blackmailing people into sex in exchange for British visas. He did get his name cleared 18 months later.
Sex crime charges
The sex crime charges against Assange, Bell and Murray are part of a pattern of whistle blowers being charged with sex crimes which includes Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Guantanamo Bay Chaplain James Yee.
As Craig Murray reported: after returning to the US, Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter was entrapped in a computer sex sting set up by the FBI. Not coincidentally, this occurred after Ritter publicly stated that there were no weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq.
Chaplain James Yee exposed mistreatment of inmates at Guantanamo Bay. After espionage charges were dropped against him, Yee was convicted of adultery and having pornography on a government computer, only to have those convictions later overturned.
Sexual entrapment has long been used in espionage to blackmail adversaries and recruit spies. Now it appears it is being used against whistleblowers. - from project censored
loose lips sink black site prison in benghazi
In the immediate aftermath of the CIA chief’s resignation, skeptics quickly suggested that there was more to the story, especially given Petraeus’ role as head of the country’s intelligence agency and the relatively unscathing extramarital affair that he rightfully admitted to in citing his departure from office. As journalists and investigators tried to dig deep for info on the alleged mistress, Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell, as expected the story took a drastic turn by Sunday when it was revealed that she may have been briefed on the truth of the Benghazi scandal while the rest of the country claws for answers.
A speech given by Broadwell only last month at her Alma matter suggests that she was given information about the terrorist attack that never made it to the American public.
“Now I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libya militia members prisoner,” Broadwell told a crowd at the University of Denver alumni symposium on October 26. “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.”
Broadwell’s address was publically available on YouTube until this weekend; it has since been removed, although mirrors have surfaced.
Until then, and even today, the CIA denies Broadwell’s claims that the CIA was holding anyone prisoner at what has long been described as a consulate building in Benghazi. Should her account prove true, however, it could mean that the agency had a secret black site prison in Libya, a fact long denied by Washington.
from russia today: Petraeus mistress reveals real motive behind Benghazi attack (VIDEO)
the benghazi gun-running operation
According to various reports (Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, repeated in numerous European media organs), Libyan rebels were paid to steal arms from ex-government dumps. Weapons that did get into the hands of the rebels were re-purchased, using secret CIA slush funds – the ‘black money’ – which is never disclosed to Congress.
We learn that here is a strikingly similar parallel to the Iran-Contra arms-go-round mastermind, the Naval Marine Corps Lt.-Col Oliver North. In that infamous affair of mid-1980s, the US covertly paid the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini – then at war with the current US ally of convenience Iraq – for shipments of weapons, delivered to the Right-wing Contra terrorists engaged in a struggle against the popular Nicaraguan government.
Iran-Contra focused on a CIA network known loosely as ‘The Enterprise,’ weaved by North and composed of hand-picked private brokers, off-screen to the Congress, including arms traders, money launderers and soldiers of fortune (contractors). Daniel Ellsberg, immortalized as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers (the military’s best kept Vietnam secrets), famously called Iran-Contra “quite the worst covert operation in US history.” It seems there is now convincing evidence of a rival candidate.
North was gleefully circumventing the Boland Amendment which forbade the US to arm the Contras. The Libyan Arms for Syria affair displays a similar false flag stamp, cloaked with the identical conspiracy of secrecy and deception.
Iran-Contra was exposed when a plane loaded with contraband Iranian weapons crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle. Ronald Reagan was able to escape the rap because he invoked the ‘afternoon nap’ escape clause. Benghazi is the new Contra moment. So what are Obama’s expectations in very similar circumstances, even as he celebrates his second triumphant political coronation?
reprinted from end the lie; General betrayal: the CIA, the murder of Ambassador Stevens and the return of Iran-Contra
With Al Qaeda shattered, U.S. counter-terrorism’s future unclear
Opinions differ over how much threat Al Qaeda’s factions pose and how U.S. policy and spending should change.
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
Skilled in tracking foreign terrorists, Jarret Brachman once was a sought-after expert on Al Qaeda, advising several federal agencies and speaking regularly around the country.
Now the former research director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, has turned his focus away from Islamic militants. He spends most of his time consulting with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies about threats from domestic extremists and antigovernment militias.
“I have totally re-branded my career,” Brachman said. “I still do the Al Qaeda stuff, but there’s no interest, no demand…. We’ve broken Al Qaeda’s back, strategically.” -there’s more to this, from the l.a. times
Investigators said it was gruesome.
Today’s story features a much worse incident in the Army, with reports that the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) 
it grants full presidential authority to “Federal military commanders.” According to the defense official, a commander is defined as follows: “Somebody who’s in the position of command, has the title commander. And most of the time they are centrally selected by a board, they’ve gone through additional schooling to exercise command authority.”
He goes on to say that our elected officials have been bought out by lobbyist. They want the politicians to pave the way for more prisons by passing more laws of enslavement to insure a steady flow of inmates to occupy the cells. America has entered into a hell like period where people are worth more in prison than free and working as all jobs are being shipped to China. America is being
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus. That telling line was prompted by a discussion about a controversial cruise missile strike that occurred in December 2009 that killed 41 civilians, including women and children. The Yemeni government insisted it carried out the attack in al-Ma’jalah, Abyan.
this blog powered by linux
