Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi Read Free

discarded longtime allies to embrace forces aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
    In Tunisia, we dropped the pro-Western Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in favor of exiled Muslim Brotherhood leader Rachid Ghannouchi.
    In Egypt, we ditched long-term U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, who had kept the peace with Israel for thirty years, in favor of a volatile coalition of Islamist organizations ultimately dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
    In Libya, the United States joined with Muslim jihadis, many of whom had close ties to al Qaeda, to overthrow a Qaddafi who had voluntarily ended his WMD programs and cut off his support to international terrorist groups, in hopes of becoming a friend of the West.
    Some of the jihadis we supported in Libya had been captured fighting against us on the battlefields of Afghanistan or Pakistan and sent to Guantánamo Bay.
    To nurture the struggle against Qaddafi, the CIA set up shop in Benghazi in early 2011 to arm and train the rebels, both directly and through proxies. Once Qaddafi was overthrown in September 2011, this covert operation shifted gears to aid similar groups in Syria, the newest front in the Muslim Brotherhood war on secular Mideast regimes.
    The Benghazi arms pipeline went awry from the very start. One of the partners the United States engaged was Qatar, a tiny emirate in the Persian Gulf best known for its sponsorship of Al Jazeera, which critics refer to as Jihad TV.
    My sources relate an astonishing incident in the desert of northern Chad, where a French military patrol confronted a convoy led by Qatari special forces officers that was bringing Stingers and other advanced weapons to the Libyan rebels at the start of the fight against Qaddafi. When the French officers sought to intercept it, they were told by Paris to stand down, because the shipment had been approved by Washington.
    Once it became clear that those weapons were making their way to al Qaeda–related groups in Libya, the Obama White House desperately sought to clean up the mess and keep it from becoming public.
    To do so, they sent members of the National Security Staff (formerly known as the National Security Council) to Libya on operational missions to negotiate arms buybacks from Libyan rebel leaders, in direct violation of the National Security Act of 1947. (Congress threatened to impeach President Ronald Reagan for similar abuse of his authority during the Iran-Contra scandal twenty-five years earlier.)
    Dark Forces will examine in detail the Obama administration’s covert operation to supply weapons to the Libyan rebels during the civil war, knowing full well that many of the rebel leaders had ties to al Qaeda.
    It will show how White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan (now CIA director) was personally in charge of U.S. covert operations in Libya, including a Fast and Furious–style gun-walking operation that allowed 800 Russian-made surface-to-air missiles from Qaddafi’s arsenal to reach al Qaeda groups in Africa and beyond.
    Some of these missiles were used to shoot down U.S. combat helicopters in Afghanistan. Others made their way into the Sudan and Gaza, prompting Israel to launch air strikes to take them out. Still others were walked into the Sinai Peninsula under the control of al Qaeda groups close to deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Photographic evidence I will present in this book shows that some wound up in the hands of Syrian rebels.
    I believe Congress needs to investigate these missile-walking operations before more American lives are lost.
    THE IRANIAN GAMBIT
    The United States and Iran have been at war since 1979. Americans often are lulled in believing that the war is over, or that some cease-fire has been reached when the bodies stop piling up. That happened for a few years in the early 1990s, once Iran released U.S. hostages in Lebanon and stopped attacking our embassies and our military.
    However, the Iranians take a longer view, especially the Quds Force, the overseas terror