Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (9 page)

During the first stage of the anti-Mubarak movement, the Muslim Brotherhood worked behind the scenes, throwing their support behind former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei with backing from megabucks Obama ally, George Soros. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system,” Soros wrote just as news that Mubarak would not stand for reelection hit the airwaves. “My foundations are prepared to contribute what they can” to their success.
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ElBaradei was seen as a liberal democrat, acceptable to the West, despite the fact that as secretary general of the IAEA, he helped keep the lid on Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program for well over a decade.

As soon as Mubarak actually left power on February 11, however, the Muslim Brothers shed the mask of secular outreach and moderation. Remember the thirty-year-old Google executive from Egypt who became the spokesman for the anti-Mubarak demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square? Wael Ghonim was hip, he was young, he spoke fluent English. He contributed to the convenient falsehood that the Arab Spring was a “Facebook Revolution,” organized by legions of anonymous youngsters online, where women were free, Christians were welcome, everybody was an Egyptian patriot, and nobody died. Just ten days after Ghonim catapulted to fame by demanding that Hosni Mubarak and his regime abandon power in Egypt, he himself was barred from addressing the crowds in Tahrir Square.

Who could have such power over him? Mubarak’s military? The police? Some secret, black-hooded assassination squad? No. It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Qaradawi had left his comfortable home in Doha, Qatar, to remind the Egyptian masses at Tahrir Square of their duty as Muslims. Sheikh Qaradawi wasn’t even Egyptian, but a Palestinian who subscribed to the strict Wahhabi school of Islamic doctrine. He preached hatred of Jews, the eradication of the state of Israel, and openly encouraged suicide bombings. Because of his ties to the 9/11 hijackers and al Qaeda, the Bush administration banned him from travel to the United States in 2002. In 2004, he issued a fatwa authorizing Muslims to kill Americans in Iraq. Just as Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, the exiled leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia who returned home to a hero’s welcome once the pro-Western, secular government of President Ben Ali was gone, Sheikh Qaradawi came to Cairo just days after Mubarak left power to give the signal to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that it was time to come out of the shadows and push aside liberal Democrats such as Mohamed ElBaradei and Wael Ghonim. Sheikh Qaradawi’s message was simple, but to the point: Islam’s time had come.
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HILLARY’S PRIORITIES

As the Arab Spring leapt from country to country, engulfing pro-Western, secular regimes, you would think that the State Department would show some concern for the security of U.S. diplomats. Surely the extent of civil unrest and the possibility for armed confrontation between Islamists and supporters of the secular regimes they replaced was obvious enough that Hillary Clinton and her seventh-floor management team understood they had to step up physical security at U.S. diplomatic outposts in the region.

In fact, just the opposite was the case, in particular as it concerns Libya. When the State Department released its budget on February 14, 2011, for the upcoming year, it included $455 million in aid to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, close to $2 billion for United Nations operations, $626 million on Family Planning and Reproductive Health—much of it to promote abortion overseas—and just $250 million on regional security operations to secure our embassies in more than twenty-eight countries in the Middle East. Congress upped the security budget by $50 million over the objections of Hillary Clinton and her paper-pushers.
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So much for the myth, conveniently created after Benghazi went up in flames, that Republicans in Congress were responsible for the lack of security personnel—and therefore the attack—because they had supposedly slashed the State Department’s budget.

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QADDAFI, THE ENEMY

The wave of protests we now call the Arab Spring swept into Benghazi on February 17, 2011, smashing the old order like a tsunami. After two days of mainly peaceful demonstrations at the courthouse square overlooking the Mediterranean, opposition groups in exile called for a “day of rage” on February 17. Already, the Islamist influence was palpable. They chose the date to commemorate the Benghazi riots of 2006, when a large crowd stormed a European consulate to protest Danish newspaper cartoons portraying Muhammad, the founder of Islam, with a bomb in his turban. In Benghazi, the police opened fire on protesters, killing fourteen. The next day, Qaddafi loyalists in the al Fadeel Abu Omar barracks, known simply as “the Katiba,” fired on the funeral procession for the initial victims, killing twenty-four more.

THE FIRST BATTLE OF BENGHAZI

Over the next three days, local youths stormed the Abu Omar barracks repeatedly, setting cars on fire, ramming the gates, and scaling the facade to tear down the Libyan flag. At one point, they even commandeered bulldozers in an attempt to breach the outer walls, as Qaddafi loyalists shot at them from inside. Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa on Al Jazeera TV, calling on the Libyan army to assassinate Qaddafi. As the death toll rose into the hundreds, Qaddafi sent his interior minister, General Abdelfattah Younis, to relieve the besieged troops with fresh soldiers from a nearby base. But instead of crushing the rebels, Younis announced he was joining them, and offered the remaining loyalists holed up in the barracks safe passage out of town.

After shooting comrades who had refused to fire on the protesters, Qaddafi’s troops fled, and Benghazi quickly became the center of the anti-Qaddafi rebel movement.
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Al Jazeera, the Qatar-government satellite channel sometimes known as “Jihad TV,” tried to paint the protests as Libya’s version of the Arab Spring movement for “jobs, equality, and more political freedom.”
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However, the organized civil disobedience that had toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt was largely missing in Libya. Forty-two years of Qaddafi’s erratic but iron-fisted rule had stifled any form of political expression. With government informers seemingly everywhere, ordinary people were always looking over their shoulders, afraid to speak to foreigners, let alone voice dissent. There was no equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood social organizations or secular NGOs that could morph into a political opposition overnight, as they had in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, popular anger with Qaddafi simply boiled over; crowds formed in city after city, surging this way and that, storming government buildings, no longer afraid of the Qaddafi loyalists. Libya’s civil war was a popular uprising from day one.

Driving the violence was loosely knit cells of jihadi fighters, forged in battle against the American infidels in Iraq and Afghanistan. They stormed government arms depots in Brega and Derna at the very outset of the protests, ensuring that the conflict turned into an armed insurrection from the very start. They quickly dominated the groups of activists in exile, such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, who used Facebook and Twitter from afar in an attempt to get people to take to the streets.

Qaddafi, too, responded differently from Ben Ali and Mubarak. For several days he disappeared from sight, giving rise to rumors he had fled the country as his diplomats and military units defected to the opposition. His son Saif al-Islam initially offered to discuss a package of reforms, and released 110 members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group even as the security forces clashed with armed protesters in Benghazi and Tripoli. Then on February 20, he gave a televised speech where he blamed the violence on “foreign agents,” and warned of “rivers of blood” if the clashes didn’t end. “We will fight to the last man and woman and bullet. We will not lose Libya. We will not let Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and BBC trick us,” he said. The threat to unleash the army from someone who held no government position only added fuel to the fire.
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The next day, Qaddafi himself made a brief appearance, telling a reporter that he was “still in Tripoli.” In the brief film sequence he looks pathetic, a bewildered and cartoonish figure in his long desert robes and black cap, clutching an open umbrella in the backseat of a vehicle, looking for all the world like he had been surprised squatting in an outhouse. But he came roaring back in an hour-long speech the next night, calling the protesters “rats” and “cockroaches,” vowing to hunt them down “inch by inch, house by house, room by room, alley way by alley way.” An Israeli musician, Noy Alooshe, set the speech to rap music, creating a spoof called “Zenga Zenga” (Arabic for “alley way”) that became an instant YouTube hit with over four million views. A sanitized version, without the scantily clothed dancing girls in the background, received an additional million views.
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Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi had long believed he could negotiate his way out of confrontation with the LIFG. At the urging of the United States, following the resumption of diplomatic relations in 2004, Saif got his father to allow Amnesty International to visit the infamous Abu Selim prison, where they found 300 political prisoners, not 3,000 or 30,000 as some claimed.
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Even as the United States and Britain began to “render” Libyan jihadists captured on the battlefields of the Global War on Terror, Saif al-Islam’s Qadhafi Development Foundation devised a rehabilitation program similar to one pioneered in Saudi Arabia, aimed at taking the jihad out of the jihadi, so that he could return to society and live a normal life. By March 2008, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Chris Stevens wrote that the Qadhafi Foundation was negotiating with the LIFG over “the possible release from prison of approximately one-third of the cohort of LIFG members currently imprisoned in Libya.”

How many al Qaeda terrorists did the barbaric Qaddafi regime hold in its prisons? Around ninety-three, Stevens reported. Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi told the Americans he believed they had undergone “a sincere ideological revision” and could be released with minimal risk, since “reconciliation among former enemies was a ‘natural part’ of Libya’s tribal culture.” Clearly, he was wrong.
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LEADING FROM BEHIND

CNN reporter Ben Wedeman, the first Western journalist to enter Libya once the fighting began, documented the total collapse of the Libyan government in the east of the country, just four days after the fighting of the 17th February Revolution started in earnest. Coming in from Egypt, he found no officials, no passport control, no customs. “I’ve seen this before,” Wedeman wrote. “In Afghanistan after the rout of the Taliban, in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Government authority suddenly evaporates. It’s exhilarating on one level; its whiff of chaos disconcerting on another.”
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The international response to the violence in Libya was as rapid and unexpected as the events inside Libya itself. Less than one week after the first protests, former British foreign secretary David Owen called for a NATO no-fly zone to protect the civilian population from government air strikes. On February 26, just nine days after the uprising began, the United Nations passed a resolution placing economic sanctions and an arms embargo on the Libyan regime and referring Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court. That same day, President Obama called for Qaddafi to leave power.

On February 28, the U.S. Navy began positioning warships off Libya’s coast; British Prime Minister David Cameron joined the call for a NATO intervention. Al Qaeda now officially said it would back the Libyan rebels, who had organized themselves in Benghazi into an ad hoc Transitional National Council. It was total war.
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While the French and the British were clamoring for NATO action, Defense Secretary Robert Gates opposed it, “point[ing] out a fact that many people didn’t seem to understand: the first step in creating a no-fly zone would be to bomb the Libyan air defense,” a move that inevitably would engage the United States in its third simultaneous war in the Muslim world.
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Pushing for intervention were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Council aide Samantha Power, the in-house champion of the “responsibility to protect,” a much-disputed doctrine to prevent the massacre of civilians by dictatorial regimes. “R2P” groups, as they came to be known, had sprung up around the world and were lobbying heavily for international military intervention in Libya. In his account of these heady days, Gates warned aides and subordinates to refer any calls from Power to him, for fear she would convey specific target coordinates she had obtained from anti-Qaddafi groups. “Don’t give the White House staff and NSS too much information on the military options,” he wrote. “They don’t understand it, and ‘experts’ like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.”
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On March 15, Qaddafi’s troops were poised to take Ajdabiyah, the logistics hub that controlled food and fuel supplies to the rebel stronghold in Benghazi. If Ajdabiyah fell, Benghazi was next, and everyone feared that a victorious Qaddafi would hunt down his opponents house by house, as he had promised, in a massacre of staggering proportions. At a meeting in the Situation Room early that evening, Obama asked his advisors if a no-fly zone would stop Qaddafi’s advance. The question itself revealed the president’s lack of understanding of modern warfare, since Qaddafi was using tanks, not his air force, to stamp out the rebellion. When they told him the truth, Obama asked his aides to come up with some more robust military options, and left for dinner.
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That was how UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which passed on March 17, 2011, became an authorization for NATO and consenting Arab League countries to launch a full-scale military intervention in Libya, not just a no-fly zone. The United States called it Operation Odyssey Dawn and mobilized active-duty and Air Force reserve units from across the country, moving them into theater within seventy-two hours. KC-10 tankers came from as far away as March Air Reserve Base in Southern California to refuel combat aircraft eventually supplied by nineteen participating nations. On the ground in Benghazi, rebel leaders were calling the new U.S. effort “Hillary’s war,” openly mocking what they perceived as Obama’s indecisiveness.
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While the United States provided the bulk of the military assets for the UN-approved fighting, to the tune of $550 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars for the first two weeks alone, the White House continued to claim that the United States was just playing a “supportive” role in a NATO-led United Nations operation. This gave rise to the famous description of the Obama Doctrine by a White House official to
New Yorker
journalist Ryan Lizza as “leading from behind.”

“That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding,” Lizza wrote. “It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for,” he added—an understatement, if ever there were one.

While supporters of the administration later argued that the term was unfair, noting that without U.S. leadership the United Nations never would have approved UNSC Resolution 1973 authorizing war against Qaddafi, leading from behind gave the impression of a timid U.S. foreign policy, operating by stealth, by an administration eager to shift political responsibility onto others. And that was far more accurate a description of Obama’s agenda than anyone outside the White House then understood.

And so was that other phrase: Hillary’s war.

BEARING GRUDGES

It was not just the brutality of Qaddafi’s response to the armed uprising that turned the West against him. The change of heart among leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States had been in the works for some time.

Despite Qaddafi having warmly welcomed Barack Obama as a “brother” and “fellow Muslim” during the 2008 election campaign—or perhaps, precisely because of it—relations with the United States gradually soured once Obama took office.
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U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz sent back a slew of cables to Hillary Clinton’s State Department detailing the debauchery and corruption of the Qaddafi family, and magnifying every dispute with Qaddafi regime officials. There were no more “Dear Musa” letters from top CIA officials to Qaddafi’s intelligence chief. Indeed, a request by Musa Kusa to Ambassador Cretz to arrange a one-on-one meeting for Qaddafi with President Obama during a G-8 summit in Italy in May 2009 was politely turned down after the embassy criticized Qaddafi for pressuring U.S. oil companies to make supposedly voluntary contributions to his own foundation, which he then used to pay terrorism compensation claims stemming from the Lockerbie bombing.
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In addition, Libya’s nonchalance about taking back remaining Libyan prisoners in Guantánamo was decidedly unhelpful to the president’s campaign promise to shut down the terrorist prison camp. “We are not overly concerned about them,” Foreign Minister Kusa told Ambassador Cretz.
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Beyond that, the Qaddafi clan had big appetites. They felt they had not been adequately compensated for their decision to give up Libya’s WMD programs and abandon terrorism in 2003, and wanted “security assurances in the form of a defensive alliance with the United States,” Cretz cabled Washington in July 2009.
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President Obama and his advisors found such a close embrace of Qaddafi distasteful—and potentially embarrassing—given the ongoing detention of political prisoners and his repression of the Islamist opposition. As Chris Stevens reported when the Lockerbie compensation arrangement was finalized, there were “high expectations . . . that the U.S. will seek to capitalize on the new tenor of the relationship to press Muammar al-Qadhafi to open further political space—particularly with respect to respect for human rights, freedom of the press and an expanded role for civil society—in what remains a tightly-controlled society.” Clearly that never happened.
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