March 28, 2024 / by 

 

About That FBI Investigation of the Benghazi Attack…

The NYT’s Eric Schmitt reports that JSOC is preparing target packages for those who attacked the Benghazi consulate.

The American military’s top-secret Joint Special Operations Command is preparing detailed information that could be used to kill or capture some of the militants suspected in the attack last month in Libya that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, senior military and counterterrorism officials said on Tuesday.

[snip]

It remained unclear precisely how many of the “target packages” are being prepared — perhaps a dozen or more — but military and counterterrorism officials said that the Libyan authorities had identified several suspected assailants based on witness accounts, video and other photographs from the scene.

“They are putting together information on where these individuals live, who their family members and their associates are, and their entire pattern of life,” said one American official who has been briefed on the target planning now under way.

American intelligence-gathering assets — spies, satellite imagery, electronic-eavesdropping devices, among others — are finite, so counterterrorism authorities preparing the “target packages” must prioritize which militants in Benghazi — or elsewhere if they have fled the area since the attack — need to be monitored on a nearly hour-by-hour, if not minute-by-minute, basis.

To help with this effort since the attacks, the Pentagon has increased the frequency of surveillance drones that fly over eastern Libya, collecting electronic intercepts, imagery and other information that could help planners compile their target lists. American intelligence agencies have assigned additional analysts to concentrate on the suspects. [my emphasis]

Schmitt doesn’t breathe a word about this in yesterday’s article, but four days before he wrote that JSOC article, he contributed to this article describing the FBI’s difficulties investigating the attack.

Sixteen days after the death of four Americans in an attack on a United States diplomatic mission here, fears about the near-total lack of security have kept F.B.I. agents from visiting the scene of the killings and forced them to try to piece together the complicated crime from Tripoli, more than 400 miles away.

[snip]

The Libyan government has advised the F.B.I. that it cannot ensure the safety of the American investigators in Benghazi. So agents have been conducting interviews from afar, relying on local Libyan authorities to help identify and arrange meetings with witnesses to the attack and working closely with the Libyans to gauge the veracity of any of those accounts.

“There’s a chance we never make it in there,” said a senior law enforcement official.

Also hampering the investigation is fear among Libyan witnesses about revealing their identities or accounts in front of Libyan guards protecting the American investigators, because the potential witnesses fear that other Libyans might reveal their participation and draw retribution from the attackers.

[snip]

Assigning culpability also complicates the American response. For now, the administration awaits the F.B.I. investigation and updated intelligence reports. President Obama has said the United States will bring to justice those responsible for the attacks. But there is little appetite in the White House to launch drone strikes or a Special Operations raid, like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, in yet another Muslim country. [my emphasis]

So I take it in the interim four days–particularly with Mitt’s team seeking to turn this into their Jimmy Carter plan–things have changed? We’ve gone from awaiting the results of an investigation to preparing target packages without that investigation? We’ve gone from having no stomach for launching drone strikes or JSOC raids to preparing targeting packages for such responses?

Now, I’m not saying that had they waited for the FBI to go to a gutted consulate in Benghazi they’d get any meaningful evidence (though I do recall the USS Cole investigative team, among others, struggled through similar concerns and dangers as exist in Libya).

But I am saying that the reporting on this story has not noted the interim step–where both political pressure (the Jimmy Carter plan) and the availability of other options led the Administration to give up on an FBI investigation and proceed directly to the targeting step.

And note the kinds of intelligence: FBI was never developing its own leads; it was relying on Libyan partners (that happens a lot in international FBI investigations, for legal as well as cultural reasons). The FBI’s efforts to interview witnesses was challenged by the intelligence vulnerabilities that made the consulate a target: the assumption that hostile militia members are surveilling the US Embassy in Tripoli, and an understanding among Libyans that America’s Libyan guards may be part of that surveillance. (The story says nothing about the fact that attackers took diplomatic records away from the Benghazi consulate that exposed the identities of people working closely with Americans; potential witnesses may have reason to fear their cooperation with the US has already been compromised.)

And so now, rather than have the FBI investigate directly (to say nothing of collecting forensic evidence from the consulate, which would have been nearly impossible given how quickly the consulate was looted), we’re relying on some spies (this, in spite of reports the CIA has pulled out of Benghazi too), but largely intercepts, imagery, and “other information” collected via drones and electronic surveillance. Sure, all that builds off the same Libyan cooperation in identifying suspects the FBI was using, and assuming that’s more reliable than the Libyan guards everyone seems to suspect have divided loyalties, that’s a great start.

There are a number of circumstances (the election being a big one) that make this shift to relying on drones understandable. I’m not faulting the Administration for doing so.

But what it shows is both an increasingly common impulse in American counterterrrorism, to shift quickly to the tools that are easy. And all that’s built on the inherent problems with a belief that our new method of intervention can rely primarily on local partners who not only don’t have reason to be loyal to us, but also may not bring security to the country.


Why Can’t Darrell Issa Read the Wall Street Journal?

In addition to the rather amusing fact that Darrell Issa is conducting an investigation that Mike Rogers should be conducting, there’s another oddity about his “investigation.” The answers to the questions he asks Hillary Clinton have been available for over 10 days in this WSJ front page article.

In his letter, Issa asks,

  1. Was State Department headquarters in Washington aware of all the above incidents? If not, why not?
  2. If so, what measures did the State Department take to match the level of security provided to the U.S. Mission in Libya to the level of threat?
  3. Please detail any requests made by Embassy Tripoli to State Department headquarters for additional security, whether in general or in light of specific attacks mentioned above. How did the Department respond to each of these requests.

In the September 21 article, the WSJ listed several of the attacks in Issa’s letter (as well as an April 10 attack on the UN’s envoy). More importantly, it provided anonymous explanations from senior State Department officials describing their thinking about security in Benghazi.

The State Department chose to maintain only limited security in Benghazi, Libya, despite months of sporadic attacks there on U.S. and other Western missions. And while the U.S. said it would ask Libya to boost security there, it did so just once, for a one-week period in June, according to Libyan officials.

[snip]

State Department officials said security for the consulate was frequently reviewed and was deemed sufficient to counter what U.S. officials considered to be the most likely threat at the time: a limited hit-and-run attack with rocket-propelled grenades or improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

There was a string of attacks in Benghazi in the months before Sept. 11, including a June 6 IED explosion outside the consulate compound. “These types of incidents were the ones that were our principal concerns,” a senior State Department official said. Based on the outcome of the June 6 attack, in which a perimeter wall was damaged but no Americans hurt, a second State Department official added: “Our security plan worked.”

[snip]

[After the Brits pulled out of their consulate in Benghazi] The U.S. deemed the security level sufficient and decided to stay, “given the very important mission that we have in eastern Libya to support U.S. national security interests,” said a senior State Department official. He said “robust” security improvements had been made to the compound since the Americans moved into it in May 2011, including cement barriers and barbed wire.

More importantly, the article describes who made the decision to opt for a light security approach over something more aggressive: Ambassador Stevens.

Current and former officials said the security choices in Benghazi reflected efforts by Mr. Stevens to maintain a low-profile security posture and show faith in Libya’s new leaders, despite questions about their ability to rein in heavily armed bands of militants. Officials say Mr. Stevens personally advised against having Marines posted at the embassy in Tripoli, apparently to avoid a militarized U.S. presence.

The security plan for the consulate also reflected confidence Mr. Stevens felt in a city where he worked for months with rebels battling Moammar Gadhafi’s rule.

Eli Lake was able to get a similar explanation for the security at the consulate in his story about Issa’s letter.

A senior State Department official contacted for this story said the ambassador was “not reckless” with his own security or that of his staff. But this official also acknowledged that the ambassador was “an old-school diplomat” and strongly desired to have as few barriers between himself and the Libyan people.

Issa must know this is the answer to some of his questions. Couple that with Issa’s letter’s focus on Stevens’ choice to keep running even after someone threatened him on Facebook, and some of this amounts to a political attack on a dead man.

Ambassador Stevens was in the habit of taking early morning runs around Tripoli along with members of his security detail. According to sources, sometime in June 2012, a posting on a pro-Gaddafi Facebook page trumpeted these runs and directed a threat against Ambassador Stevens along with a stock photo of him. It is reported that, after stopping these morning runs for about a week, the Ambassador resumed them.

I wonder if Darrell Issa is also going to beat up David Petraeus for insisting on taking morning runs each day?

None of this is to say that State made the right decisions on security–though Ishmael Jones probably offers a better solution than the militarized consulates Issa’s anonymous sources seem to back. He suggests that the amount of CIA activity at the Consulate is one thing that made it a target.

A hostile intelligence service can shut down an embassy just by keeping track of who walks in and out. A hostile enemy can obliterate an embassy using obsolete military weapons. Once an embassy is neutralized, it can no longer gather information to protect itself, much less serve the needs of Americans and our allies.

The solution is to have people operating outside of those embassies. I did this continuously in foreign countries – including Libya – for more than 15 of my 18 years in the CIA. I had no security, no Marine guards, not even an alarm system in my house. Except for brief tours in war zones, I never carried a weapon. The enemy did not disrupt or attack me because they couldn’t identify and locate me. The enemy would never have been able to locate the safe houses I used because they were unconnected to any embassy. I never had diplomatic immunity, and it didn’t bother me a bit. Diplomatic immunity didn’t protect our ambassador in Libya.

The Israelis, facing acute threats, figured out the disadvantages of embassies and in the 1990’s moved their information and intelligence gathering outside of embassies.

But this earlier WSJ article shows that a week before Republican operatives met to plot out their Jimmy Carter strategy, and 10 days before Issa wrote his letter, some of the same issues were being reported in the press. (Note, too, that the WSJ story quotes Susan Collins responding to a Hillary Clinton briefing on this, suggesting that some of this reporting may come from a briefing State already did to the appropriate committees.)

Now, I’m sure Issa would like to force these anonymous State Department officials to go on the record–and frankly, State should explain these on the record.

But journalists have already done much of the work that Issa–and much of the press–is pretending is a legitimate attempt to answer questions.


Why Is Darrell Issa Doing Mike Rogers’ Job?

In his latest of a series of posts on the Benghazi strike, Eli Lake reveals that Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz have written a letter to Hillary Clinton suggesting State ignored intelligence about terrorists in Benghazi.

In the five months leading up to this year’s 9/11 anniversary, there were two bombings on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and increasing threats to and attacks on the Libyan nationals hired to provide security at the U.S. missions in Tripoli and Benghazi.

Details on these alleged incidents stem in part from the testimony of a handful of whistleblowers who approached the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the days and weeks following the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The incidents are disclosed in a letter to be sent Tuesday to Hillary Clinton from Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the oversight committee’s subcommittee that deals with national security.

The State Department did not offer comment on the record last night.

The new information disclosed in the letter obtained by The Daily Beast strongly suggests the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the late Ambassador Chris Stevens were known by U.S. security personnel to be targets for terrorists. Indeed, the terrorists made their threats openly on Facebook.

Curiously, Lake doesn’t ask a really obvious question: why would a slew of “whistleblowers” go to Darrell Issa with their complaints about missed intelligence rather than Mike Rogers, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee? After all, if there was an intelligence failure, then it is HPSCI’s job to do something about it.

The question is all the more curious given that Issa’s Committee does not have the clearance for some levels of intelligence (the kind that sources who could well be these very same whistleblowers have already been sharing with Lake).

Meaning this letter will have an utterly predictable result: State will respond that they can’t share the information that Issa is seeking. And then Issa will escalate this, turning his “investigation” into Son of Fast and Furious.

Moreover, this intelligence should have already been shared with the House (and Senate) Intelligence Committees (note that Peter King, a leaky sieve, sits on both committees). If it hasn’t been, then Mike Rogers has all the more reason to escalate this issue. The only possible reasons for Issa to investigate this, then, is if 1) Rogers is failing to do his job and/or 2) this is just a stunt to turn a legitimate intelligence issue, the Benghazi attack, into a political attack on Obama.

Back in May, Mitt made it clear he was hoping for a hostage situation he could use as an electoral opportunity. Yesterday, Craig Unger confirmed what was already clear; Mitt intends to use the Benghazi attack as his “Jimmy Carter” strategy against Obama.

According to a highly reliable source, as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama prepare for the first presidential debate Wednesday night, top Republican operatives are primed to unleash a new two-pronged offensive that will attack Obama as weak on national security, and will be based, in part, on new intelligence information regarding the attacks in Libya that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens on September 11.

The source, who has first-hand knowledge of private, high-level conversations in the Romney camp that took place in Washington, DC last week, said that at various times the GOP strategists referred to their new operation as the Jimmy Carter Strategy or the October Surprise.

He added that they planned to release what they hoped would be “a bombshell” that would make Libya and Obama’s foreign policy a major issue in the campaign. “My understanding is that they have come up with evidence that the Obama administration had positive intelligence that there was going to be a terrorist attack on the intelligence.”

Since the presumed time of the meeting last week, Lake has written four stories about Benghazi.

But Unger’s source wouldn’t reveal what the second-prong of this attack was.

The source said that “there was quite a bit more” to the operation than simply revealing the intelligence regarding Libya. He declined to discuss what he described as the second phase of the operation.

According to Lake, Issa plans to hold an October 10 hearing on the Benghazi attack, even while Congress is out of session. That would put the hearing the day before the VP debate, and in plenty of time for Issa to create his scandal before the Presidential foreign policy debates on October 16 and 22.

I think it’s fairly clear what the second prong of this strategy is.

But the whole strategy is premised on a very flawed premise: one that says Oversight should investigate things it doesn’t have clearance for and that are solidly HPSCI’s responsibility.

I actually do want to know what happened here, and I was suggesting it was a planned al Qaeda attack longer than Lake has been. But it’s blatantly obvious Issa’s investigation is not designed to find out what happened.


Poking Our Eyes Out in Libya

The NYT reports that–as already happened in Lebanon and Iran in the last year or so–the attack on the Consulate in Benghazi seriously set back CIA’s intelligence gathering efforts in Libya.

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”

Curiously, the article doesn’t mention anything about my current obsession about the attack, the reports that attackers took away documents from the embassy listing those cooperating with our intelligence (as well as describing oil negotiations). If the attackers walked away with a CIA location’s files, of course the CIA’s HUMINT network and SIGINT efforts would be compromised; the attackers would have a road map of what the CIA was doing!

Instead, the article uses the number of spooks evacuated from Benghazi as an indication of how much intelligence work was going on.

Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.

Remember, when rescuers showed up at a safe house after the attack, they expected 10 people; they weren’t prepared for the 37 they found, which made the ambush on the safe house more difficult to fight.

But he had a transport problem. Having been told to expect 10 Americans and having found 37, Obeidi did not have enough vehicles to break out, despite having one heavy anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck.

“I was being bombarded by calls from all over the country by Libyan government officials who wanted me to hurry and get them out,” he said. “But I told them that we were in such difficult circumstances and that I needed more men and more cars.”

Eventually dozens more vehicles were dispatched from pro-government militia brigades and, with the sun rising, the convoy headed back to the airport where an aircraft flew a first group of U.S. personnel out to the Libyan capital.

Though I’m wondering whether at least some of the 37 were DIA, since right after this happened, DOD announced it would hire contractors–including Blackwater–to train DIA personnel deploying overseas.

In any case, the number of people evacuated must have led to the discovery that many the people working at the Consulate were working off the books, because in addition to the Libyan Special Forces partnering with us to protect the Consulate, the number was also a surprise to Libya’s Deputy Prime Minister.

Though the agency has been cooperating with the new post-Qaddafi Libyan intelligence service, the size of the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi apparently surprised some Libyan leaders. The deputy prime minister, Mustafa Abushagour, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal last week saying that he learned about some of the delicate American operations in Benghazi only after the attack on the mission, in large part because a surprisingly large number of Americans showed up at the Benghazi airport to be evacuated.

“We have no problem with intelligence sharing or gathering, but our sovereignty is also key,” said Mr. Abushagour.

Ah sovereignty. That pesky issue keeps biting us in the ass with our so-called allies.

All of this is not to ignore the really big news from Libya over the weekend: the large protests against militias in the city, which the Administration is hailing as proof of the democratic instincts of the Libans. Though I suspect we’ll learn this was more about Libyan counter-offensive (possibly with US assistance) than just spontaneous protests (that is, as the original attack used cover of a protest, I suspect this counter-offensive did too).

But the subtext of this NYT story seems to be that we had a bunch of CIA guys working in two undefended locations-purportedly “safe houses” that the attackers knew enough about to deploy mortars to attack them. And that leaving the spooks like sitting ducks rather unsurprisingly led to the attackers compromising all their intelligence-gathering going on in Benghazi.


How Does a Paper Personal Journal Survive a Fire?

Michael Calderone catches CNN not disclosing that their reporting purportedly based on “a source familiar with Ambassador Stevens’ thinking” was actually working off his personal journal which they had obtained and not disclosed to the FBI team investigating his killing.

On Wednesday on his show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” Cooper told Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that “a source familiar with Ambassador Stevens’ thinking told us that in the months before his death he talked about being worried about the never-ending security threats that he was facing in Benghazi and specifically about the rise in Islamic extremism and growing al Qaeda presence.” The source, Cooper continued, “also mentioned [Stevens] being on an al Qaeda hit list.”

But what Cooper didn’t reveal at the time was that CNN’s sourcing was tied, at least partially, to Stevens’ thinking as written in his personal journal.

In one version of their explanation CNN said they “came upon” the journal (Calderone has the transcription).

We came upon the journal through our reporting and notified the family.

In another, they describe it consisting of seven pages in a hard-bound book.

The journal consists of just seven pages of handwriting in a hard-bound book.

Several things stink about this story. First of all, consider that the attack was in Benghazi, not Tripoli, where Stevens was stationed and where he presumably kept his personal affects. So for CNN to have “come upon” it in Benghazi, it presumably would have been on Stevens’ person when he was attacked. If that’s the case, how did it survive the fire [correction, smoke] that killed Stevens?

And consider the role of this picture. CNN included in its spread of pictures of the trashed Consulate. While it clearly shows that some papers did survive, the picture immediately following shows just ashes survived the flames. Also, this image shows the papers having been ransacked; we know that the attackers got sensitive papers. How likely is it that the attackers wouldn’t have taken the Ambassador’s personal journal, even while taking everything else of interest?

That suggests two possibilities. That the journal was on Stevens’ person when he was brought to the hospital, and the person who brought him (or someone in the hospital) gave it to CNN. Or, that the attackers got the journal and one of them got it to CNN (which might explain why CNN’s language here is so sketchy).

There is, of course, one other possibility: that the journal always remained in Tripoli, at the Embassy or the Ambassador’s residence, and one of the staffers shared it with CNN.

In any case, I suspect the reason CNN didn’t reveal they had the journal at first has to do with how they found it. But that may mean they have other relevant information about the attack.


Fox News Blames Benghazi Attack on Gitmo Detainee

Fox News quotes sources claiming that former Gitmo detainee Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamouda Bin Qumu was involved in–and may have planned–the attack on American’s Consulate in Benghazi.

Intelligence sources tell Fox News they are convinced the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was directly tied to Al Qaeda — with a former Guantanamo detainee involved.

That revelation comes on the same day a top Obama administration official called last week’s deadly assault a “terrorist attack” — the first time the attack has been described that way by the administration after claims it had been a “spontaneous” act.

[snip]

Sufyan Ben Qumu is thought to have been involved and even may have led the attack, Fox News’ intelligence sources said. Qumu, a Libyan, was released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007 and transferred into Libyan custody on the condition he be kept in jail. He was released by the Qaddafi regime as part of its reconciliation effort with Islamists in 2008.

His Guantanamo files also show he has ties to the financiers behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The declassified files also point to ties with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a known Al Qaeda affiliate.

Like Fox, I strongly suspect the Benghazi attack was planned in advance.

But Fox has grasped on one of the most damning pieces of evidence in Hamouda’s Gitmo file to insinuate close ties to al Qaeda–that his alias was found on Mustafa Al Hawsawi’s laptop–without considering that his role as a truck driver for an Osama bin Laden company might explain it. Nor does it look at Hamouda’s participation in an LIFG splinter group, which may have caused him financial troubles and might make his role in factional politics today rather interesting.

Plus, there’s more interesting details about Hamouda in the public record. For example, in a July 2, 2007 Administrative Review Board, Hamouda reportedly said he didn’t want to go back to Libya for fear he’d be held responsible for earlier drug charges. But a September 25, 2007 WikiLeaks cable records his lawyer saying he had no such fears–both in June 2007 (so before the ARB) and again in September. He also reportedly said the same to Gitmo JAGs and the ICRC.

— Hamouda’s counsel’s unsolicited contact with a DOJ attorney in June 2007, through which counsel represented to DOJ that Hamouda was “okay to go back [i.e., to Libya]”;

— Counsel’s September 10 representations to DOJ and State Department attorneys that, if the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR — a detainee advocacy group that employs Hamouda’s counsel as a staff attorney) learned that the USG intended to transfer Hamouda to Libya, CCR would not pursue legal action to block the transfer, as it previously has done when it learned that the USG intended to transfer to Libya other individuals detained at Guantanamo who did not wish to return;

— Hamouda’s September 19 representations to JTF-GTMO judge advocates that he was not afraid of returning to Libya and that he would go to Libya; and

— Hamouda’s representations to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on this matter. ICRC officials informally confirmed that Hamouda previously told them that he wished to return to Libya and had no fears about returning. ICRC officials met with Hamouda again on September 19 to confirm this fact; during this interview, he expressed his willingness to be repatriated to Libya.

By the time Hamouda got transferred, the Embassy was already concerned about an earlier transferred detainee, Muhammad Abdallah Mansur al-Rimi, who had an arm injury (al-Rimi repeatedly said he got the injury from guards at Gitmo). The Embassy worked over time through the Qaddafi Development Foundation and Moussa Koussa to get access to the two former Gitmo detainees. Chris Stevens, both as Deputy Chief of Mission and the Charge d’Affaires, played a role throughout this period of observation, repeatedly interceding with Libyans to ensure they upheld humanitarian standards for the two repatriated detainees. After US intervention, Hamouda got his first familial visit in December 2007. And as Hamouda was charged, tried, and (apparently) declared innocent, the Embassy (and Stevens personally) tracked his status.

None of that means Hamouda wasn’t involved in the attack on Benghazi. You could have an entirely innocent person repatriated to Libya who bore ill will to the US over treatment at Gitmo. One thing the cables make clear, for example, is in Hamouda’s absence he got divorced and estranged from his wife. And all that’s before more details on the US role in rendering Libyan opposition figures to Libya for torture came out.

But if Hamouda did participate in or plan the attack, it means his actions led to the death of a man who worked for two years to make sure he got decent custody in Qaddafi’s custody.


Beginning of the End in Afghanistan? Most Joint Operations Below Battalion Level Suspended

In the most significant move yet that suggests the NATO plan for Afghan security forces to take over as NATO withdraws from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 has failed, the US has halted most joint activities between US and Afghan forces below the battalion level. Any joint action at the lower force level will require approval from a General before it is permitted. Because the bulk of the training and joint patrol work of US and Afghan forces occurs at these lower force size levels, this order effectively brings training to a close until the order is reversed.

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News first reported this development last night:

Most joint U.S.-Afghan military operations have been suspended following what authorities believe was an insider attack Sunday that left four American soldiers dead, officials told NBC News.

“We’re to the point now where we can’t trust these people,” a senior military official said. So far this year, 51 NATO troops have been killed in these so-called blue-on-green attacks. Sunday’s attack came a day after two British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman, Reuters reported.

“It’s had a major impact on our ability to conduct combat operations with them, and we’re going to have to back off to a certain degree,” the official said.

The suspensions of the joint operations are indefinite – according to one official, they “could last three days or three months.”

ISAF took issue with some of the early reporting and issued this “clarification” this morning:

 Recent media coverage regarding a change in ISAF’s model of Security Force Assistance (SFA) to the Afghan National Security Forces is not accurate. ISAF remains absolutely committed to partnering with, training, advising and assisting our ANSF counterparts. The ISAF SFA model is focused at the battalion level and above, with exceptions approved by senior commanders. Partnering occurs at all levels, from Platoon to Corps. This has not changed.

In response to elevated threat levels resulting from the “Innocence of Muslims” video, ISAF has taken some prudent, but temporary, measures to reduce our profile and vulnerability to civil disturbances or insider attacks. This means that in some local instances, operational tempo has been reduced, or force protection has been increased. These actions balance the tension of the recent video with force protection, while maintaining the momentum of the campaign.

We’ve done this before in other high tension periods, and it has worked well. Under this guidance, and as conditions change, we will continue to adapt the force posture and force protection. The SFA model is integral to the success of the ANSF, and ISAF will return to normal operations as soon as conditions warrant.

It seems to me that just as the “Innocence of the Muslims” video and its associated protests was used as cover for the sophisticated attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, ISAF now is using the film and protests as cover for suspending training even though this suspension was a development that was easily predicted when Special Forces halted training of the Afghan Local Police on September 2. As I said at the time:

So, while only Special Operations forces have suspended training for now, it is hard to see how this will not extend to all training of Afghan security forces soon, because the lapses in screening of recruits applies equally to the much larger ANA and ANP forces (approximately 350,000 for those two forces combined, compared to various estimates in the 20,000 range for the ALP and Afghan special forces when combined).

We learned a few days after the suspension of ALP training that a thorough review of credentials for Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police who already had been trained was underway, even though DoD seriously bungled its responses when trying to describe the process to the press. Strip away the convenient timing of the video and it seems likely that ISAF would have had to admit that training has been suspended because the process of re-screening Afghan National Security Forces indicates that a very significant number of the 350,000-strong force were never adequately screened and pose a security threat for green on blue insider attacks.

Despite the attempt by ISAF to downplay the significance of a halt to most training activities, the importance stands out both to major media organizations and, more importantly, to the Afghans. Just as I pointed out in early August, when Afghan troops “trained” by the US are left alone to carry out missions, things do not go well. Today’s New York Times article show the same level of failure as the Washington Post report I quoted last month:

Afghan soldiers were not reassured by such talk. Three interviewed as word spread Tuesday said their [sic] many of their units were not yet ready to fight alone – an assessment shared by the Pentagon — and could be in deep trouble without close coalition assistance.

The curtailment of partnered operations is “a big problem for the Afghan Army,” said Maj. Salam, an officer based in western Afghanistan who asked that he only be identified by his rank and last name.

“We rely on the Americans for everything,” he continued. “The army is not in a level to carry out military operations independently, we still need their support. I do not buy the lies that the MOD officials are trying to sell us and the public — we are in the field and we know how difficult it would be for the army without Americans.”

He cited an incident on Monday in which an Afghan Army vehicle struck a hidden bomb. Two soldiers were killed, and the Americans did not respond to a request to evacuate the four wounded troopers.

Instead, they had to wait for help from their own forces, which do not have medical evacuation helicopters. “It took them six hours to bring the soldiers to the hospital. One of them has lost a lot of blood and he might die,” Major Salam said.

This same Times report opens by stating that the “training mission” “is the heart of the Western exit strategy” and is threatened by this move. Reuters characterizes it as “a decision that could complicate plans to hand security over to Afghan forces ahead of a 2014 drawdown”.

Because so much of Obama administration policy in Afghanistan has been governed from the start by electoral politics, look for the “suspension” of training to hold through the November election, with US troops withdrawing into defensive postures on bases  and carrying out only solo, rather than joint, patrols to secure their perimeters. It is very difficult to see how the training mission can be revived in any meaningful form after the election. Although the US has begrudgingly gotten to the point of at least going through the motions of “cultural sensitivity” training, the US still refuses to face up to the most important overarching factor behind violence aimed at the US: the Afghans see the US as an invading force and want all foreign troops out of their country. No amount of “training” Afghan security forces will alter this basic desire by the Afghan people to get US forces out of their country, so leaving is the only realistic option.

Although Obama should begin the process of leaving now, look for him after the election to declare training to have been such a success that the withdrawal process can be accelerated, presumably with an end of 2013 target rather than end of 2014. The process will have to be fast because the defection rate from the ANSF is too high to wait through 2014 before completing withdrawal. He’ll of course want to keep a presence of “non-combat” forces just as he did in Iraq and most likely will move to a high frequency of drone strikes, as well, from the few bases he will maintain. At the very least it’s hard to see how he could be so dense as to attempt to stick with ISAF’s current claim that the training mission remains in place and to actually lift the training suspension.

 


How Many of the Protests Have Gotten Diplomatic Documents?

Here’s a few data points to suggest that the protests in Muslim countries may have been, in part, an effort to grab sensitive diplomatic correspondence.

I noted–but did not quote–this report on the documents taken from the US Consulate in Benghazi.

Sensitive documents have gone missing from the consulate in Benghazi and the supposedly secret location of the “safe house” in the city, where the staff had retreated, came under sustained mortar attack. Other such refuges across the country are no longer deemed “safe”.

Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.

Then on Saturday, Yemeni lawyer Haykal Bafana suggested we might soon see secret files taken from the Yemeni Embassy last week.

Forecasted in the local press : #Wikileaks #Yemen soon from secret info in computers & documents looted from the US Embassy, Sanaa.

Here’s a picture of “protestors” in Sanaa carrying out computer equipment.

Today, Tim Shorrock described a military person on Fox admitting that Marines at Embassies prioritize protecting classified information over lives.

Military guy on Fox: Marines’ priorities at the embassies are 1) protect classified communications & 2) protect human lives. In that order.

Now, possibly it’s only the Libyan attack that got or even deliberately sought documents. Libyans have proven to be master information operatives in the past. After all, somebody conveniently left documents implicating the US and UK in rendition to Libya and torture. Human Rights Watch used those files to compile its recent report on torture.

But the US Embassy in Tunis was also breached (though not, I think, sufficiently to get files). And the German Embassy in Khartoum was overrun, so the “protestors” there probably got close enough to get files as well (I’m less sure about the breaches at the British and US Embassies in Khartoum).

In all of these successful breaches, there seems to have been some cooperation from local guards who allowed the protestors to get close or into the diplomatic properties, so they may also have had information on where to look for the most sensitive files.

It’s possible that none of these breaches was designed specifically to get diplomatic correspondence (and remember, these would presumably be far more sensitive than what we’ve seen from WikiLeaks, none of which were Top Secret) and only in Libya is it clear attackers did get documents.

But it’s worth considering that all the places we’ve sent Marine response teams, there may be very compromising documents floating around.

Update: The AP reports the Lebanese Embassy is preemptively destroying classified documents. (h/t TPM via fatser)


What “Desert Warriors” Attacked Us in Libya?

There’s a weird bifurcation in the coverage of yesterday’s Libya tragedy.

The Islamist plot in Benghazi

One strand of coverage revised the initial claims that the mob that burned the consulate in Libya were responding solely to  an anti-Mohammed film, The Innocence of Muslims. Jihadist chat rooms and–presumably–SIGINT made it clear that the attack on the consulate was planned in advance, probably as retaliation for the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi, whom we killed in a drone strike in June.

The officials said there were indications that members of a militant faction calling itself Ansar al Sharia – which translates as Supporters of Islamic Law – may have been involved in organizing the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya’s second-largest city.

They also said some reporting from the region suggested that members of Al-Qaeda’s north Africa-based affiliate, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, may have been involved.

“It bears the hallmarks of an organized attack” and appeared to be preplanned, one U.S. official said.

Not only does it suggest that Moon of Alabama was (once again) right. But it also made me remember this post from All Things Counterterrorism, which warned that killing Abu Yahya al-Libi might make Al Qaeda even more extreme.

One seriously underplayed piece of evidence that this was planned is that after Consulate employees evacuated to a safe house and a helicopter of commandoes came to recuse them, they were ambushed at the purportedly secret location.

Capt. Fathi al-Obeidi, whose special operations unit was ordered by Libya’s authorities to meet an eight-man U.S. Marine force at Benghazi airport, said that after his men and the Marines had found the American survivors who had evacuated the blazing consulate, the ostensibly secret location in an isolated villa came under an intense and highly accurate mortar barrage.

“I really believe that this attack was planned,” he said, adding to suggestions by other Libyan officials that at least some of the hostility towards the Americans was the work of experienced combatants. “The accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any regular revolutionaries.”

[snip]

Speaking of the rescue mission, he said: “A team of commandos arrived by air and went to a farm which we thought was a secret location. Once they got there, they came under heavy fire from heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, which resulted in the death of two others.”

(Note, I’m not sure, but this may suggest two safe locations were compromised, an urban villa and a farm, each attacked with different weapons; I’m trying to clarify this. Update: Yes, two sites were compromised–apparently because the US shared the information with the Libyan militia.)

This suggests not only that professionals launched this attack with advance warning and serious weaponry (this is part of the reasons Libyans initially blamed it on Qaddafi dead-enders), but that they did it with either inside knowledge or incredibly good intelligence.

The Islamophobic plot in California

The second strand of coverage has puzzled through who was responsible for the film itself.

The film was made by a “Sam Bacile,” who claimed to the WSJ and AP to be Israeli. Then a “consultant” on the film, the militant Christian Steve Klein, refuted that claim, while claiming to know little of the film-maker’s real story.

Klein told me that Bacile, the producer of the film, is not Israeli, and most likely not Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is, in fact, a pseudonym. He said he did not know “Bacile”‘s real name. He said Bacile contacted him because he leads anti-Islam protests outside of mosques and schools, and because, he said, he is a Vietnam veteran and an expert on uncovering al Qaeda cells in California.

[snip]
When I asked him to describe Bacile, he said: “I don’t know that much about him. I met him, I spoke to him for an hour. He’s not Israeli, no. I can tell you this for sure, the State of Israel is not involved, Terry Jones (the radical Christian Quran-burning pastor) is not involved. His name is a pseudonym. All these Middle Eastern folks I work with have pseudonyms. I doubt he’s Jewish. I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign.”

Then the AP figured out “Sam Bacile” is actually a Coptic Christian with 2010 check kiting conviction named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula who lied to them about his identity.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and may have caused inflamed mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.

[snip]

Nakoula denied he had posed as Bacile. During a conversation outside his home, he offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found it and other connections to the Bacile persona.

Laura Rozen discovered that in July 2011, Klein, the militant Christian, set up a company called Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment that seems to have coincided with the filming of the video.

It became clear that the film was originally shot as a script called Desert Warriors, with completely different names. The link to Mohammed was overdubbed into the sound track in post-production.

Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.

The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.

“It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything.”

In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product, now called Muslim Innocence. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The word “Muhammed” was dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed.

For example, at 9:03 in the trailer, Garcia berates her husband, who wants to send their daughter to Muhammed: “Is your Muhammed a child molester?” she says in the final product. But the words are dubbed over what she actually said. The line in the script—and the line Garcia gave during filming—was, “is your God a child molester,” Garcia told us today.

In short, a shady group of Islamophobes started working on this hoax video over a year ago, posted it in English to little notice this summer, but then loaded it up in Arabic just in time to set off riots earlier this week.

In other words, a day of reporting have corrected a bunch of initial misconceptions to reveal a plot led by radical Islamists in North Africa and a plot led by radical Islamophobe Egyptian Christians here, both remarkably coinciding in a Consulate attack on 9/11, the death of one of our most qualified Ambassadors, and mobs across the Islamic world.

And that may, in fact, be what we have: two plots. It’s not surprising the Islamists struck on 9/11, nor is it surprising the Islamophobes deliberately incited violence for 9/11.

For the moment, though, I have just one question about that theory.

The Islamists used the mobs as cover for their attack in Benghazi, but the attack had been planned in advance, complete with mortars in place to attack the evacuation site.

Now maybe it was just auspicious for the Islamists that some Egyptian-American Islamophobes incited mobs on precisely the day Islamists planned their attack. Maybe it was just auspicious for terrorists on both sides of the Atlantic this timing came together.

It is, after all, 9/11, a day that incites extremists of all sorts.

Or maybe there’s another explanation entirely, in which all the identities we’re working with thus far are covers?

Given that the mobs continue in Egypt and have spread to Yemen, we might want to get a more solid answer to this question than we now have.


US Ambassador Christopher Stevens Dies in Attack on Benghazi Consulate

The US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed earlier today in an attack on the Consulate in Benghazi.

An armed mob attacked and set fire to the building in a protest against an amateur film deemed offensive to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, after similar protests in Egypt’s capital.

The ambassador was paying a short visit to Benghazi when the consulate came under attack on Tuesday night, Al Jazeera’s Suleiman El-Dressi reported from the eastern Libyan city.

He died of suffocation during the attack, along with two US security personnel who were accompanying him, security sources told Al Jazeera. Another consulate employee, whose nationality could not immediately be confirmed, was also killed.

Earlier in the attack, there was another Consular employee killed.

And in our Embassy in Cairo, protestors pulled down the American flag and replaced it with an Islamic one–reportedly an al Qaeda one. There were reports that Ayman al-Zawahiri’s brother was involved in the Egyptian attack.

Note that Stevens was also the liaison with the Libyan National Transitional Council. This man helped Libya overthrow Moammar Qaddafi. Already, there have been a lot of condemnations of the killing from Libyans and other Arabs.

Details about both attacks are still coming out, and State is trying to play down the degree to which Salafists were involved in both. I’ll be curious to learn whether the mob had reason to know Stevens was at the Consulate when they attacked.

Condolences to Stevens’ family and the families of all of those killed in these attacks.

Copyright © 2024 emptywheel. All rights reserved.
Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/benghazi-attack-2/page/9/