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Bengh– Blackwater!

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You should definitely read the James Risen story describing how the head of Blackwater’s operations in Iraq threatened to kill an investigator into the company’s practices in the period before the Nisour Square. It definitely confirms every concern that has been raised about mercenaries generally and Blackwater specifically.

But I want to look at the frame Risen gave the story, which I suspect few will read closely.

His memo and other newly disclosed State Department documents make clear that the department was alerted to serious problems involving Blackwater and its government overseers before the Nisour Square shooting, which outraged Iraqis and deepened resentment over the United States’ presence in the country.

[snip]

Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, named a special panel to examine the Nisour Square episode and recommend reforms, but the panel never interviewed Mr. Richter or Mr. Thomas.

Patrick Kennedy, the State Department official who led the special panel, told reporters on Oct. 23, 2007, that the panel had not found any communications from the embassy in Baghdad before the Nisour Square shooting that raised concerns about contractor conduct.

“We interviewed a large number of individuals,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We did not find any, I think, significant pattern of incidents that had not — that the embassy had suppressed in any way.”

The reason this is coming out — aside from the fact the government is trying to try the Nisour Square killers again — is to show that contrary to what Patrick Kennedy said after having done a review of security practices in 2007, there had been a pattern of incidents, and they had been suppressed by the Embassy.

Now consider how that reflects on the GOP’s second favorite scandal, Benghazi. Not only was Kennedy the key judge about the events leading up to that event (which is normal — he’s been a key player in State for a very long time; I’m beginning to believe he’s State’s institutional defender in the same way David Margolis was at DOJ), but the question of security oversight is important there: Blue Mountain Group appears to have done its job inadequately (and there are some sketchy things about its contract and contractors).

Benghazi is actually not a bigger scandal than that State suppressed knowledge of Blackwater’s problems. But there does seem to be continuity.

“Morgan Jones'” Blue Mountain Whitewash

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One thing that surprises me about this whole 60 Minutes “Morgan Jones” fiasco is that no one mentions that, regardless of whether “Jones” lied to his supervisor about running to the compound or not, it’s clear he lied to his supervisor about Chris Stevens’ death. As I noted earlier, the incident report (which the FBI has leaked matches his interview with them) says,

I kept quiet about the Ambassadors [sic] death as I knew there would be huge repercussions.

Assuming “Jones'” company was what it claims to be — a security firm — he had been involved in the worst possible disaster, the death of the principal, and he didn’t warn his boss. Even within the scope of the incident report, it’s clear he lied.

The ARB version

With all that in mind, I want to compare what the State Department Accountability Review Board said about BMG’s performance (they refer to it as Blue Mountain Libya, BML) with the two versions “Jones” has offered.

The ARB admitted that BMG guards were unarmed.

The Special Mission also had an unarmed, contract local guard force (LGF), Blue Mountain Libya (BML), which provided five guards per eight-hour shift, 24/7, to open and close the gates, patrol the compound, and give warning in case of an attack.

But it also found they had failed to fulfill one of their primary duties, perimeter patrols.

The Board found the responses by both BML and February 17 to be inadequate. No BML guards were present outside the compound immediately before the attack ensued, although perimeter security was one of their responsibilities,

[snip]

Although the unarmed BML guards could not be expected to repel an attack, they had core responsibility for providing early warning and controlling access to the compound, which they had not always performed well in the past.

In addition, ARB raised questions about whether the BMG guards had run away and left the gate open, facilitating the quick assault on the compound.

In the final analysis, the Board could not determine exactly how the C1 gate at the Special Mission compound was breached, but the speed with which attackers entered raised the possibility that BML guards left the C1 pedestrian gate open after initially seeing the attackers and fleeing the vicinity. They had left the gate unlatched before.

Finally, there are conflicting stories about whether the BMG guards even sounded the first alarm — or any alarm — before attackers had already started streaming into the compound.

and there is conflicting information as to whether they sounded any alarms prior to fleeing the C1 gate area to other areas of the SMC.

[snip]

Around the same time, the TDY RSO working in the TOC heard shots and an explosion. He then saw via security camera dozens of individuals, many armed, begin to enter the compound through the main entrance at the C1 gate. He hit the duck and cover alarm and yelled a warning over the radio, and recalled no such warning from the February 17 or BML guards, who had already begun to flee to points south and east in the compound, towards the Villa B area. ARSOs 1 and 2 heard an attack warning from the BML guards passed on over the radio.

About the only contribution BMG made to security for the compound, the ARB reports, was in noticing a man uniformed as a police officer scoping out the compound earlier that morning.

At approximately 0645 local that morning, a BML contract guard saw an unknown individual in a Libyan Supreme Security Council (SSC) police uniform apparently taking photos of the compound villas with a cell phone from the second floor of a building under construction across the street to the north of the SMC. Read more →

60 Minutes Writes the Final (?) Installment of the Benghazi Left Behind Novels

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60 Minutes Left Behind NovelThe very last scene of 60 Minutes’ now-discredited “scoop” on Benghazi — in which the Project Manager (alternately described as the Security Manager) for the project, whom 60 Minutes names Morgan Jones and WaPo names Dylan Davies describes his own heroism that didn’t appear in the official report — features a 60 Minutes cameraman “discovering” Ambassador Chris Stevens’ itinerary for September 12.

The discovery is just the latest in a series of what I call “Left Behind” novels associated with the Benghazi story — the remarkable discovery by media outlets of paper documents left behind the scene of the crime. Other instances are:

And now we’re supposed to believe that over two years a year after the attack on Benghazi, journalists are still finding paper documents that magically survived a fire that killed State IT guy Sean Smith and would lead to the death of Chris Stevens.

WaPo version of Stevens Itinerary What’s interesting is this latest Left Behind novel purports to be one of the very same documents the WaPo found on October 3 — Chris Stevens’ itinerary. Except it differs in content, showing Stevens meeting with the Arabian Gulf Oil Company rather than the Italian Consul.

There’s nothing inherently suspicious about there being two different versions of Stevens’ itinerary. The WaPo version includes hand-written additions, as if it were a draft. But I do find it remarkable that these documents keep appearing in a compound that got devastated by fire and then lay unguarded for years.

Oh. One more thing. Almost every single document that was “found” by these journalists could have been a Blue Mountain Group document. Except, of course, Chris Stevens’ diary.

But I’ll come back to that in a later post.

Meanwhile, something major seems to be missing from the narrative of Dylan Davies AKA Morgan Jones.

In the latest narrative, he’s the one who “trained” security guards at the compound. Elsewhere, his role might better be described as the one who hired locals with zero fighting experience and paid them so little they would be easy to buy off and over five months on the ground never fixed this obvious problem. He’s also the one who hired two guys who earlier in the summer just happened to attack the compound.

Blue Mountain hired about 20 Libyan men – including some who say they had minimal training – to screen visitors and help patrol the mission at Benghazi, according to Reuters interviews.

Some of the guards sustained injuries and said they were ill-prepared to protect themselves or others when heavily armed militants last month stormed the rented villa that was serving as the mission.

They also described being hired by Blue Mountain after a casual recruiting and screening process.

State Department security officials had their own concerns about some of the guards at the mission months before the recent attack, according to emails obtained by Reuters this week. One guard who had been recently fired and another on the company’s payroll were suspected of throwing a homemade bomb into the U.S. compound in April. They were questioned but not charged.

[snip]

Several of Blue Mountain’s Libyan employees told Reuters that they had no prior security training or experience.

“I was never a revolutionary or a fighter, I have never picked up a weapon during the war or after it,” said Abdelaziz al-Majbiri, 28, who was shot in the legs during the September 11 assault.

The Libyan commander in charge of the local guards at the mission was a former English teacher who said he heard about Blue Mountain from a neighbor. “I don’t have a background in security, I’ve never held a gun in my life,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

When hired, the commander said he was told “you have great English and get along with everyone and are punctual; we want you to be a guard commander.”

Whatever else Blue Mountain Group was — and I think that remains an active question — it was a contractor that provided guard service that might be tailor made to make this kind of attack on the compound easy as pie. I’m flabbergasted that this hasn’t been a more central part of efforts to figure out who Dylan Davies AKA Morgan Jones is and why he might be coming forward with a dramatically different story now.

One final point, for now.

Read more →