The Obama administration pursued a policy in Libya back in 2011 that ultimately allowed guns to walk into the hands of jihadists linked to the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda (AQ) in Syria, according to a former CIA officer who co-authored a report on behalf of the Citizen’s Commission on Benghazi (CCB), detailing the gun running scheme.
In Congress, the then-bipartisan group known as the “Gang of Eight,” at a minimum, knew of the operation to aid and abet America’s jihadist enemies by providing them with material support. So says Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer and the primary author of CCB’s interim report, titled How America Switched Sides in the War on Terror, speaking with Breitbart News.
The ripple effects of the illegal policy to arm America’s enemies continue to be felt as the U.S. military is currently leading a war against ISIS and AQ terrorists in Iraq and Syria, according to Lopez.
In late October, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that the U.S. would begin “direct action on the ground” against ISIS terrorists in Iraq and Syria who may have reaped the benefits from the gun-running scheme that started in Libya.
“The Obama administration effectively switched sides in what used to be called the Global War on Terror [GWOT] when it decided to overthrow the sovereign government of our Libyan ally, Muammar Qaddafi, who’d been helping in the fight against al-Qaeda, by actually teaming up with and facilitating gun-running to Libyan al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood [MB] elements there in 2011,” explained Lopez. “This U.S. gun-running policy in 2011 during the Libyan revolution was directed by [then] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and [the late Libya Ambassador] Christopher Stevens, who was her official envoy to the Libyan AQ rebels.”
To avoid having the funds tracked back to the Obama administration, the arms flow to Libya was financed thru the United Arab Emirates, while Qatar served as the logistical and shipping hub, she noted.
“In 2012, the gun-running into Libya turned around and began to flow outward, from Benghazi to the AQ-and-MB-dominated rebels in Syria,” Lopez added. “This time, it was the CIA Base of Operations that was in charge of collecting up and shipping out [surface-to-air missiles] SAMs from Libya on Libyan ships to Turkey for overland delivery to a variety of jihadist militias, some of whose members later coalesced into groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS [also known as IS].”
Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
“The downstream consequences of Obama White House decisions in the Syrian conflict are still playing out, but certainly the U.S. – and particularly CIA – support of identifiable jihadist groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, the Islamic State and other [jihadists] has only exacerbated what was already a devastating situation,” declared Lopez.
Some of the other weapons that eventually ended up in Syria included thousands of MAN-Portable-Air-Defense-System (MANPADS) missile units, such as shoulder-launched SAMs, from late dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s extensive arms stockpiles that pose a threat to low-flying aircraft, especially helicopters.
“It’s been reported that President Obama signed an Executive Order on Syria in early 2012 [just as he had done for Libya in early 2011], that legally covered the CIA and other U.S. agencies that otherwise would have been in violation of aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war and providing material support to terrorism,” notes Lopez. “Still, such blatant disregard for U.S. national security can only be described as deeply corrosive of core American principles.”
Libya Amb. Stevens was killed by jihadists in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, along with three other Americans.
Echoing a Benghazi resident who provided a first-hand account of the incident, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Dennis Haney, a CCB member, suggested to Breitbart News that Hillary Clinton’s State Department armed some of the al-Qaeda linked jihadists who may have killed the four Americans in Benghazi.
“The reason the U.S. government was operating in Libya is absolutely critical to this debacle because it reflects where America went off the tracks and literally switched sides in the GWOT,” points out Lopez. “This is about who we are as a country, as a people — where we are going with this Republic of ours.”
“There can be no greater treason than aiding and abetting the jihadist enemy in time of war – or providing material – weapons, funding, intel, NATO bombing – support to terrorism,” she continued. “The reason Benghazi is not the burning issue it ought to be is because so many at top levels of U.S. government were implicated in wrong-doing: White House, Pentagon, Intel Community-CIA, Gang of Eight, at a minimum, in Congress, the Department of State, etc.”
The State Department and the CIA did not respond to Breitbart News’ requests for comment.
Clinton was asked about the gun running operation when testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October.
The Democratic presidential frontrunner claimed she was not aware of any U.S. government efforts to arm jihadists in Libya and Syria.
Clinton did admit to being open to the idea of using private security experts to arm the Qaddafi opposition, which included al-Qaeda elements, but added that it was “not considered seriously.”
@ Leftcoaster: The GOP establishment has failed to make this a loud, high profile, issue against Obama, Clinton and the Democrat party.
Doing so would inform many Americans about the treason being done to us. Unfortunately the GOP establishment is corrupt and mostly brain dead except for a few reformers which the GOP wants to destroy.
Among the key findings of the Commission was the fact that the war in Libya, initially described as a an effort to prevent a humanitarian crisis, but which later became a mission to take out the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, could very possibly have been avoided through negotiations—an offer the Obama administration turned down. Then there was the dereliction of duty, namely the failure to bring available military forces to bear in an effort to save at least some of the Americans under attack during the night of September 11 and into the early morning of September 12, 2012.
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/fresh-perspectives-on-benghazi-keep-the-scandals-alive/
see also
https://www.israpundit.org/archives/63611225
see also
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/isis.htm
The whole article and unforgettable lesson as introduced by Jared Israel needs to be read and kept alive: QUOTE…As you shall see, he used the interview to encourage Croatian chauvinism, Kosovo Albanian secessionism and, in Bosnia, Islamic Fundamentalism, the very forces that Nazi Germany allied with in Yugoslavia during World War II.
Zimmermann said he was against destabilization; but talk is cheap and every diplomat knew a united Yugoslavia was the key to stability in the Balkans. Zimmermann spoke of peace but he unleashed the dogs of war.
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/nothing.htm
Read the whole of the abiove article to understand the difference between what leaders say and what they and the forces which place and keep them in power do, and how this played out into brutal civil wars and repressive legal international World Court proceedings in which Serbs suffered and are still suffering in the Hague prisons. In that Yugoslavia in the 1990s remains the template. This is why the power elites represented in the Media such as BBC strive might and main to hide the lessons of Yugoslavia, using especially the lie of Srebrenica, just as against the Jews and Israel they have used the lie of “Palestinian” refugees under the false Nakba, the large key and all that tripe.
It is also important to shatter this lie that Obama is a “thing in itself” because Bush and Condi Rice followed the same methods in relation to Israel, and very importantly in relation to Mubarak. The feeling between George W. Bush and Mubarak soured totally long before Obama came on the scene in his Cairo speech in 2009, so much so that Mubarak refused to travel to America during the second 4 years of the Bush rule. Mubarak was continually attacked by the American establishment over democratic rights which amounted to support by Bush and Rice for the Muslim Brotherhood.
For pure and utter deviousness see the response of my question to Matthew Bracken. Bracken has written a long essay in which is interspersed many conspiracy theory concepts which I have often read in David Icke. But such a method always does not deal with real history, what really happened and what is happening, rather imposing already formed conclusions onto living reality.
I commented this and he answered:
QUOTE
Felix Quigley on December 1, 2015 at 7:06 am said:
Mr Bracken explain the following passage:
QUOTE”This pattern of secular strongmen being followed by fanatical Islamist leaders has recurred many times over the past millennium and longer. Do not be fooled by modernists like King Abdullah of Jordan. To the true believer of Islam, any king or strongman is never more than a rifle shot or grenade toss away from being kinetically deposed, and replaced by another Islamist fanatic.”
There is an obvious problem with this in that we have witnessed US Imperialism and other western Imperialisms such as British being involved in intervening on the side of the enemy of civilization, that is of Islam.
I will give you some examples all of which are of great importance to our lives in the modern world.
There was the intervention in Indonesia of the US in support of Suharto against Sukarno (founding President), and the result of this was a massive genocide of mainly Young rural communists of the Stalinist “peaceful road to socialism” persuasión…talking big numbers here maybe a million massacred in the Indonesian countryside, a massacre I hardly ever see mentioned in print. That was in the 60s.
There was the epochal event of the 1990s when the US and EU/NATO/UN intervened on behalf of the Islamist Supremacist Izetbegovic in Bosnia, broke apart a sovereign country Yugoslavia, provided Bin laden with his bridge from where he went on to plan and carry out 9-11
There was the Arab Spring which was anticipated by events in states like Ukraine, Georgia and then went on to the intervention of US Imperialism and the above EU in order to overthrow largely secular leaders like the Tunisian ruler Ben Ali, Gadhafi, Mubarak, Gaghbo and some others.
The biggest event though was the 2003 war on Saddam which as Raymond Ibrahim says “uncorked” the Jihad.
There were two positions taken on this by the left. There was the pacifist position of people like Corbyn who opposed the war and in doing this they were leading people astray on the danger from Islam. There was a second position, my own, and I opposed the war on the basis that it would “uncork” the bottle, a bottle filled with all kinds of fizzy Islam Nasties.
This is the problem I have with your above paragraph. These dictators were not overthrown by the Islamist Supremacists. They were overthrown in the major part by the intervention of the forces of capitalism, the forces of the US British and French jets against the forces of as a good example those of Gadhafi.
It is a very simple point that I am making here. And simple points need to be answered in a simple and straightforward way.
Bracken said this was a “great point”. Really! The point being that the US was pulling the strings behind the scenes of all of these terrible conflicts! He had not the space for that. (Bracken does not alarm me half as much as the uncritical support he gets in the comments from so many of these that make up the whole anti-Jihadist movement in America and Canada)
QUOTE…That’s a great point. I was already at 9K words, so I needed to keep it succinct anywhere I could, but yes, you are correct.
Just as somebody else pointed out that the Muslims never “found” oil under their feet. The British did. Also true. But to include every last aspect and detail would require a book, not a 9 or 10K essay.
But you are certainly correct. The fanatical Islamists usually have help from outside. Like today. Bastards, all of them, the Islamists and the international socialists.
If the Publicans had the cajones to impeach Obama for all the laws he has violated thus far, there would be rioting in the streets of Amerika, that would make the
Ferguson/Baltimore look like a peaceful afternoon in Central Park.
The Watergate cover-up was not about the hotel burglary, but an attempt to conceal Nixon’s comprehensive sabotage campaign of the 1972 Democrat presidential candidates.
The Benghazi cover-up was not about the terrorist attack, but an attempt to conceal that Obama is subsidizing jihad.
The difference is that the Democrats impeached Nixon, but the Republicans would never impeach Obama because their Chamber of Commerce benefactors demand that they focus exclusively on facilitating corporate welfare.