“possibility those weapons might leave the Libyan conflict and travel to other locations where they would be used against our own soldiers. More and more evidence of this happening was growing.
In 2011 a total of four air assets were destroyed by enemy fire in Afghanistan. Two of those helicopters happened at the same time in August 2011 when we lost the Navy Seal unit that killed Osama Bin Laden. 22 Americans killed.”
The Seal helicopter in Afghanistan was downed with an old-fashioned RPG, of which the Soviets left many behind. The black market of Islam is full of them without Libya.
So, while I’m first in line to want to know why 30 CIA guys were in Benghazi (I believe they were shipping Ghaddafi’s arsenal to Al Qaeda in Syria) this very first factoid does not support the author’s thesis.
Initially the CIA was sent there to arm the Libyan rebels--Operation Zero Footprint. The diversion of some of these weapons elsewhere, e.g., Afghanistan, to AQ and the Taliban set off the plan to get these weapons back and then send some of them to Syria.
We know from a speech delivered by Asst. Secretary of State Shapiro in Feb of 2012 the actual program to recapture the Zero Footprint weapons began in August of 2011 about two months before Gaddaffi was killed:
“Once the stalemate broke and the fighting rapidly shifted in the TNC’s [Libyan Transitional National Council] favor in August, we immediately deployed a State Department expert from the MANPADS Task Force to Benghazi.
Mark Adams, who you will hear from shortly on the panel, is the head of our MANPADS Task Force and spent considerable time on the ground in Libya.
[… ] The initial primary objective was to reach an agreement with the TNC to set up a MANPADS control and destruction program that would enable us to set up what we call our Phase I efforts.
Phase I entailed an effort to rapidly survey, secure, and disable loose MANPADS across the country. To accomplish this, we immediately deployed our Quick Reaction Force, which are teams made up of civilian technical specialists.”
We know those “civilian technical specialists”, being talked about in August 2011, were contractors, CIA contractors, hired by the State Department to recapture the weapons – some of which they provided as a specific consequence of Operation Zero Footprint.
If the story ended there it would be bad enough. A flawed policy, a secret mission arm the Libyan “rebels” without a great deal of thinking through the longer term consequences. A flawed policy with political consequences.
But when you think about the larger picture you understand why the details of the covert weapons operation Zero Footprint were so tightly guarded among select members of Congress (the Gang of Eight), the CIA (Panetta), the State Department (Clinton) and the White House (Donilon).
Each of them was trying to manage a covert operation that would expose a U.S. policy decision to arm al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist militias. But that’s only “IF” the story ended there, in Libya, at the end of 2011 into the beginning of 2012. It didn’t, the decisions got worse – much worse.
The saga then continues with the arming of the Syrian rebels including ISIS. You really need to read the article due to the complex series of actions and reactions.