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Rep. Jason Chaffetz speaks with Rep. Trey Gowdy during "The Security Failures of Benghazi" hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington D.C. Oct. 10, 2012. (REUTERS/Jose Luis Magana) Rep. Jason Chaffetz speaks with Rep. Trey Gowdy during "The Security Failures of Benghazi" hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington D.C. Oct. 10, 2012. (REUTERS/Jose Luis Magana)  

House Intelligence Committee Report Obfuscates Benghazi Arms Smuggling

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Kenneth Timmerman
President, Foundation for Democracy in Iran
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      Kenneth Timmerman

      Kenneth R. Timmerman is an investigative reporter, author, and President/CEO of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. His books and an illustrated bio are available at KenTimmerman.com.

Buried in the House intelligence committee report on Benghazi released on Friday afternoon – the horse’s rear end of the weekly news cycle – was some astonishing information on who knew what about the CIA’s involvement in arms smuggling from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels.

As with so many whitewash reports from Congress and the executive branch, you have to read between the lines to get the facts. After all, these reports are written to obscure the facts, not illuminate them, as Jonathan Gruber has reminded us.

From page 3 of the main report: “The Committee also found no evidence that the CIA conducted unauthorized activities in Benghazi and no evidence that the IC [intelligence community] shipped arms to Syria.”

What exactly does that mean?

For the CIA to have conducted “unauthorized activities” in Benghazi would have been the height of insanity, as many former CIA executives explained to me when I was researching my book on the September 11, 2012 attacks.

Ever since Iran-Contra, when Democrats in Congress teamed up with federal prosecutors to go after CIA officers and White House officials for operating beyond official guidelines, no sane CIA officer will engage in a covert operation – such as helping to arm the Syrian rebels – without explicit legal authority.

It’s called “lawyering up.” Everyone does it. And nothing happens without it these days.

The CIA was operating in Benghazi to train and equip the Libya rebels under the authority of a presidential finding. Therefore, anything they did in Benghazi, including liaising with militias now recognized as terrorist groups who were involved in the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Ty Woods, was authorized.

Is that a scandal? Absolutely. But it gets passed over in the HPSCI report because it was “authorized.” Don’t look here, is the message.

Again, on pages 12 and 16 of the main report, HPSCI maintains that “the CIA was not collecting and shipping arms from Libya to Syria,” contrary to media allegations.

The report attempts to provide some context to this obfuscation of the facts:

Committee Members and staff asked all witnesses what they observed at the Benghazi Annex and whether they had any information to support allegations about weapons being collected and transported to Syria. Each witness reported seeing only standard CIA security weapons at the base. No witness testified that non-CIA weapons were brought to the Annex. Security personnel and officers testified that they had complete access to the Annex and would have observed any weapons, such as MANPADS [shoulder-fired surface to air missiles], stored at the facility.

But no serious source ever alleged the CIA was stockpiling weapons at the annex. It would have been the height of folly to do so, since the annex was an operational base for CIA case officers and their NSA colleagues, who were manning sophisticated signals intelligence equipment aimed at the jihadis and against Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force, which had a sizeable (and visible) presence in Benghazi.

Instead, as former CIA officer Larry Johnson points out, the CIA Annex was conducting liaison operations with British, Qatari, Saudi, and Turkish intelligence operatives in Benghazi, who were involved in collecting MANPADS and other weapons and shipping them to the Syrian rebels.

“Yes, the CIA was neither ‘collecting nor shipping the arms,’” Johnson wrote in response to the HPSCI whitewash report. “That was being done by Brits, Turks and Arabs from the Gulf. I also know personally of one American who was hired by a British firm who convinced the man that he was a non-official cover officer of the CIA. This man was in Benghazi, did collect MANPADS and turned them over to a British citizen who was part of the company he worked for.”

Left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee in a highly classified appendix to its January 2014 report on the Benghazi attacks, “described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan [Turkish] administrations” to funnel weapons to the Syria rebels through front companies in Libya.

The actual weapons smuggling was done by Australian front companies in Benghazi, who hired “retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them,” Hersh wrote.