Cidersomerset
15th September 2013, 11:06
Sunday 15th September 2013 at 09:42 By David Icke
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/sitelogos/logo_mol.gif
Why did the CIA let a crazed al-Qaeda mob kill America's ambassador? Moment by
moment, the atrocity that's sent the U.S. into a frenzy of suspicion and recrimination
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012
A group of armed jihadists attacked the building and set it alight
Four people died in the attack, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens
By Tony Rennell
PUBLISHED: 22:17, 13 September 2013 | UPDATED: 22:39, 13 September 2013
Fumbling in the dark, the American ambassador hurriedly pulled on bullet-proof
body armour over his blue trousers and T-shirt. A shrill warning siren was sounding
and the crash of gunshots could be heard, getting closer by the second.
‘Follow me, sir,’ urged a diplomatic bodyguard, gripping his M4 assault rifle,
shouldering an additional pump-action shotgun and looking anxiously around him
as they set outalong blacked-out corridors. ‘We are under attack.’
It was 9.40pm in the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the second city
of strife-torn Libya, a country trying to re-build itself in the aftermath of civil war
and the ousting and killing of its mad dictator, Colonel Gaddafi.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-01B0B6ED00000514-761_634x457.jpg
Under fire: An armed jihadist waves his rifle as buildings and cars are engulfed in
flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late
on September 11, 2012 Under fire: An armed jihadist waves his rifle as buildings
and cars are engulfed in flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate
compound in Benghazi late on September 11, 2012The year was 2012 and the date
hugely significant for the American and Arab worlds alike — September 11, the
anniversary of the 9/11 attack by Islamic terrorists on the Twin Towers in New
York. To mark it, one of the many rogue militia armies that were now ripping Libya
apart as the so-called Arab Spring turned sour fired up a mob to launch a
murderous assault on this vulnerable U.S. outpost.
It was an attack that would not only cost American lives, but bring embarrassment
and humiliation to the Obama White House that it has not been able to shrug off.
Heavily armed and flying the black flags of Al Qaeda, the terrorists arrived en
masse at the eight-acre Mission Compound, whose outer defences — manned by
local guards of doubtful loyalty — collapsed all too easily in the initial onslaught. A
rocket-propelled grenade took out the front door of the ambassadors’ residence,
and they were in.
As men poured through the opening, the safety of Ambassador Chris Stevens —
who had flown into Benghazi for a week of talks with political leaders, businessmen
and officials in the hope of bringing some peace and order to the troubled and
violent city — was top priority for the handful of special agents of the U.S.
Diplomatic Security Service who were guarding him.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC17328000005DC-517_306x464.jpg
Tragedy: Christopher Stevens and three other embassy staff were killed in Libya on
September 11th last yearStevens, 52, was a highly respected Arabist, a top-notch
diplomat and an acknowledged friend of Libya. He believed fervently that with U.S.
help the country would flourish. But in Libya’s political and religious ferment, that
made him a target. The Benghazi mission was a nervy place to be.It had been set
up in a hurry in response to the fast-moving political situation, with the result that
basic security measures were far short of the norm in U.S. establishments in the
Middle East.
Shockingly, Washington knew this. Just weeks earlier, agents on the ground in
Libya had sent an emergency message detailing their fears that the post was under-
manned, under-gunned and under-resourced, and was not capable of withstanding
a major terrorist attack.
There were, for example, no sprinklers, smoke hoods and anti-fire foam. But
nothing had been done, and it was now too late.At least, though, there was a
specially built safe haven at the heart of the main residence building, and it was
into this room that the bodyguard bundled Stevens and an aide, 34-year-old Sean
Smith, a communications wizard, and locked all three of them in behind its steel
mesh gate, with a sense of relief.
‘Package and one guest secure, hunkered down,’ he reported on his hand-held
radio to colleagues manning a command centre in a neighbouring barracks
building.All the three could do was wait until rescue arrived. They could only hope
that help would reach them before the murderous bunch now ransacking the
residence did.
What happened next was, for all the courage of the men involved, a catalogue of
disaster and death. The events of that night have now been told for the first time in
a new gung-ho, all-guns-blazing account.
As foreign governments debate the merits of strikes on the Assad regime in Syria,
the book is a timely reminder of how American intervention in Middle Eastern
trouble spots seems doomed to backfire, however well intentioned. In the eyes of
fundamentalists in those regions, the U.S. is Satan — an enemy to be attacked and
humiliated at any cost.
As Ambassador Stevens sat on the floor in the safe room making calls on his
BlackBerry to local leaders pleading in vain for their help, he must have felt his
dream of a free, regenerated and peaceful Libya going up in smoke.Literally smoke,
because by now the building was on fire, deliberately set alight by the dozens of
armed intruders, some of whom had now reached the safe room and were peering
menacingly through the grille.
Inside, the three Americans lay low, quiet and out of sight. The bodyguard —
unnamed in the book for security reasons and identified only as Agent A — panned
his gun sight at one screaming balaclavaed head after another as they appeared at
the grille but held his fire rather than reveal their presence in what was now
becoming a rapidly heating oven rather than a haven.
A stifling heat built up within the safe room, as clouds of black, acrid smoke crept
in. On his knees, the bodyguard crawled through the choking darkness to what was
now the only possible exit — a small iron-grilled window in the adjoining bathroom.
With great difficulty, he heaved it open and pulled himself out onto the roof of the
building, signalling to Stevens and Smith to follow, believing they were right behind
him. He coughed repeatedly to clear his soot-caked lungs and then stretched his
arm back through the window to haul the other two out.
No hand came to meet his. There was no sign of either of them. They were lost in
the choking smoke.
Bravely Agent A — his hands already scorched, his lungs hardly able to draw
breath — plunged back into the smoke and flames to find them, not just once but
five, six times. Each time he re-emerged to gasp a few lungfuls of air, bullets
cracked around him from gunmen on the ground.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC8EAB3000005DC-517_634x475.jpg
Good work: Christopher Stevens was a pro-Libya ambassador who believed the
country could stabilise and develop with the help from the U.S.
Frantic at having failed in a diplomatic guard’s number one priority, he yelled into
his radio. ‘I don’t have the ambassador,’ he shouted at the embassy compound’s
control centre.The agents there were under siege too, barricaded in and surrounded
by hostile fire. Now they gathered their strength, cleared the area outside the
control centre with a grenade and then charged out, shooting at anyone who
lingered.Three of them made it across open ground to the residence and onto the
roof where a distressed Agent A was still trying to rescue the Ambassador and his
aide.
Soaking their shirts in water and wrapping them round their faces, they took over
the search for the missing men, both by now certainly unconscious inside the
smoke-filled safe room, their lives hanging in the balance.
Mercifully, help was at last coming.
A mile away was a heavily-fortified building used by the CIA for covert intelligence-
gathering in Benghazi. Half the staff there were Special Forces veterans — now
racing to the embassy, battering their way through road blocks and hails of hostile
gunfire in armoured Mercedes 4x4s.
Equipped with full battle kit, they took back control of the Mission Compound,
forcing the marauders out. But for how long?
In the streets outside, more gunmen, dissidents and demonstrators were massing,
chanting their bloodlust like hyped-up fans at a football match.
‘Today we have attacked the infidels and avenged the honour of Islam,’ a voice
screamed through a microphone. ‘Let’s go and finish the job!’
Meanwhile, back inside the safe room, the lifeless body of Sean Smith had at last
been found and was carried out. But there was still no sign of Ambassador Stevens.
What if he had been captured? Visions of America’s diplomatic envoy being held for
ransom, tortured, beheaded on film even — all recent fates of U.S. citizens who had
fallen into jihadist hands — flashed through anxious minds. The search went on.
The mob, though, was pushing at the gates again, firing bullets into the compound,
eager for a battle, hundreds of them against a dozen Americans. They swarmed
into the grounds in the darkness. U.S. snipers fired, leaving casualties strewn on
the manicured lawns, but still the mob came on, an unstoppable tide of hate.
There was no choice left for the Americans. They had to retreat or die.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-14F88A99000005DC-921_634x417.jpg
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was set alight on the evening of September 11, and
the armed group returned the following day, with deadly results Leaving without
having found Ambassador Stevens was a terrible decision for the diplomatic service
agents. Even supposing the man it was their job to protect was dead, there was the
gut-wrenching prospect of his body falling into terrorist hands and being dragged
through the streets, U.S. pride trampled in the dust.
But that thought had to be put aside. Escape was the only option. Cramming into
armoured Land Cruisers, they pushed their way out of the compound and down
roads filled with heavily armed men.They exchanged machine gun fire with the mob
and swerved to avoid volleys of grenades. The tyres were torn to shreds as they
screamed round corners flat out until they screeched into the safety of the CIA base.
It was over, a chance now to tend their wounds . . . or was it?
The insurgents had not given up. If anything, they were more enraged and more
determined than ever at having let their quarry get away.They surrounded the CIA
outpost in alarming numbers wielding machine guns and grenade launchers. As
explosions rocked its walls, it was in real danger of being overrun.
The defence line was paper thin — just a handful of American snipers in vantage
points on the roof as overhead, a U.S. Predator drone cruising backwards and
forwards sent back to the defenders vivid images of the sheer scale of the attack
being mounted against them.
Not even the seven-man hit squad of trained commandoes that had finally made it
by air from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, the capital city, to back up the Americans in
Benghazi could swing the situation in their favour.Short of all 34 of them dying
where they stood in a last-ditch Alamo defence, they would have to get out.
Frantically, nervous CIA agents shredded classified files and took sledgehammers to
computers and hard drives brimming with secrets, anxious that nothing should fall
into enemy hands.As preparations were made to break out of the compound,
another furious attack began, this time with an even deadlier weapon — mortars.
Perched up on a roof, two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods,
were picking off the attackers with their Mk 46 automatics when a mortar shell hit
their position. Woods died instantly, his friend Doherty seconds later, killed by
another mortar round. Shrapnel cut down other defenders.
Dawn was breaking, and in the early morning light the next onslaught could well be
final.
The battle was about to be lost, Americans slaughtered, their nation humbled. But
the Libyan army saved the day. As the sun rose, Special Forces soldiers from its
Military Intelligence section came barrelling in with orders to get the Americans out
of the country as quickly as possible. The terrorist mob was driven back.
As the Muslim morning call to prayer echoed around Benghazi, 32 weary survivors
packed themselves and crate-loads of CIA equipment into a convoy of vehicles and
drove under escort to the airport for a rapid exit from this place of destruction and
death. They carried with them the bodies of Smith, Doherty and Woods.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC8EABF000005DC-628_634x424.jpg
Destruction: The consulate was completely destroyed in the attack - a raid which
Washington had been warned could come, and that the resources were not there to
protects it should it happen
But what of Ambassador Stevens? He had choked to death in the flames of his
residence, his body unrecovered by his team.
At the now deserted Mission Complex, looters wandered into the still burning
remains of the ambassador’s home. Abandoned weapons, furniture, iPods, mobile
phones, the ambassador’s clothes, his luggage, cigars, bottles of water —
everything was carried off in triumph.
Eventually they forced their way into the safe room — and there was Stevens’s
blackened body. It was carried out, laid on the ground, propped up to be
photographed and the pictures flashed around the world to be gawped at.
Much worse indignities could well have been heaped on it. Twenty years earlier, the
corpse of an American soldier had been dragged through Mogadishu in Somalia.
The photograph was seen all over the world.
Instead, local Libyan men — dressed in jeans and football shirts rather than the
jihadists’ uniform of dark shirts and combat trousers — lifted the ambassador’s
body into a car to rush it to Benghazi’s main hospital. There doctors worked for 90
minutes in a desperate attempt to resuscitate him.It was a futile task, but the fact
that it was attempted at all in the circumstances is a surprise.
Even now there were Libyans who wanted to distance themselves from the
terrorists and send a message to Washington that not everyone in that benighted
country was its enemy.
Stevens’s remains were taken to the airport, loaded on a plane and, along with the
other three bodies and the survivors, flown out. The Benghazi raid was over — but
its aftermath haunts U.S. foreign policy.
In a speech paying tribute to those who died, President Barack Obama was
emphatic that the U.S. would not be deterred from its global mission. But his John
Wayne confidence in America as the world’s policeman has now backfired.
His allies edge away from intervention in Syria, and U.S. voters show an
understandable reluctance for their country’s soldiers and diplomats to put their
lives at risk in far off desert nations.
A year on, the Benghazi raid is the focus of bitter contention in the U.S., where
accusations are made by senators and conspiracy theorists alike that the Obama
administration covered up — and continues to obscure — failings that led to an
ambassador and three other Americans dying in such horrendous circumstances.
Why was the attack not anticipated by intelligence sources? Why were warnings
ignored that the mission building was inadequate for its job?
Was the response from Washington on the night in question bungled? What
precisely did the President know and when? Or did he sleep though the whole thing?
The questions seem even more pointed in the light of allegations that the survivors
have allegedly been silenced.
Under this continuing cloud of suspicion, the damage caused by the insurgents in
Benghazi that fearful night may sadly end up running far deeper than even the
most hardened jihadist fanatic could have imagined.
UNDER FIRE by Fred Burton and Samuel Katz is published by St Martin’s Press. ©
2013 Fred Burton and Samuel Katz. Order a copy via amazon.co.uk
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420334/Why-did-CIA-let-crazed-al-Qaeda-mob-kill-Americas-ambassador-Moment-moment-atrocity-thats-sent-U-S-frenzy-suspicion-recrimination.html#ixzz2exQm7TpB
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Why did the CIA let a crazed al-Qaeda mob kill America's ambassador? Moment by
moment, the atrocity that's sent the U.S. into a frenzy of suspicion and recrimination
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012
A group of armed jihadists attacked the building and set it alight
Four people died in the attack, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens
By Tony Rennell
PUBLISHED: 22:17, 13 September 2013 | UPDATED: 22:39, 13 September 2013
Fumbling in the dark, the American ambassador hurriedly pulled on bullet-proof
body armour over his blue trousers and T-shirt. A shrill warning siren was sounding
and the crash of gunshots could be heard, getting closer by the second.
‘Follow me, sir,’ urged a diplomatic bodyguard, gripping his M4 assault rifle,
shouldering an additional pump-action shotgun and looking anxiously around him
as they set outalong blacked-out corridors. ‘We are under attack.’
It was 9.40pm in the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the second city
of strife-torn Libya, a country trying to re-build itself in the aftermath of civil war
and the ousting and killing of its mad dictator, Colonel Gaddafi.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-01B0B6ED00000514-761_634x457.jpg
Under fire: An armed jihadist waves his rifle as buildings and cars are engulfed in
flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late
on September 11, 2012 Under fire: An armed jihadist waves his rifle as buildings
and cars are engulfed in flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate
compound in Benghazi late on September 11, 2012The year was 2012 and the date
hugely significant for the American and Arab worlds alike — September 11, the
anniversary of the 9/11 attack by Islamic terrorists on the Twin Towers in New
York. To mark it, one of the many rogue militia armies that were now ripping Libya
apart as the so-called Arab Spring turned sour fired up a mob to launch a
murderous assault on this vulnerable U.S. outpost.
It was an attack that would not only cost American lives, but bring embarrassment
and humiliation to the Obama White House that it has not been able to shrug off.
Heavily armed and flying the black flags of Al Qaeda, the terrorists arrived en
masse at the eight-acre Mission Compound, whose outer defences — manned by
local guards of doubtful loyalty — collapsed all too easily in the initial onslaught. A
rocket-propelled grenade took out the front door of the ambassadors’ residence,
and they were in.
As men poured through the opening, the safety of Ambassador Chris Stevens —
who had flown into Benghazi for a week of talks with political leaders, businessmen
and officials in the hope of bringing some peace and order to the troubled and
violent city — was top priority for the handful of special agents of the U.S.
Diplomatic Security Service who were guarding him.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC17328000005DC-517_306x464.jpg
Tragedy: Christopher Stevens and three other embassy staff were killed in Libya on
September 11th last yearStevens, 52, was a highly respected Arabist, a top-notch
diplomat and an acknowledged friend of Libya. He believed fervently that with U.S.
help the country would flourish. But in Libya’s political and religious ferment, that
made him a target. The Benghazi mission was a nervy place to be.It had been set
up in a hurry in response to the fast-moving political situation, with the result that
basic security measures were far short of the norm in U.S. establishments in the
Middle East.
Shockingly, Washington knew this. Just weeks earlier, agents on the ground in
Libya had sent an emergency message detailing their fears that the post was under-
manned, under-gunned and under-resourced, and was not capable of withstanding
a major terrorist attack.
There were, for example, no sprinklers, smoke hoods and anti-fire foam. But
nothing had been done, and it was now too late.At least, though, there was a
specially built safe haven at the heart of the main residence building, and it was
into this room that the bodyguard bundled Stevens and an aide, 34-year-old Sean
Smith, a communications wizard, and locked all three of them in behind its steel
mesh gate, with a sense of relief.
‘Package and one guest secure, hunkered down,’ he reported on his hand-held
radio to colleagues manning a command centre in a neighbouring barracks
building.All the three could do was wait until rescue arrived. They could only hope
that help would reach them before the murderous bunch now ransacking the
residence did.
What happened next was, for all the courage of the men involved, a catalogue of
disaster and death. The events of that night have now been told for the first time in
a new gung-ho, all-guns-blazing account.
As foreign governments debate the merits of strikes on the Assad regime in Syria,
the book is a timely reminder of how American intervention in Middle Eastern
trouble spots seems doomed to backfire, however well intentioned. In the eyes of
fundamentalists in those regions, the U.S. is Satan — an enemy to be attacked and
humiliated at any cost.
As Ambassador Stevens sat on the floor in the safe room making calls on his
BlackBerry to local leaders pleading in vain for their help, he must have felt his
dream of a free, regenerated and peaceful Libya going up in smoke.Literally smoke,
because by now the building was on fire, deliberately set alight by the dozens of
armed intruders, some of whom had now reached the safe room and were peering
menacingly through the grille.
Inside, the three Americans lay low, quiet and out of sight. The bodyguard —
unnamed in the book for security reasons and identified only as Agent A — panned
his gun sight at one screaming balaclavaed head after another as they appeared at
the grille but held his fire rather than reveal their presence in what was now
becoming a rapidly heating oven rather than a haven.
A stifling heat built up within the safe room, as clouds of black, acrid smoke crept
in. On his knees, the bodyguard crawled through the choking darkness to what was
now the only possible exit — a small iron-grilled window in the adjoining bathroom.
With great difficulty, he heaved it open and pulled himself out onto the roof of the
building, signalling to Stevens and Smith to follow, believing they were right behind
him. He coughed repeatedly to clear his soot-caked lungs and then stretched his
arm back through the window to haul the other two out.
No hand came to meet his. There was no sign of either of them. They were lost in
the choking smoke.
Bravely Agent A — his hands already scorched, his lungs hardly able to draw
breath — plunged back into the smoke and flames to find them, not just once but
five, six times. Each time he re-emerged to gasp a few lungfuls of air, bullets
cracked around him from gunmen on the ground.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC8EAB3000005DC-517_634x475.jpg
Good work: Christopher Stevens was a pro-Libya ambassador who believed the
country could stabilise and develop with the help from the U.S.
Frantic at having failed in a diplomatic guard’s number one priority, he yelled into
his radio. ‘I don’t have the ambassador,’ he shouted at the embassy compound’s
control centre.The agents there were under siege too, barricaded in and surrounded
by hostile fire. Now they gathered their strength, cleared the area outside the
control centre with a grenade and then charged out, shooting at anyone who
lingered.Three of them made it across open ground to the residence and onto the
roof where a distressed Agent A was still trying to rescue the Ambassador and his
aide.
Soaking their shirts in water and wrapping them round their faces, they took over
the search for the missing men, both by now certainly unconscious inside the
smoke-filled safe room, their lives hanging in the balance.
Mercifully, help was at last coming.
A mile away was a heavily-fortified building used by the CIA for covert intelligence-
gathering in Benghazi. Half the staff there were Special Forces veterans — now
racing to the embassy, battering their way through road blocks and hails of hostile
gunfire in armoured Mercedes 4x4s.
Equipped with full battle kit, they took back control of the Mission Compound,
forcing the marauders out. But for how long?
In the streets outside, more gunmen, dissidents and demonstrators were massing,
chanting their bloodlust like hyped-up fans at a football match.
‘Today we have attacked the infidels and avenged the honour of Islam,’ a voice
screamed through a microphone. ‘Let’s go and finish the job!’
Meanwhile, back inside the safe room, the lifeless body of Sean Smith had at last
been found and was carried out. But there was still no sign of Ambassador Stevens.
What if he had been captured? Visions of America’s diplomatic envoy being held for
ransom, tortured, beheaded on film even — all recent fates of U.S. citizens who had
fallen into jihadist hands — flashed through anxious minds. The search went on.
The mob, though, was pushing at the gates again, firing bullets into the compound,
eager for a battle, hundreds of them against a dozen Americans. They swarmed
into the grounds in the darkness. U.S. snipers fired, leaving casualties strewn on
the manicured lawns, but still the mob came on, an unstoppable tide of hate.
There was no choice left for the Americans. They had to retreat or die.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-14F88A99000005DC-921_634x417.jpg
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was set alight on the evening of September 11, and
the armed group returned the following day, with deadly results Leaving without
having found Ambassador Stevens was a terrible decision for the diplomatic service
agents. Even supposing the man it was their job to protect was dead, there was the
gut-wrenching prospect of his body falling into terrorist hands and being dragged
through the streets, U.S. pride trampled in the dust.
But that thought had to be put aside. Escape was the only option. Cramming into
armoured Land Cruisers, they pushed their way out of the compound and down
roads filled with heavily armed men.They exchanged machine gun fire with the mob
and swerved to avoid volleys of grenades. The tyres were torn to shreds as they
screamed round corners flat out until they screeched into the safety of the CIA base.
It was over, a chance now to tend their wounds . . . or was it?
The insurgents had not given up. If anything, they were more enraged and more
determined than ever at having let their quarry get away.They surrounded the CIA
outpost in alarming numbers wielding machine guns and grenade launchers. As
explosions rocked its walls, it was in real danger of being overrun.
The defence line was paper thin — just a handful of American snipers in vantage
points on the roof as overhead, a U.S. Predator drone cruising backwards and
forwards sent back to the defenders vivid images of the sheer scale of the attack
being mounted against them.
Not even the seven-man hit squad of trained commandoes that had finally made it
by air from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, the capital city, to back up the Americans in
Benghazi could swing the situation in their favour.Short of all 34 of them dying
where they stood in a last-ditch Alamo defence, they would have to get out.
Frantically, nervous CIA agents shredded classified files and took sledgehammers to
computers and hard drives brimming with secrets, anxious that nothing should fall
into enemy hands.As preparations were made to break out of the compound,
another furious attack began, this time with an even deadlier weapon — mortars.
Perched up on a roof, two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods,
were picking off the attackers with their Mk 46 automatics when a mortar shell hit
their position. Woods died instantly, his friend Doherty seconds later, killed by
another mortar round. Shrapnel cut down other defenders.
Dawn was breaking, and in the early morning light the next onslaught could well be
final.
The battle was about to be lost, Americans slaughtered, their nation humbled. But
the Libyan army saved the day. As the sun rose, Special Forces soldiers from its
Military Intelligence section came barrelling in with orders to get the Americans out
of the country as quickly as possible. The terrorist mob was driven back.
As the Muslim morning call to prayer echoed around Benghazi, 32 weary survivors
packed themselves and crate-loads of CIA equipment into a convoy of vehicles and
drove under escort to the airport for a rapid exit from this place of destruction and
death. They carried with them the bodies of Smith, Doherty and Woods.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/13/article-2420334-1BC8EABF000005DC-628_634x424.jpg
Destruction: The consulate was completely destroyed in the attack - a raid which
Washington had been warned could come, and that the resources were not there to
protects it should it happen
But what of Ambassador Stevens? He had choked to death in the flames of his
residence, his body unrecovered by his team.
At the now deserted Mission Complex, looters wandered into the still burning
remains of the ambassador’s home. Abandoned weapons, furniture, iPods, mobile
phones, the ambassador’s clothes, his luggage, cigars, bottles of water —
everything was carried off in triumph.
Eventually they forced their way into the safe room — and there was Stevens’s
blackened body. It was carried out, laid on the ground, propped up to be
photographed and the pictures flashed around the world to be gawped at.
Much worse indignities could well have been heaped on it. Twenty years earlier, the
corpse of an American soldier had been dragged through Mogadishu in Somalia.
The photograph was seen all over the world.
Instead, local Libyan men — dressed in jeans and football shirts rather than the
jihadists’ uniform of dark shirts and combat trousers — lifted the ambassador’s
body into a car to rush it to Benghazi’s main hospital. There doctors worked for 90
minutes in a desperate attempt to resuscitate him.It was a futile task, but the fact
that it was attempted at all in the circumstances is a surprise.
Even now there were Libyans who wanted to distance themselves from the
terrorists and send a message to Washington that not everyone in that benighted
country was its enemy.
Stevens’s remains were taken to the airport, loaded on a plane and, along with the
other three bodies and the survivors, flown out. The Benghazi raid was over — but
its aftermath haunts U.S. foreign policy.
In a speech paying tribute to those who died, President Barack Obama was
emphatic that the U.S. would not be deterred from its global mission. But his John
Wayne confidence in America as the world’s policeman has now backfired.
His allies edge away from intervention in Syria, and U.S. voters show an
understandable reluctance for their country’s soldiers and diplomats to put their
lives at risk in far off desert nations.
A year on, the Benghazi raid is the focus of bitter contention in the U.S., where
accusations are made by senators and conspiracy theorists alike that the Obama
administration covered up — and continues to obscure — failings that led to an
ambassador and three other Americans dying in such horrendous circumstances.
Why was the attack not anticipated by intelligence sources? Why were warnings
ignored that the mission building was inadequate for its job?
Was the response from Washington on the night in question bungled? What
precisely did the President know and when? Or did he sleep though the whole thing?
The questions seem even more pointed in the light of allegations that the survivors
have allegedly been silenced.
Under this continuing cloud of suspicion, the damage caused by the insurgents in
Benghazi that fearful night may sadly end up running far deeper than even the
most hardened jihadist fanatic could have imagined.
UNDER FIRE by Fred Burton and Samuel Katz is published by St Martin’s Press. ©
2013 Fred Burton and Samuel Katz. Order a copy via amazon.co.uk
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420334/Why-did-CIA-let-crazed-al-Qaeda-mob-kill-Americas-ambassador-Moment-moment-atrocity-thats-sent-U-S-frenzy-suspicion-recrimination.html#ixzz2exQm7TpB
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