The assault left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. But intelligence officials say U.S. investigators are making very little headway in finding justice.
Ever since an armed mob torched a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President Obama has vowed to bring the killers of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans to justice. Yet four months after the assault, U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that the hunt for those responsible remains stymied by poor cooperation by North African governments.
A Libyan man walks through the debris of the damaged U.S. ambassador’s residence in the U.S. Consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 13, 2012. Inset: Ambassador Christopher Stevens. (Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty; AP)
On Tuesday the Tunisian government released Ali Ani al-Harzi, a leading suspect in the attack, who was taken into custody after fleeing Libya for Turkey and then sent to Tunisia. Officials say Harzi was released over Washington’s objections, as Tunis cited a “lack of evidence.” While the FBI eventually got access to Harzi, efforts to press him on what he knew were often blocked by bureaucratic objections by the Tunisian government and its court system. In December the Tunisian branch of the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia posted photos of people they claimed to be FBI agents who interviewed Harzi, according to the counterterrorism website Long War Journal. The U.S. intelligence community believes members of Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi participated in the attack four months ago.
While some U.S. officials feared that Harzi’s release was coming, Tunisian officials did not inform the U.S. government ahead of time.
Meanwhile, in Libya, the landscape isbecoming increasingly lawless. In Benghazi this week, Ahmed Abu Khattala, a militia leader who claimed in an interview with Reuters that he was at the U.S. mission the night of the consulate attack, survived an assassination attempt after a bomb was placed under his car. The device exploded prematurely and instead killed one of Khattala’s assailants. Additionally, the Benghazi police officer investigating the murder of the chief of Benghazi police in November went missing last week.
One source of frustration for U.S. intelligence community: the president’s decision to make the Benghazi probe a criminal investigation. While the CIA has an ever-changing list of suspects it dubs the “Benghazi attack network,” the drones and Special Operations teams that are used to hunt al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Yemen are not being used to track down Stevens’s killers. Instead the investigation is being led by the FBI, which relies on cooperation from local and national police in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.
Some U.S. intelligence officials stress that counterterrorism investigations take time. In this case, the Benghazi attack is not like other al Qaeda terrorist operations that are planned for months and involve the movement of people, money, and the metadata found on emails or social media. While there was some planning of the Benghazi attack (the State Department’s Accountability Review Board confirmed that someone dressed as a police officer was casing the U.S. mission the morning of the assault), there is little evidence there was a plot similar to the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
One source of frustration for U.S. intelligence community: the president’s decision to make the Benghazi probe a criminal investigation.
Harzi is not considered to be a ringleader of the Benghazi-attack network, according to three U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity. He is, however, considered a suspect, because he used social media to tip off friends about the attack and was later arrested at Istanbul’s airport trying to get to Syria.
According to these officials, Harzi’s brother is believed to be Tariq Abu Ammar, a midlevel planner for al Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq. Today Ammar’s main job is arranging the travel of fighters from North Africa to Syria’s al Qaeda–linked opposition, known as the al-Nusra Front.
The slow pace of the hunt has caught the attention of some lawmakers. Last month Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN he was “getting reports of people who are in that business that tell us it is going far too slow, and they can’t tell us why it’s so slow.”
De Sanctis attack condemned
Italy’s Benghazi consul, Guido de Sanctis
Tripoli, 14 January
Italy’s foreign minister, Giulio Terzi has strongly condemned the failed attack on his country’s Benghazi consul, as has the city’s local council.
The attack by gunmen on the vehicle carrying Guido de Sanctis was “an attempt to destabilise the institutions of the new Libya”, Terzi told Reuters, “Italy expresses its strongest condemnation and reaffirms its total support of the democratic path and the reforms that the Tripoli authorities have started”.
On Saturday evening, de Sanctis was being driving away from the Tibesti hotel, where he had been attending a conference on Benghazi as Libya’s “Cultural Capital”, when the gunmen opened fire on his armoured minibus. The diplomat was uninjured.
For their part, Benghazi council demanded that the Ministry of the Interior act over poor security in the city, while also moving swiftly to identify and arrest the attackers.
The council called on local civil society institutions and leading figures and scholars to support the Ministry in its efforts to combat violence.
Government sources have indicated that, because of this latest attack on envoys – US ambassador Christ Stevens and three colleagues were murdered in September , a few weeks after a failed attack on the British ambassador – there are plans to create a special diplomatic protection force.
There may however be ministers who doubt the wisdom of such separate body. It would have, in any event, to work in close cooperation with local police, as diplomats moved around the country. Moreover its creation and maintenance might take funding and focus away from the police, whose lack of training and resources has meant the force has struggled to cope with violence in the east of the country.
Police car bombed in Benghazi; one officer reported killed
By Maha Ellawati.
The remains of the bombed police vehicle
Benghazi, 14 January 2013:
A bomb was thrown at a police vehicle in Benghazi this evening. One officer, believed to be the driver was reported killed. He has been named as Jamal Khalil.
The incident occurred in the Kish area near Fuwaihat. According to eyewitnesses, the bomb was thrown at the police vehicle by youths in another car driving past. The incident occurred around 9 pm. The explosion was heard some distance away.
There have been a spate of assassinations and attempted assassinations of security officials in the city over the past year, as well as attacks on courts and buildings belonging to the security forces. Ten days ago, the body of Benghazi CID officer Nasser Al-Moghrabi was discovered with a single bullet wound to his head, three days after he had been kidnapped. Another officer was kidnapped the previous week.
A secret State Department cable has concluded that the Syrian military likely used chemical weapons against its own people in a deadly attack last month, The Cable has learned.
United States diplomats in Turkey conducted a previously undisclosed, intensive investigation into claims that Syrian PresidentBashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, and made what an Obama administration official who reviewed the cable called a "compelling case" that Assad's military forces had used a deadly form of poison gas.
The cable, signed by the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, Scott Frederic Kilner, and sent to State Department headquarters in Washington last week, outlined the results of the consulate's investigation into reports from inside Syria that chemical weapons had been used in the city of Homs on Dec. 23.
The consul general's report followed a series of interviews with activists, doctors, and defectors, in what the administration official said was one of the most comprehensive efforts the U.S. government has made to investigate claims by internal Syrian sources. The investigation included a meeting between the consulate staff and Mustafa al-Sheikh, a high-level defector who once was a major general in Assad's army and key official in the Syrian military's WMD program.
An Obama administration official who reviewed the document, which was classified at the "secret" level, detailed its contents to The Cable. "We can't definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23," the official said.
The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would cross the "red line" President Barack Obama first established in an Aug. 20 statement. "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation," Obama said.
To date, the administration has not initiated any major policy changes in response to the classified cable, but a Deputies Committee meeting of top administration officials is scheduled for this week.
The report confirms the worst fears of officials who are frustrated by the current policy, which is to avoid any direct military assistance to the Syrian rebels and limit U.S. aid to sporadic deliveries of humanitarian and communications equipment.
Many believe that Assad is testing U.S. red lines.
"This reflects the concerns of many in the U.S. government that the regime is pursuing a policy of escalation to see what they can get away with as the regime is getting more desperate," the administration official said.
The consulate's investigation was facilitated by BASMA, an NGO the State Department has hired as one of its implementing partners inside Syria. BASMA connected consular officials with witnesses to the incident and other first-hand information.
The official warned that if the U.S. government does not react strongly to the use of chemical weapons in Homs, Assad may be emboldened to escalate his use of such weapons of mass destruction.
"It's incidents like this that lead to a mass-casualty event," the official said.
Activist and doctors on the ground in Homs have been circulating evidence of the Dec. 23 incident over the past three weeks in an attempt to convince the international community of its veracity. An Arabic-language report circulated by the rebels' Homs medical committee detailed the symptoms of several of the victims who were brought to a makeshift field hospital inside the city and claims that the victims suffered severe effects of inhaling poisonous gas.
Activists have also been circulating videos of the victims on YouTube and Facebook. In one of the videos, victims can be seen struggling for breath and choking on their own vomit. (More videos, which are graphic, can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Experts say the symptoms match the effects of Agent 15, known also by its NATO code BZ, which is a CX-level incapacitating agent that is controlled under schedule 2 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Syria is not a party.
"The symptoms of an incapacitating agent are temporary. If someone is exposed to BZ, they are likely to be confused, perhaps to hallucinate," said Amy Smithson, a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "While it is not good news that a chemical agent of any kind may have been used in the Syrian conflict, this Agent 15 is certainly on the less harmful end of the spectrum of chemical warfare agents believed to be in the Syrian arsenal."
The Cable spoke with two doctors who were on the scene in Homs on Dec. 23 and treated the victims. Both doctors said that the chemical weapon used in the attack may not have been Agent 15, but they are sure it was a chemical weapon, not a form of tear gas. The doctors attributed five deaths and approximately 100 instances of severe respiratory, nervous system, and gastrointestinal ailments to the poison gas.
"It was a chemical weapon, we are sure of that, because tear gas can't cause the death of five people," said Dr. Nashwan Abu Abdo,a neurologist who spoke with The Cable from an undisclosed location inside of Homs.
Abdo said the chemical agent was delivered by a tank shell and that the range of symptoms varied based on the victim's proximity to the poison. The lightly affected people exhibited gastrointestinal symptoms, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, he said. Victims who received a higher concentration of the poison, in addition to the gastrointestinal symptoms, showed respiratory symptoms as well.
"The main symptom of the respiratory ailments was bronchial secretions. This particular symptom was the cause of the death of all of the people," he said. "All of them died choking on their own secretions."
The doctors said their conclusion that the poison was a chemical agent and not tear gas was based on three factors: the suddenness of the deaths of those who were directly exposed, the large number of people affected, and the fact that many victims returned with recurring symptoms more than 12 hours after they had been treated, meaning that the poison had settled either in their nervous systems or fat tissue.
"They all had miosis -- pinpoint pupils. They also had generalized muscle pain. There were also bad symptoms as far as their central nervous system. There were generalized seizures and some patients had partial seizures. This actually is proof that the poison was able to pass the blood-brain barrier," Abdo said. "In addition, there was acute mental confusion presented by hallucinations, delusions, personality changes, and behavioral changes."
The doctors on the scene said they were not able to pinpoint the poison because they lacked the advanced laboratory equipment needed. They took blood, hair, saliva, and urine samples, but those samples are no longer viable for testing because too much time has passed, they said.
"We took many samples, we kept them, but we cannot get them anywhere because we are in the besieged Homs area," he said. "We are not 100 percent sure what poison was used, but we can say with firm statement that it was not tear gas, that's for sure."
The State Department, in response to inquiries from The Cable, declined to comment on the secret cable from Istanbul or say whether or not chemical weapons were used in the Homs attack, but said that the administration believes Assad's chemical weapons are secure.
"I'm not going to comment on the alleged content of a classified cable," State Department Spokesman Patrick Ventrell told The Cable. "As you know, the United States closely monitors Syria's proliferation-sensitive materials and facilities, and we believe Syria's chemical weapons stockpile remains secured by the Syrian government. We have been clear that if Assad's regime makes the tragic mistake of using chemical weapons or failing to secure them, it will be held accountable."
Shifting red lines
The White House's threats to react to Assad's WMD activity have softened over time. In Obama's Aug. 20 statement, he indicated that "a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around" would trigger U.S. action.
Obama then shifted his warning to Assad about red lines in December, after intelligence reports stated that the Syrian regime had moved some precursor chemicals out of storage and mixed them, making them easier to deploy. Now, Obama's red line is that the United States will react if Syria uses these weapons.
"The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable," Obama said Dec. 3, directing his comments at Assad. "If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable." That same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added: "we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur."
Outside analysts worry that the administration's red line may have shifted again.
"Given the fact you have that in a cable, this indicates that the Obama administration may not simply jump into the conflict because chemical agents are used," said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Assad has a much better idea now of what he can do and get away with."
"This shows that actually the red line on chemical weapons is not clear and that the regime may be able to use some chemical agents, and the response might not be immediate," he said.
On Jan. 11, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said that the U.S. government and the international community doesn't have the capability to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons if he chooses to do so.
"The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable... because you would have to have such clarity of intelligence, you know, persistent surveillance, you'd have to actually see it before it happened, and that's -- that's unlikely, to be sure," Dempsey said. "I think that Syria must understand by now that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable. And to that extent, it provides a deterrent value. But preventing it, if they decide to use it, I think we would be reacting."
Abdo, the Syrian neurologist, said that the doctors treating civilians inside Homs have run out of even the basic medicines they have been using to bring a level of comfort to the victims, such as the drug atropine.
"We hope this information will reach the people in the American government so maybe they will help us," he said. "If the regime does this one more time, we don't have the antidote in our hands anymore and we can't treat it. It's very urgent."
In Friday’s Washington Post, David Ignatius described “an intelligence report provided to the State Department last week by Syrian sources working with the Free Syrian Army (FSA),” which describes Syria’s rebel opposition as “disorganized fighters, greedy arms peddlers and profiteering warlords.”
“There are hundreds of small groups (10-20 fighters) spread all over the area of Aleppo,” notes the bleak assessment given to the State Department. “The FSA has [been] transformed into disorganized rebel groups, infiltrated by large numbers of criminals. All our efforts with MCs [military councils] were abolished. .?.?. Warlords are a reality on the ground now. .?.?. A [failed] state is the most likely outcome of the current condition, unless adjustment [is] done.”
The battles in the north these days are mostly for the spoils of war, argues the Syrian assessment. “Rebel violations are becoming a normal daily phenomenon, especially against civilians, including looting public and private factories, storage places, houses and cars.”
What’s important to note here is that the report from Free Syrian Army sources is not describing the most extremist, terrorist groups that have been a part of the rebel fighters for the bulk of the civil war. Nay, it is describing the types of groups Washington has attempted to portray as worthy of Western aid.
So while US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar actively fund the terrorist groups in Syria, Washington is aiding the rag-tag rebel bands of criminals.
US policy does seem to be shifting, apparently in recognition of the kinds of realities the FSA-State Department report explains. Focus has been adjusted to the Syrian National Coalition, basically an exile group organized by the US that doesn’t have strong roots inside the country. There little evidence the Syrian people accept it. But there is strong evidence it has been vehemently rejected by the armed rebel groups fighting the Assad regime.
According to the State Department’s spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the US aim is to use the coalition to “maintain the functions of the state.” In other words, to get rid of Assad, but keep the regime. You know, for the sake of freedom and democracy.
This is the real goal of US policy in Syria: get rid of Bashshar but keep the regime
"Looking ahead, the United States and its allies need to encourage more stable transitions of power — where possible, maintaining national institutions, such as state services and the army, but transferring control of them to a new, more democratic leadership. That’s what happened in the mostly bloodless revolutions of Egypt and Yemen, where the United States pushed the army generals to abandon the dictators." (thanks Electronic Ali)
From the moment the first defectors from the Syrian military took up arms against the Assad regime, rebels have couched their fight as an extension of pro-democracy protests that erupted across Syria. But as the rebellion is increasingly composed of foreign fighters, many religiously motivated, their agenda has changed.
Far from Western assumptions that removing Assad and installing the rebels would mean a “Free Syria,” the Islamist rebels are demanding an Islamist state, with a harsh brand of Sharia law and Sunni clergy given positions of significant power. Democracy, let alone a secular state that respects religious minorities is for them out of the question.
This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the rebellion has changed dramatically from the days when military defectors were the rank-and-file soldiers. It is now a sectarian civil war, and despite US efforts to sequester the al-Nusra Front from the rest of the rebellion, it seems the fighters have more in common with the al-Qaeda-backed rebel group than the Western nations that continue to support them.
This is a long-term concern, as many of these fighters are pledging to continue the fight against whoever replaces Assad if they don’t get their way. Much as with Libya, the current civil war could set the stage for another one.
"For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.
But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials.
“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.
Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.
Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves."
Kevin Gosztola over at FireDogLake has a helpful round-up of news stories describing US involvement in the French-led military intervention in Mali:
CBS News reported the ”United States is providing communications and transport help for an international military intervention aimed at wresting Mali’s north out of the hands of Islamist extremists.” Though the mission is taking place in a “lawless desert in weakly governed country,” French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the operation was “gaining international backing. The US was providing communications and transportation support.
On January 12, “US officials” told CBS “they had offered to send drones to Mali.” Drones excel in weakly governed and lawless deserts and lawless parts of countries it seems such parts are where the US likes to use drones the most.
The Wall Street Journal reported, “France asked Washington late last week to deploy unmanned aerial drones and aircraft that could be used to refuel French fighter planes in the air. Paris also asked the US to provide satellite imagery and share intercepts of militants’ communications.”
According to WSJ, unnamed US officials told the newspaper the role of America “would be non-lethal in nature, focused on intelligence collection and providing other support to French and any allied African forces.” But drones were used to carry out strikes in Libya in 2011 and mission creep could easily lead to a situation where military drones were not just providing non-lethal tactical support to enable French military operations.”
Also, Tom Vanden Brook of USA TODAYreported, “US military warplanes assisted French forces battling Islamic extremists in two African countries over the weekend, according to the Pentagon, highlighting the growing threat of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the region.”
It is important to remember, as I wrote almost a year ago, that the unrest in Mali that is now the excuse for Western military intervention is a direct consequence of the US-NATO war in Libya in 2011. Former Gadhafi militias, including lots of Tuaregs from northern Mali, returned after an influx of arms flooded Libya. The resulting unrest led to a military coup - led by by Captain Amadou Sanogo, trained by the US military - against President Amadou Toumani Toure. So not only did the rise of Islamist rebels in Mali result directly from a separate US war in Muslim lands, but the subsequent collapse of the Malian government was instigated by militias that were trained and armed by the US.
“Over and over, western intervention ends up – whether by ineptitude or design – sowing the seeds of further intervention,” writes Glenn Greenwald, with regard to the intervention in Mali. “Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies,” Greenwald adds. “Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.”
Walter Russell Mead writes at The American Interest that Obama’s “counter-terrorism” policies in North Africa have failed catastrophically:
Since Obama took office the US spent almost $600 million to combat Islamic militancy across North Africa. In countries like Mali and Niger US forces trained local soldiers in counterterrorism skills. Arms and equipment were bought so local governments could protect their territories. This strategy, in theory, would protect North Africa from falling into the hands of Islamist militants—who would impose strict Sharia rule on unwilling locals and use lawless territory to launch attacks on Western targets—without involving a heavy deployment of American troops like in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That was the theory. But as heavily armed Islamist militants battle French forces in the Battle for Mali, it’s clear Obama’s strategy to help weak North African states protect themselves from terrorists has failed catastrophically.
“This has been brewing for five years,” one US special ops officer told the NYT. “The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came in from Libya.
The New York Timesreports that some US officials believe a Western assault on Mali “could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe.”
Indeed what has been happening in the news is revealing: the French-led air assaults seem to have emboldened the Islamist fighters. Either Mali becomes a long lasting military quagmire, or a misleadingly quick mission leads to even worse blowback somewhere else in Africa’s Sahel region, prompting yet another Western intervention.
Far from Western assumptions that removing Assad and installing the rebels would mean a “Free Syria,” the Islamist rebels are demanding an Islamist state, with a harsh brand of Sharia law and Sunni clergy given positions of significant power. Democracy, let alone a secular state that respects religious minorities is for them out of the question.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 5:45 PM 
Share
More...CBS News reported the ”United States is providing communications and transport help for an international military intervention aimed at wresting Mali’s north out of the hands of Islamist extremists.” Though the mission is taking place in a “lawless desert in weakly governed country,” French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the operation was “gaining international backing. The US was providing communications and transportation support.
On January 12, “US officials” told CBS “they had offered to send drones to Mali.” Drones excel in weakly governed and lawless deserts and lawless parts of countries it seems such parts are where the US likes to use drones the most.The Wall Street Journal reported, “France asked Washington late last week to deploy unmanned aerial drones and aircraft that could be used to refuel French fighter planes in the air. Paris also asked the US to provide satellite imagery and share intercepts of militants’ communications.”
No comments:
Post a Comment