‘Arms smuggling to Syria’ From Benghazi When US Ambassador Was Killed

| WTF News |

Katharine Tobal
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is seen in flames during a protest by an armed group, September 11, 2012.

America has done its best to keep secret its role in supplying the Syrian rebels (terrorists of al-Qaeda), operating through proxies and front companies. It is this which makes Seymour Hersh’s article “The Red Line and The Rat Line: Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels” published last week in the London Review of Books, so interesting, The Independent reported on Sunday April 13.

A little-regarded theme of Hersh’s article is what the CIA called the rat line, the supply chain for the Syrian militants overseen by the US in covert cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The information about this comes from a highly classified and hitherto secret annex to the report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the attack by Libyan militiamen on the US consulate in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 in which US ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.

The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a reported US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was in progress when American ambassador was killed by a mob in the city 2 year ago, according to reports.

Up to 35 CIA operatives were working in the city of Benghazi during the attack in September 2012 on the US consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, according to CNN.

There were many stories going on in the American media in the last 2 years about the Islamist jihadists lethal attack on the American consulate in Benghazi – in both the electronic and print media, The emphasis and the debate is on why the event was twisted by the Obama administration to suppress a terrorist attack on eve of the presidential election.

CNN has uncovered new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.

Sources told CNN that dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret. CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. CIA chiefs were actively working to ensure the real nature of its operations in the city did not get out. So only the losses suffered by the State Department in the city had been reported to Congress.

The CIA, in cooperation with MI6, arranged the dispatch of arms from Libya’s arsenals to Turkey and then across the 500-mile long Turkish southern frontier with Syria.

It was on October 25, 2012 when FoxNews.com broke the story that a mysterious Libyan ship was reportedly carrying weapons and ammunition for Syrian rebels would have had some link to the September 11 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Through shipping records, Fox News had confirmed that the Libyan-flagged vessel Al Entisar, which means “The Victory,” was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun, 35 miles from the Syrian border, on Sept. 6, just five days before Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American officers were killed during an extended assault by more than 100 Islamist militants. On the night of Sept. 11, in what would become his last known public meeting, Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the consulate front gate one hour before the attack began.

A report by the Times of London in Sept. 14 told that Al Entisar was carrying 400 tons of cargo. Some of it was humanitarian, but also reportedly weapons, described by the report as the largest consignment of weapons headed for Syria’s rebels on the frontlines. The cargo reportedly included surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, RPG’s and Russian-designed shoulder-launched missiles known as MANPADS.

Although what was discussed at the meeting is not public, a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists. And although the negotiation said to have taken place may have had nothing to do with the attack on the consulate later that night or the Libyan mystery ship, it could explain why Stevens was travelling in such a volatile region on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

The Internet Media reported at that time that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.

Other Internet Media reported that if the new Libyan government was sending Islamic jihadists and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey — a deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution — then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.

Also, according to a recent New York Times report from June 29th 2013, Qatar have been carrying out arms shipments to “rebels” in Syria from Libya, since at least the same time they “stepped up efforts” to oust Colonel Gaddafi. Consequently, this can only be interpreted as Qatar commencing shipments of arms to Syria – from Benghazi – before Gaddafi had been killed, which means before October 2011.

The U.S. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who is expected to run for his party presidential nomination in the year 2016, was the only American lawmaker who revealed about this ‘arms deal’ which he connected to Ambassador Steven’s brutal murder in the hands of the Islamist Jihadists.

In an interview on CNN, Sen. Paul said he hasn’t ruled out the possibility that last year’s attack prevailed as a result of a secret arms trade. The confusion in the immediate aftermath of the event — including unfounded admissions from America’s United Nations envoy Susan Rice that denied what is known today about the attack — could actually be a cover-up, the senator said.

“Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation going on at the CIA annex?” Paul asked. “I’m not sure exactly what was going on, but I think questions ought to be asked and answered, and I’m a little curious when employees of the State Department are told by government officials they shouldn’t testify – before the Senate or House committees – and then they are sort of sequestered and kept away from testimony, so I think there may be more to this.”

This is not the first time either that Senator Paul raised questions about possible arms supplies under the CIA umbrella. During her testimony in the Senate in January, Rand Paul asked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether the spy agency was sending weapons from Benghazi into other countries. Clinton replied that he would have to ask CIA officials about it.

Furthermore, the US’s Secretary of State John Kerry and its UN ambassador, Samantha Power had been pushing for more assistance to be given to the Syrian militants. This is despite strong evidence that the so called “Syrian rebels” or “Syrian opposition” are, more than ever, dominated by extremists similar in their beliefs and methods to al-Qaeda. The recent attack by militant forces on Armenian and Alawites villages in Lattakia, northern Syria, which initially had a measure of success, was led by Chechen and Moroccan extremist groups.