Has Anyone Seen 400 Surface-to-air Missiles?
A new revelation on the Benghazi attacks has come to light following a series of shocking statements from a high-profile representative of a Benghazi whistle-blower. In an interview with wmal radio on August 12, Joe diGenova, a lawyer representing Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism Mark Thompson in the Benghazi trials, said 400 surface-to-air missiles were stolen in Libya on the night of the Benghazi attack.
Following the terrorist attack last September, Washington went about doing all that it could to obscure, bury and distort what happened. Coming right at election time, the government was concerned about a dip in the polls, so an elaborate cover-up was concocted. When questioned about the attack, the government wouldn’t even take questions, telling reporters to stop asking.
The revelation that there was a large shipment of missiles involved in the attack, if shown to be true, would blow away the government’s stance that the whole thing was a backlash to an obscure film depicting the prophet Mohammad.
This was no sporadic, off-the-cuff attack by a hot-headed mob that got out of control. This was a planned attack on U.S. soil, against U.S. citizens, which appears to have involved the theft of a massive horde of weaponry.
While simply burning a U.S. consulate to the ground is reason enough for terrorists to commit their crimes, the fact that there were 400 advanced missiles that could be stolen would certainly be added incentive. The likelihood that the terrorists simply stumbled on the 400 missiles during a random attack on the U.S. consulate and annex is as farfetched as Washington’s proposal that it wasn’t a terrorist attack at all.
Joe diGenova said his sources were former intelligence officials with connections in the special operations and intelligence community. These sources are bolstered by other reports.
The Telegraph ran a story on August 2 discussing the idea that the cia was smuggling weapons from Libya to Turkey, then down into the hands of the Syrian rebels. This is certainly plausible, because Libya was still staggering to its feet after the revolution, making gun smuggling easy for the cia. Sending anti-air missiles to Syrian rebels would make sense, due to the fact that the rebels are devoid of any form of air force, and are up against the Assad regime, which does.
Sen. Rand Paul also backs the smuggling theory, saying that it “may have been that there was a gunrunning operation going on in Benghazi, leaving Libya and going to Turkey and [distributing] arms to the [Syrian] rebels.”
If gunrunning was involved, it would have vast and deadly implications. For one, it would prove that the government had further understanding that this was no mob attack. It is clear that the “mob” that burned the consulate to the ground also knew ahead of time where the cia annex was. Could it have also known where the 400 missiles were being kept? DiGenova said that “the annex was somehow involved in the process of the distribution of those missiles.” Is it mere coincidence that the annex came under repeated fire from the terrorists in the September 11 attack?
DiGenova dropped another bombshell during the radio interview. He said the missing missiles were related to the extended closure of the 21 embassies across the Middle East and North Africa. He said, “They [U.S. government officials] were afraid that there was going to be a missile attack on one of the embassies. Remember, you can take a shoulder-held missile and shoot it into an embassy, not just into the sky.”
Consider: The U.S. closed embassies across a vast number of countries in the region. If the missiles were linked to the closures, does it appear the U.S. government has any idea where the missiles have gone? In addition, it issued a worldwide travel warning. It would only take one missile to bring down a commercial aircraft.
Whether the suspected massive armament theft is eventually used against America or not, it is potentially very embarrassing for the U.S. government, which has never mentioned the weapons cache in the past.
The missiles are just one more piece of evidence that the aftermath of the Libyan revolution is still coming back to haunt the United States. For more on the Benghazi scandal, and its deleterious effects on the U.S., read “The Truth Revealed in the Benghazi Attack.”