Killing Qaddafi: Hillary’s Secret Role
By Matthew Vadum
To justify an illegal ouster of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Hillary Clinton falsely claimed the Libyan leader was planning genocidal attacks against his domestic enemies, an investigative report in the Washington Times suggests.
Documents and audio recordings examined by the newspaper suggest the former U.S. secretary of state had no clear plan for how to deal with the Libyan crisis she created and whether the lawlessness and chaos she spawned in that country led to the deadly Muslim terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
Clinton was secretary of state on that terrible day. Despite her disastrous tenure at Foggy Bottom which saw Muslim irredentist movements gain ground in North Africa and the Middle East, she continues to be the early frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She resigned as secretary of state in early 2013, paving the way for the utterly undistinguished then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to take over as chief public cheerleader for the Obama administration’s pro-Islamist campaign.
When that fateful 3 a.m. telephone call her 2008 TV ads warned about finally came, Mrs. Clinton snoozed on through it, allowing a comedy of errors consisting in part of incompetence and arrogance to dictate the U.S. government’s bungled response to Benghazi. Clinton and her fellow Obama White House officials lied over and over again about the catalyst for the attack, refusing for weeks even to call it a terrorist attack.
Instead Clinton blamed the Benghazi attack on an obscure U.S.-based filmmaker who made an anti-Islam movie trailer just about no one saw. Officials told anyone willing to listen that a spontaneous demonstration sparked by Muslim anger over the video had magically materialized in a city blanketed by al-Qaeda flags and that within hours this supposedly organic melee had claimed the lives of four Americans, including J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Bowing to Shariah law, Clinton had the filmmaker imprisoned on a flimsy legal pretext, America’s First Amendment be damned.
U.S intelligence did not concur with Clinton’s public rationale for invading Libya, a military action that was never approved by the United States Congress, according to the newspaper report. She had claimed Qaddafi was planning to commit acts of genocide aimed at liquidating his regime’s detractors. But intelligence operatives “had come to the opposite conclusion: that [Qaddafi] would not risk world outrage by killing civilians en masse even as he tried to crush the rebellion in his country.”
Citing secret Libyan intelligence documents, the Washington Times reports that Libyan officials were worried back in 2011 that weapons were being directed to NATO-supported rebels with ties to al-Qaeda.
“The reports included a 16-page list of weapons that Libyans supposedly tracked to the rebels from Western sources or their allies in the region,” according to the newspaper. “The memos were corroborated by a U.S. intelligence asset familiar with the documents as well as former top [Qaddafi] regime official Mohammed Ismael.”
“NATO has given permission to a number of weapons-loaded aircraft to land at Benghazi airport and some Tunisian airports,” the intelligence report stated. Libyan officials said they were worried that the weapons and training provided to the anti-Qaddafi rebels would spread in the region and find their way to Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.
A year later, the Benghazi attack took place, leaving four Americans dead. Stevens was tortured before he died and his dead body was dragged around town by Islamist savages. In an increasingly familiar, grim ritual of Islamofascist humiliation, Stevens was reportedly sodomized by his Islamist captors, just as Qaddafi was by his Islamist captors.
More than a year before the Benghazi attack, several U.S. officials so distrusted then-Secretary Clinton’s judgment on the Libyan situation that they opened their own secret diplomatic channels with the Qaddafi regime, leaving the State Department out of the loop.
In mid-2011 Libyan officials and a Pentagon operative informed Ismael that they were thinking about seizing some of Qaddafi’s frozen assets and directing them to the rebels fighting against him. The report further suggests U.S. ally Qatar played a major part in shipping weapons to the Libyan rebels, a role Qatar adamantly denies.
“The Qataris have spent more than $100 million on this, and they have an agreement with the rebels that the moment you rule Libya you pay us back,” Qaddafi’s eldest son, Seif, told then Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in a conversation recorded in May 2011.
“So, it’s your position that your government has been trying to defend itself against an insurrection brought about by jihadists who were joined by gangsters, terrorists and that there’s basically about 1,000 people who were joined by NATO?” Kucinich asked.
“Yes,” Seif Qaddafi replied.
Some may, quite understandably, wish to take intelligence reports supplied by a sketchy foreign power with a grain of salt, but those who follow Libyan affairs have long known that there was no compelling U.S. national security-related justification in 2011 to remove Qaddafi as Libya’s leader.
Libya didn’t matter anymore. A decade earlier the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 led to an epiphany on Qaddafi’s part. The Libyan strongman saw the writing on the wall as Islamists launched operations on Qaddafi’s home turf and carried out attacks directed at him personally.
With Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein easily overthrown by a U.S.-led coalition, Qaddafi’s allies in the old Soviet bloc consigned to the dustbin of history, and his fair-weather friends in the Arab world unwilling to help him deal with devastating U.S. sanctions, Qaddafi recognized his growing political impotence.
He renounced terrorism and decided to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program in 2003. Qaddafi even did the unthinkable, signing on –at least nominally– to the U.S.-led Global War on Terror. He promoted his son’s charitable foundation to augment his influence and revamp his reputation outside Libya.
Qaddafi so impressed George W. Bush’s administration that the U.S. government restored full diplomatic relations with the former pariah nation in 2006. As then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the time, Libya had provided “excellent cooperation in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001.”
It may be a stretch to describe the post-9/11 Qaddafi as a friend of the United States but it is probably accurate to say that at worst he had become a defanged frenemy of the U.S. Rendered largely irrelevant by the events of the day, the dictator who retained the risibly grandiose official state title of Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution of Libya was humiliated and emasculated.
But getting Qaddafi out of the way was long a part of President Obama’s plan to help the Islamist movement in Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Qaddafi was viewed as unsympathetic to the resurgent jihadists in his region and so he had to be eliminated.
Hillary Clinton carried out the hit and today Libya, with the assistance of the U.S. taxpayer, is well on its way to becoming a member in good standing of the Islamic Caliphate.
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