(These are the English notes of the interview rearranged in pyramid form; they were translated and published in a different sequence in Spanish at La Prensa of Panama City). Many thanks to Mr. Martinez for a wide-ranging conversation!
RM: How is Syria different from Libya?
Syria is different in so many ways… first of all, it’s not clear that a majority of Syrians necessarily want the government gone of at least that they would prefer the rebel forces to the government. Syria is a much more diverse country than Libya, in Syria you have 10-14% Christians, another 10-14% Shiites, and you have a large sector of urban, middle-class, relatively secular Sunni Muslims, and together they could easily form the majority of the country. And while they may not like the more authoritarian aspects of the Ba’ath government, they might prefer a secular government to a religious one. Many of the rebels, as things have developed, are invested in a Muslim Brotherhood, or even some of them have affiliated themselves with Al Qaeda. So I don’t think the moral clarity is apparent in Syria in the way that it was in Libya.
Secondarily, there is no UNSC authorization for the use of force in Syria, and I would have opposed a Libyan intervention if the UN hadn’t authorized one. I think international law is very important, I think the one thing that was wrong with Bush’s invasion of Iraq was that there was no UNSC authorization. If you undertake a military operation at a large scale in the Middle East without the support of the world, then it’s probably doomed to failure.
So there’s no authorization –Russia and China don’t want an intervention— and then Syria’s geography is not like Libya’s, the tanks are not out on desert roads, they are inside the cities, you couldn’t take out the artillery and the tanks without risking hitting apartment buildings with these large bombs and killing a lot of innocent civilians.
So, for all kinds of reasons I don’t think that an intervention in Syria is wise. I deeply regret the daily massive loss of life, and I wish there were a way for the international community to stop this carnage, but I feel helpless, I just don’t see a way.
RM: You were speaking about the importance of international law. Do you really think it’s possible to control the anarchy that exists at a supranational level?
JC: Historians who study the development of international of law and international treaties are not typically cynical. They find that even when there’s reluctance to abide by international law, that it’s claims are often consequential. Even though governments routinely disregard it or break it, international law still has a lot of weight in world affairs, and you can tell this because even the governments that do contravene it, deny that they have done so, they’re embarrassed about it, they get pressured… I’m not entirely sure that without international pressure, without the weight of international law, that the apartheid regime in South Africa could have been made to fall. And I think that the fact that George W. Bush went to Iraq without international law on his side meant that a lot of countries –France and Germany— were unwilling to help him, and he lost a lot of international support, and that was one of the reasons why he failed.
I understand why there would be cynicism about international law because it is often disregarded. But I think it often also has weight, and over time forms a point of pressure that does have consequences.
RM: The whole world is talking about the NSA scandal. How bad is it? Should we be worried?
JC: Well yes, I’m worried! I’m alarmed… of course, this is not in fact a new revelation, we’ve known about this for some time. Government surveillance is a problem, it violates basic norms of democracy when it is carried out without a warrant, without evidence of laws been broken.
On the other hand, they can’t actually surveil everybody. It’s impossible to monitor everyone. Technically, this information that they’re gathering is not that they’re watching you or me –- well, they might’ve been watching me —- but most people are not singled out for surveillance. It’s data mining, they’re looking for macro patterns, for certain kinds of connections, but the thing that displeases me it’s not that they’re spying on everybody at the time, it’s that the potential for abuse it great. And I don’t believe there’s probably sufficient oversight to forestall abuse. So, if a politician has a friend in the NSA and wanted the reputation of his rival to be destroyed by illegal surveillance, I think that’s something that can happen, and if it can happen it probably will happen. So that’s what I’m worried about, the politics of reputation coming out of this destruction of the whole idea of privacy.
RM: You wrote in Engaging the Muslim World that the world is facing the twin crisis of energy scarcity and climate change. How do you see the world reacting to them?
JC: As I suggested several years ago, solar energy is the only real, ultimate solution to these two crisis. The world is still growing population-wise, more and more people in Africa and Asia and the rest of the world are aspiring to a modern life rather than a village, agricultural one, and all of this makes the demand for more energy burgeon. Hydrocarbons simply could not possibly provide the kind of energy that is going to be demanded even over the next 50 years. Moreover, hydrocarbons cause very dangerous climate change which could destabilize our climate and our world.
My policy prescription would be to have a global massive program of solar installations. Solar panels have now come down in price to where they are competitive with hydrocarbons. They can be supplemented by wind and geothermal. But my frustration is that I see this change over to solar energy as urgent, as something we should try to do over the next 10 years, and most governments that pay any attention to the issue talk about having 50% renewable energy by 2050. To prevent debilitating climate change that’s way too late.
I have to say one of the reasons for which governments and the public are dragging their feet on this issue is that so much of our economy and our lives are wrought up with hydrocarbons that those companies employ a lot of people and have a lot of political clout, so they obfuscate the issue, they try to cast doubts on the by now quite solid findings of the climate scientists, or they try to drag their feet with regard to the policy, but if more governments in the world put in feed-in- tariffs and gave incentives for the installation of solar panels, and made it a priority to get this change over to renewable energy as quickly as possible we could avoid the worst outcomes that are facing us. If we go on like we are, we will have probably a 3-4 foot sea level rise in this century. Countries like Egypt and Bangladesh could be flooded. Storms in the Caribbean could become more frequent and more powerful –warm water feeds these hurricanes. You could have long storms and not short ones…
We’re playing with fire here, we really are in danger of inflicting massive damage on our world. And as I said, I’m frustrated that this danger, which is undebatable scientifically, is not being given the urgency that is requisite by most countries of the world.
RM: What’s going on with the US right now? [Some talk about it having become a totalitarian society.]
JC: I wouldn’t call it a totalitarian society just because I think there are still multiple powers and I think there’s still a place for popular mobilization. It’s certainly the case that about half of the American economy is dominated by about 2000 corporations, and that much government policy and legislation is dictated and very heavily influenced by those 2000 corporations.
But it should be remembered that often the corporations themselves have disputes, and that’s an opportunity for the public to leverage one against the other. A lot of the corporations and the US government were not very happy about the rise of the internet, especially what is called ‘net neutrality’. As things now stand, the way the internet is designed, anyone in the world who is on the internet has equal access to my blog, they have the same access to it, for the same price, that they have to corporate sites. Many of the corporations wanted to have the internet scaled so that it was easy and inexpensive to reach corporate sites, but difficult and expensive to reach an individual site like my own. So there was an attack on the principle of net neutrality. And Google and other internet companies that are quite large and powerful, and who depend on net neutrality for their profits, intervened on this debate and so saved net neutrality.
I just gave that as an example where corporate interests are not universal among the corporations, there are fights amongst them, and the internet activists –the bloggers and so forth— were able to rally and get Google on our side, so at least for the moment we have fought off this threat to net neutrality. And net neutrality in turn is what allows movements like the Tahrir Square in Egypt, or what’s going on in Turkey today… social media allows people to know about the protests because the official media were intimidated into not reporting it.
So, I don’t want to be overly optimistic, because these corporate interests are very powerful, and they do have disproportionate weight in government deliberations and legislation, but I also don’t want to give up hope, and I think individuals, the public, NGOs, civil society, still are diverse enough and in the aggregate have a great deal of power and it can find ways to find allies, at some point maybe with the corporations for certain kinds of political work which are of progressive nature, so a little bit more optimistic, I think.
RM: As a historian, do you see between the post-Cold War world and the post-9/11 world in terms of protest movements?
Obviously, the Libyan government with the help of neighbors and Europe, ought to be buying back the weapons itself to keep them off the smuggling market. Just condemning the weapons trade is not going to accomplish much.
The foreign policy of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez imagined that socialism and anti-imperialism are the same thing, and that he could lead a new sort of socialist international. (He also seems not to have distinguished between anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism.) These considerations shaped his Middle East policy in ways that were contradictory and hypocritical. Chavez, supposedly a man of the people, stood against Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, against the Libyan Revolution to overthrow the erratic Muammar Qaddafi, against the Syrian Revolution.
Iran, while it is a profound critic of the United States, is not a socialist country. Its gini coefficient or measurement of social inequality now is probably worse than in the days of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch overthrown in 1979. As with all oil states, its public sector is large, but it also has a lively private sector, which is dominated by wealthy oligarchs, including some of the ayatollahs and institutions like the Revolutionary Guards. Iran is a right wing theocracy, not a left wing socialist state. If Chavez could embrace a repressive theocracy run for the benefit of wealthy oligarchs, merely because it is anti-American, then of what logical acrobatics was he incapable?
Likewise, Chavez’s support for the Ghaddafis in Libya was based on an extremely superficial reading of Libyan political, economic and social system. The Ghaddafi family looted the country of its wealth, wasting it on ruinous African adventures or squirreling it away in Western banks and real estate. Libya was not a socialist country but a post-Soviet, Russian-style oligarchy. Ordinary Libyans, especially in the east of the country, were increasingly cut out of any share in the country’s oil bonanza. I was shocked last year on my visit there how dowdy and relatively undeveloped Benghazi is; Ghaddafi had clearly punished the country’s second largest city by declining to spend much money on it. Nor was Ghaddafi of 2010 even particularly anti-imperialist. He had welcomed European investment in his oil and gas industries and had much improved relations with the Bush administration. Far from being anti-American, Ghaddafi had a thing for Condi Rice and called Barack Obama his African son. Chavez’s own ally, Iran, largely supported the struggle of the Libyan people against what one ayatollah called “this shell-shocked individual,” though of course Iran condemned the NATO air intervention.
Syria is also no longer a socialist country. The relatives and hangers-on of the ruling al-Assad family transformed themselves into billionaires, using their government contacts to gain lucrative contracts and establishing monopolies. Working Syrians were facing declining real wages in the past decade and very high youth unemployment. Poverty was increasing. Nor was Syria particularly anti-imperialist. In the 1970s and 1980s in Lebanon, Baathist Syria had gladly helped defeat the Palestine Liberation Organization and its Druze and Muslim allies on behalf of the pro-American, right wing Phalangist Party supported by some Christians. After 9/11, the Syrian government tortured al-Qaeda suspects for the Bush administration. It was the US congress that cut Syria off in 2003, not the other way around. And when Obama reopened the US embassy and sought better ties in 2009, al-Assad was perfectly happy to accept.
Whatever one thought of Chavez, he did genuinely improve the lot of the Venezuelan working classes. He won elections and was genuinely popular for this reason. He appears not to have been able to imagine that Khamenei, Ghaddafi and al-Assad are rather less interested in an ideal like the public welfare.
Unable to perform a basic political-economy analysis that would demonstrate that Iran, Libya and Syria had abandoned whatever socialist commitments they once had (Iran of the ayatollahs had never been progressive), Chavez in his own mind appears to have thought that they were analogous to the Bolivia of Eva Morales or the Ecuador of Rafael Correa. Emphatically not so.
He also imagined these countries as anti-American (only Iran really is), and appears to have believed that such a stance covers a multitude of sins on the part of their elites– looting the country, feathering their own nests, and authoritarian dictatorship and police states that deploy arbitrary arrest and torture. In the case of Libya and Syria, the regimes showed a willingness to massacre thousands of their own citizens with bombings from the air and heavy artillery and tank barrages fired into civilian neighborhoods. US imperialism has been guilty of great crimes in Central America and often backed right wing dictators in Latin America generally. You understand how it made a bad impression on Chavez. But the US supported Algeria and many other decolonizing countries in the 1960s and “imperialism” is a thin reed as an all-encompassing analytical tool. There is a sense in which capitalist Russia is seeking a superpower supremacy in parts of the Middle East. Chavez was happy to align with that development.
Venezuela’s stances on the Middle East under Chavez were not usually important in any practical sense. Despite a lot of verbiage, its economic cooperation with Iran has been minor for both countries, and Chavez did no more than make angry speeches about Libya and Syria. Good Iranian-Venezuelan relations provoked a great deal of hysteria in the US, but they don’t actually appear to have been consequential, either in the sphere of economics or in that of security. Despite dark predictions by US hawks, it is probably not very important whether Venezuela keeps its current foreign policy or alters it.
But Chavez did sully his legacy as a progressive with his superficial reading of what ‘anti-imperialism’ entails and his inability to see the neo-liberal police states of the Middle East for what they had become.
1. Republican senators keep saying that it should have been “easy” to find out what happened on September 11, 2012, by simply debriefing US personnel who had been there. John McCain, Ron Johnson and the others who make this charge are the most cynical and manipulative people in the world. The Benghazi US mission was very clearly an operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that is the reason that the Obama administration officials have never been able to speak frankly and publicly about it. McCain and the others know this very well, and they know that their public carping cannot be “simply” answered because the answers would endanger sources and methods. The consulate was amazingly well-guarded by some 40 CIA operatives, many of them ex-special forces, in a nearby safe house. These were viewed by consular officials as “the cavalry.” It is still not clear what Ambassador Chris Stevens and the CIA were doing in Benghazi, and unless we know that we can’t know why they were attacked. (They were not overseeing the shipping of weapons to Syria; the Syrian revolutionaries complain bitterly that the US *prevents* them from getting medium and heavy weapons).
2. Republicans keep posturing that their questions about Benghazi are intended to bolster US security. In fact, they are harming it. Republican hearings in the House of Representative have disgracefully revealed the names of Libyans talking to the US consulate, thus endangering their lives and harming US efforts to understand the situation in the country, since who would risk talking to the embassy if they know about Darrell Issa’s big mouth?
3. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the so-called “film,” the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that attacked the Prophet Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time confirms that there were such demonstrations that day. The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security videos.
4. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not dominated by “al-Qaeda,” contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university. While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist, tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya’s parliamentary elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief, called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.
5. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city, members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012.
In fact, one Senator John McCain said during a visit to Libya last February, ““We are very happy to be back here in Libya and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few months… We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged by what we have seen.” Doesn’t sound to me like McCain was running around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey Graham, who likewise didn’t issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.
6. Contrary to the “Libya-is-riddled-with-al-Qaeda” meme of the GOP politicians, there is a strong civil society and tribal opposition to fundamentalist militias in Benghazi, of which Amb. Chris Stevens was well aware. Tripoli-based journalist Abd-al-Sattar Hatitah explained in the pages of the pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat [Sept. 30, 2012, trans. USG Open Source Center]:
“It appears that the simple rule Benghazi’s people thought of applying was based on other experiences in which the radical Islamists or militants in general managed to grow, prosper, and expand by seeking protection from the tribes, as happened in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. But the civil movements which became very active [in Benghazi] after the fall of Al-Qadhafi’s regime were the ones that formed alliances this time with the tribes, the notables, wise men councils, and civil society figures against the militants. This is akin to the “Sahwat” in Iraq. The alliance managed to expel the brigades from the town and encouraged the nascent Libyan authorities to tighten their restrictions on all armed manifestations…
He adds that [a meeting by secular notables with the tribes] was also attended by representatives from the army chiefs-of-staff and the Interior Ministry as well as a number of members from the National Congress (parliament). “All civil society organizations also took part with us. Everybody consented to issuing the statement against the presence of the [fundamentalist] brigades and we distributed 3,000 copies. “
This was around September 3. After the attack on the US consulate, tens of thousands of people in Benghazi demonstrated against the violence and in favor of the US and Stevens. Then they attempted to sweep the fundamentalist militias from the city.
7. Al-Qaeda is not for the most part even a “thing” in Libya. The only formal al-Qaeda affiliate in the region is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a Libyan but an Algerian organization. Just calling all Salafi groups “al-Qaeda” is propaganda. They have to swear fealty to Ayman al-Zawahiri (or in the past, Usama Bin Laden) to be al-Qaeda. The main al-Qaeda connection in Benghazi is to Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in northern Pakistan by a US drone strike in June. Some of his close relatives in Benghazi may have been angry about this (depending on how well they liked him), but they are not known to form a formal al-Qaeda cell. There are also young men from Dirna in the Benghazi area, some of whom fought against the US in Iraq. Their numbers are not large and, again, they don’t have al-Zawahiri’s phone number on auto-dial. Sen. McCain was a big supporter of the US intervention in Libya and seems to have been all right with Abdul Hakim Belhadj being his ally, even though in the zeroes Belhadj would have been labeled ‘al-Qaeda.’
8. Ansar al-Sharia (Helpers of Islamic Law) is just an informal grouping of a few hundred hard line fundamentalists in Benghazi, and may be a code word to refer to several small organizations. There are no known operational links between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda. It is a local thing in Benghazi.
10. Lindsey Graham and others point to instances of political violence this past summer in Benghazi as obvious harbingers of the September 11 consulate attack. But it was a tiny fringe group, the Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades, that claimed responsibility for setting off a small pipe bomb in front of the gate of the US consulate last June. This is what the US statement said last June:
“There was an attack late last night on the United States office in Benghazi,” a US embassy official said, adding that only the gate was damaged and no one was hurt. The diplomat said a homemade bomb had been used in the attack on the office, set up after the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qadhafi and kept open to support the democratic transition “
You’d have to be a real scaredy cat to pack up and leave because of a thing like that, which is what Sen. Graham keeps saying should have been the response. Likewise the same small cell was responsible for attacks on the office of the Red Cross and on a convoy of the British consulate, which injured a consular employ. Security isn’t all that great in Benghazi, though actually I suspect the criminal murder rate is much lower than in any major American city. I walked around freely in Benghazi in early June, and couldn’t have disguised my being a Westerner if I had wanted to, and nobody looked at me sideways. A pipe bomb and a shooting, neither of them fatal, did not stand out as dire in a city full of armed militias, most of them grateful to the US and Britain for their help in the revolution. You can understand why the Red Cross packed it in after a couple of attacks, but the US government is not the Red Cross.
I met a person who worked there when I was in Benghazi in June, and she told me that it wasn’t even clear if the consulate would be retained after the first of this year. It was possibly temporary, depending on Congressional funding. (The Tea Party House hasn’t been good on meeting requests for embassy security funds).
The more interesting question than why ad hoc arrangements should have been made for a consulate during and after the Libyan revolution (the answer to which seems fairly obvious) is, who is responsible for the string of assassinations and acts of violence in the city, of which the RPG attack on the consulate on September 11 was only one? Benghazi, with a population of over one million in a country of 6.5 million, is Libya’s second largest city and was the epicenter of the revolution against the government of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
On November 22, Benghazi police chief Farej Darssi was assassinated. In October a police colonel barely avoided death– his car was wired to explode. A Libyan intelligence officer was killed in September. A general was assassinated in August. Some of these figures had worked for Qaddafi but had defected to the revolution. Qaddafi’s security forces were responsible for the 1996 massacre of hardline fundamentalists at Abu Salim prison, and for making others just disappear. Likely the same shadowy cells that attacked the US consulate are behind the attacks on Benghazi police and army officers.
Deep Throat is so knowledgeable about the conspiracies facing the city and so dangerous to those hatching them that the latter immediately attempted to spring him from jail.
On Sunday morning, militants attacked the police facility next to the holding cell where the man is being detained. A policeman at that station died in a hail of bullets from the attackers, and they called for back-up. The police car that sped to the scene was ambushed and three policemen in it were killed.
Still, the police stood their ground and fought off the assault, and they kept their valuable suspect in custody, with all his valuable testimony.
Shortly after midnight, on Monday morning, small explosives were set off at the Garyounis police station in Benghazi, damaging a couple of automobiles but otherwise doing little damage. Then explosives were set off at al-Uruba police station, which also took sniper fire, but neither resulted in casualties.
The police became vigilant, and they apprehended a shady-looking man skulking around near the al-Hadaeq police station, finding him to have two rocket propelled grenades in his possession, which he was apparently intending to fire at the station.
In other words, the capture of Libyan Deep Throat has set off a gang war on the police, who are being informed by bombings and shootings that they must let their informant go or risk their safety.
So what is Deep Throat saying? According to local journalist Mohamed Bujenah of the Libyan Herald, a senior figure in the Benghazi police told him that the informant had fingered as many as 7 prominent Muslim fundamentalist leaders in connection with these attacks, of whom the police named 6 explicitly:
1 Sufyan Ben Qumu, from the notoriously radical town of Derna, and a former prisoner at Guantanamo
2. Ahmad Bukatela, leader of the Ubaida Militia
3. Muhammad al-Zahawi, head of the Ansar al-Sharia militia
4. Muhammad al-Gharabi, a leader of the Rafallah al-Sahati Militia
5. Ismail Sallabi, another leader of Rafallah al-Sahati
6. Salim Nabous, head of the Zawiya Martyrs’ Brigade
It is just a newspaper article. We don’t know if the informant actually named these individuals or if he did so to escape torture, in which case we can’t trust what he said. But if the allegations are true, there is collusion among several hardline militias in the city to create instability in hopes of taking it over.
The new, elected, prime minister Ali Zeidan, has started asserting himself militarily. He closed the country’s southern borders against instability in the Sahel. He may well have some risky house cleaning to do in Benghazi.
The charge against US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice was led by a handful of Republican senators and congressmen, and based on the alleged deficiencies of her account of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11. She withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state on Thursday. The GOP narrative of Benghazi and of Libya in general, however, bears no relationship to reality. This was pure politics, beginning as an attempt to hurt the Obama administration’s reputation for being good on defense issues, and then turning into sour grapes once Mitt Romney lost the election.
1. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not dominated by “al-Qaeda,” contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university. While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist, tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya’s parliamentary elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief, called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.
2. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city, members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012.
In fact, one Senator John McCain said during a visit to Libya last February, ““We are very happy to be back here in Libya and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few months… We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged by what we have seen.” Doesn’t sound to me like McCain was running around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey Graham, who likewise didn’t issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.
3. Contrary to the “Libya-is-riddled-with-al-Qaeda” meme of the GOP politicians, there is a strong civil society and tribal opposition to fundamentalist militias in Benghazi, of which Amb. Chris Stevens was well aware. Tripoli-based journalist Abd-al-Sattar Hatitah explained in the pages of the pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat [Sept. 30, 2012, trans. USG Open Source Center]:
“It appears that the simple rule Benghazi’s people thought of applying was based on other experiences in which the radical Islamists or militants in general managed to grow, prosper, and expand by seeking protection from the tribes, as happened in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. But the civil movements which became very active [in Benghazi] after the fall of Al-Qadhafi’s regime were the ones that formed alliances this time with the tribes, the notables, wise men councils, and civil society figures against the militants. This is akin to the “Sahwat” in Iraq. The alliance managed to expel the brigades from the town and encouraged the nascent Libyan authorities to tighten their restrictions on all armed manifestations.
Abd-al-Hamid Ibrahim Bu al-Shunaybat al-Aquri, a member of the committee of wise men and shura in Libya and a popular leader in Benghazi, said that “in the week preceding the Benghazi events [of September 11], the popular and security leaders met in the eastern area of the country, from the town of Imsa’id in the east to Ajdabiya in the west. They were all tribal notables, members of wise men councils in the eastern region, and the revolutionary field commanders during the days of the liberation, not the commanders of the [fundamentalist informal] brigades.”
He adds that the meeting was also attended by representatives from the army chiefs-of-staff and the Interior Ministry as well as a number of members from the National Congress (parliament). “All civil society organizations also took part with us. Everybody consented to issuing the statement against the presence of the [fundamentalist] brigades and we distributed 3,000 copies. “
This was around September 3. After the attack on the US consulate, tens of thousands of people in Benghazi demonstrated against the violence and in favor of the US and Stevens. Then they attempted to sweep the fundamentalist militias from the city.
4. Al-Qaeda is not for the most part even a “thing” in Libya. The only formal al-Qaeda affiliate in the region is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a Libyan but an Algerian organization. Just calling all Salafi groups “al-Qaeda” is propaganda. They have to swear fealty to Ayman al-Zawahiri (or in the past, Usama Bin Laden) to be al-Qaeda. The main al-Qaeda connection in Benghazi is to Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in northern Pakistan by a US drone strike in June. Some of his close relatives in Benghazi may have been angry about this (depending on how well they liked him), but they are not known to form a formal al-Qaeda cell. There are also young men from Dirna in the Benghazi area, some of whom fought against the US in Iraq. Their numbers are not large and, again, they don’t have al-Zawahiri’s phone number on auto-dial. Sen. McCain was a big supporter of the US intervention in Libya and seems to have been all right with Abdul Hakim Belhadj being his ally, even though in the zeroes Belhadj would have been labeled ‘al-Qaeda.’
5. Ansar al-Sharia (Helpers of Islamic Law) is just an informal grouping of a few hundred hard line fundamentalists in Benghazi, and may be a code word to refer to several small organizations. There are no known operational links between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda. It is a local thing in Benghazi.
7. Lindsey Graham and others point to instances of political violence this past summer in Benghazi as obvious harbingers of the September 11 consulate attack. But it was a tiny fringe group, the Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades, that claimed responsibility for setting off a small pipe bomb in front of the gate of the US consulate last June. This is what the US statement said last June:
“There was an attack late last night on the United States office in Benghazi,” a US embassy official said, adding that only the gate was damaged and no one was hurt. The diplomat said a homemade bomb had been used in the attack on the office, set up after the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qadhafi and kept open to support the democratic transition “
You’d have to be a real scaredy cat to pack up and leave because of a thing like that, which is what Sen. Graham keeps saying should have been the response. Likewise the same small cell was responsible for attacks on the office of the Red Cross and on a convoy of the British consulate, which injured a consular employ. Security isn’t all that great in Benghazi, though actually I suspect the criminal murder rate is much lower than in any major American city. I walked around freely in Benghazi in early June, and couldn’t have disguised my being a Westerner if I had wanted to, and nobody looked at me sideways. A pipe bomb and a shooting, neither of them fatal, did not stand out as dire in a city full of armed militias, most of them grateful to the US and Britain for their help in the revolution. You can understand why the Red Cross packed it in after a couple of attacks, but the US government is not the Red Cross.
8. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the so-called “film,” the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ that attacked the Prophet Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time confirms that there were such demonstrations that day. The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security videos.
9. The GOP senators keep complaining about President Obama’s “leadership” on the Benghazi issue. But they know very well that presidents don’t typically get involved in things like consular requests for guards. Moreover, the consulate was amazingly well-guarded, not only by a revolutionary militia that did in fact rescue dozens of consular employees after the rpg fire came in, but by some 40 CIA operatives, many of them ex-special forces, in a nearby safe house. These were viewed by consular officials as “the cavalry.”
10. Susan Rice had nothing whatsoever to do with Libya, had no special knowledge of the situation in Benghazi, and she briefed the talking points she was given by the CIA in the aftermath.
Whether Susan Rice would have made a good secretary of state or not, it is a shame that the GOP Fantasy Machine should have attempted to harm her reputation for probity over the Libya situation. In fact, almost everything the GOP senators and congressmen have alleged about the situation in Benghazi is factually incorrect and easily shown to be so.
Republican critics of the Obama administration’s evolving accounts of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 imply that there was early certainty in the US intelligence community that it was an attack staged by an al-Qaeda affiliate. In fact, the theories of who was behind the attack were multiple and conflicting for days afterward.
The Open Source Center serves US intelligence in conveying press reports, and translating some of them, to analysts. They are then released to the public via e.g. university libraries. Here are the reports included by OSC for September 11-12 in the aftermath of that attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. The press reports, including interviews with Libyan officials on the ground, would have shaped analysts’ perceptions, along with internal emails such as those recently acquired by CNN:
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 T00:01:10 TRIPOLI, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) — One American staff member from the U.S. consulate in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi was killed on Tuesday night after hundreds of protesters, angered by an alleged U.S.-made movie that insults the Prophet Mohammed, broke into the consulate building, a Libya’s interior ministry official said.
Wanis Sharef, an assistant to Libya’s interior minister, told Xinhua that the diplomats of the U.S. mission have been evacuated to avoid clashes with the protesters.
Sharef confirmed that one person from the consulate was killed, but did not say clearly whether the dead was a diplomat or not.
Meanwhile, reports from Washington have by now confirmed one death in the consulate attack in Benghazi, but it neither revealed the casualty’s identity.
At the same time, local media in Libya said that another U.S. official might also have been injured.
This account by the Chinese wire service Xinhua depends on a briefing by the Libyan interior minister, who presumably should have had good information about Benghazi (the Interior Ministry in the Arab World is sort of like the US FBI). This report came out shortly after midnight on Sept. 12, just after the attack.
AFP, Wednesday, September 12, 2012 T11:28:34: “The American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three officials were killed when a mob attacked the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday.
“The ambassador was killed along with three other officials,” said Wanis al-Sharif, the Deputy Minister of the Interior. Stevens’ death in Tuesday’s attack was confirmed in a tweet by Mustafa Abu Shagur, the Deputy Prime Minister.
Stevens, a career officer with the US foreign service, had been in the country for less than four months after taking up his post in the capital Tripoli in May.
Fawzi Wanis, who heads the High Security Commission in Benghazi, confirmed that Stevens was at the consulate when it was attacked.
The ambassador was killed when an armed mob protesting against a film deemed offensive to Islam attacked the US mission, just hours after Islamists also stormed Washington’s embassy in the Egyptian capital Cairo.
The film at the center of the anti-US protests was made by an Israeli-American who describes Islam as a “cancer” and depicts the Prophet Mohammed sleeping with women, the Wall Street Journal reported.”
Note that the Agence France Presse correspondent in Libya thought that there was a protest in Benghazi against the ‘film’ “The Innocence of Muslims.”
Libya: Jihadist Websites Claim US Envoy’s Murder ‘Response’ to Al-Libi Death
Unattributed report: “Libya: US Ambassador’s Death, Vengeance for Al-Libi, Websites Linked to the Al-Qa’ida Galaxy Claim”
ANSA.it
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 T14:05
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
Rome, 12 September — The death of the US ambassador in the assault on Benghazi yesterday is “a response by the Ansar al-Sharia militia to the confirmation of the death of Abu al-Libi,” the Al-Qa’ida number two, that was provided by Ayman al-Zawahiri yesterday, Al-Qa’ida-ist websites claim. The United States confirmed his death on 5 June. In the evening a bomb went off precisely in the US delegation’s premises in Benghazi.
(Description of Source: Rome ANSA.it in Italian — Website of Associated National Press Agency featuring Italian domestic and international political and economic news; URL: http://www.ansa.it)
Note that this Italian report of something on ‘al-Qaeda web sites’ was disseminated at 2 pm on the Wednesday after the attacks, and that ‘al-Qaeda websites’ say a lot of things.
AFP Wednesday, September 12, 2012 T15:24:00 “Libyan authorities on Wednesday pointed a finger of blame at supporters of ousted leader Moammar Qaddafi’s regime and at Al-Qaeda for a deadly attack on the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.
“What happened yesterday coincided with September 11 and has a clear significance,” Mohamed al-Megaryef, president of Libya’s highest political authority, the elected General National Congress, told reporters in Tripoli.
He was referring to Al-Qaeda’s devastating attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.
“We categorically refuse to allow our lands to be used to mount cowardly and dirty revenge attacks,” he said.
Washington’s envoy to Libya and three other Americans were killed when an armed mob outraged over a low-budget movie mocking Islam late on Tuesday attacked the American consulate in Benghazi with rocket-propelled grenades.
Megaryef also pointed a finger of blame at the ousted regime, saying such actions were aimed at sabotaging Libya’s moves towards democracy in the wake of three decades of Qaddafi’s autocratic rule.”
So if you listened to the elected president of Libya, the attack on the consulate was done neither by a protest crowd nor by an al-Qaeda affiliate, but by left-overs (tahalleb) of the deposed Gaddafi regime.
Given this wide range of accounts, and given what wire services reporting from Libya were saying, confusion in Washington was all but guaranteed.
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
Google+