Just two days before the 9/11 anniversary
attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, two leaders of the Libyan militias
responsible for keeping order in the city threatened to withdraw their
men.
The brinksmanship is detailed in a cable
approved by Ambassador Chris Stevens and sent on the day he died in the attack,
the worst assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission since the 1979 hostage crisis in
Iran. The dispatch, which was marked “sensitive” but not “classified,”
contained a number of other updates on the chaotic situation on the ground in
post-Gaddafi Libya.
The cable, reviewed by The Daily Beast,
recounts how the two militia leaders, Wissam bin Ahmed and Muhammad al-Gharabi,
accused the United States of supporting Mahmoud Jibril, the head of the Libyan
transitional government, to be the country’s first elected prime minister.
Jibril’s centrist National Forces Alliance won the popular vote in Libyan
elections in July, but he lost the prime minister vote in the country’s
Parliament on Sept. 12 by 94 to 92. Had he won, bin Ahmed and al-Gharabi warned
they “would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function
they asserted they were currently providing,” the cable reads. The man who beat
Jibril, Mustafa Abushagur, lost a vote of no-confidence Sunday, throwing Libyan
politics back into further uncertainty.
The threat from the militias underscores
the dangers of relying on local Libyan forces for security in the run-up to the
9/11 military-style assault. The U.S.
consulate in Benghazi employed a militia called the “February 17 Martyrs
Brigade” for security of the four-building compound. In addition, there were
five Americans serving as diplomatic security and a group of former special
operations forces that acted as a quick reaction force on the day of the 9/11
attack. Members of the militias led by bin-Ahmed and al-Gharabi overlapped with
the February 17 militia, the cable says.
Jason Chaffetz, the Republican lawmaker who
has led the House Oversight and Government Reform committee’s investigation
into the 9/11 attack, says the State Department actually decreased U.S.
diplomatic security personnel in the months leading up to the attack.
The cable, titled “Benghazi Weekly Report –
September 11, 2012,” notes the dangerous environment in eastern Libya. It does
not, however, make a specific plea to Washington for more personnel or more
security upgrades, and concludes that much of the violence in the country
consists of Libyans attacking other Libyans, as opposed to specific plots
directed at the West. Indeed, it says that in a meeting with Stevens, members
of the Benghazi Local Council said security in their city was improving.
At the same time, the cable makes no
mention of the anti-Muslim YouTube video or planned protests at the consulate,
two key pillars of the Obama administration’s initial narrative on the 9/11
attacks.
Chaffetz, who visited Tripoli on Saturday,
told The Daily Beast he has obtained documents and conducted interviews with
whistle blowers that show the U.S. mission Libya did request more security from
Washington in the run-up to the attack, but was denied. “Regional
security officers were denied requests for more personnel and security upgrades
to the four buildings and the perimeter security of the U.S. mission in
Benghazi,” he told The Daily Beast on Sunday. More details on that negotiation
will likely come out on Wednesday, when Chaffetz will hold his committee’s
first hearing on the Benghazi attack.
The cable in some ways is bittersweet. It
provides a snapshot of U.S. activities in Libya’s second-largest city before
the assault that killed Stevens and three other Americans. It acknowledged the
rise of Islamist forces in the militias and in the nearby city of Dernaa, a hotbed
of al Qaeda recruiting in the last decade. In that city, an outfit called the
“Abu-Salim Brigade” was beginning to enforce a harsh version of Islamic law
that prohibited any co-mingling of men and women at the local university. One
correspondent with the late ambassador urged him to send someone to Dernaa to
“see the truth for yourselves.”
But the cable also details how the U.S.
mission in Libya was optimistic about Libya’s future. The cable described plans
for something called “the American space” in Benghazi. The new facility would
contain “a small library, computer lab, and open space for programming.” It
said the new facility has already been used for a dialogue on foreign policy
with young Libyans.
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Eli Lake is the senior national-security
correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He previously covered national
security and intelligence for the Washington Times. Lake has also been a
contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy,
intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo
and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few
journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil:
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
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