The New York Times has done excellent reporting on Libya. The newspaper was among the first to reveal that U.S.-approved arms for the Libyan rebels had fallen into the hands of jihadi groups and, more generally, on the rise of al Qaeda-affiliated groups in Libya and North Africa. So the paper’s Dec. 28 “investigation” that determined with utter certainty that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi were caused by a YouTube video would be baffling if it weren’t so obvious an attempt to exonerate the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton from responsibility for the deadly failures in Libya that cost the lives of four brave Americans.
The Times’ report misconstrues known facts and simply sweeps under the table mountains of evidence of al Qaeda’s ties to Libyan jihadi groups.In June 2012, for example, more than a dozen different jihadi groups put the black flag of al Qaeda on parade in Benghazi in what they hoped would be a three-day show of force. Thousands of jihadi fighters, many of them in Pakistani and Afghan dress, paraded through the streets of Benghazi with hundreds of gun trucks.
For The New York Times, though, the black flags were merely “the black flags of militant Islam” and apparently bore no relation to al Qaeda. “Benghazi was not infiltrated by al Qaeda,” The Times flatly asserted.
In August, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens put his name to a cable with the auspicious title, “The Guns of August,” that explicitly warned about the security vacuum in Benghazi and Tripoli. “What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks,” the cable warned.
It was one of dozens of cables detailing the growing chaos in Libya that were turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after repeated stonewalling by the State Department. My sources say it came on the heels of an alarming security briefing by the CIA chief of station for Stevens and the Embassy security team. But for The New York Times, the cable simply “struck an understanding tone about the absence of effective policing.”


















