Iran, Lies and Videotape

By Ken Timmerman

Aren’t you tired of the lies and obfuscations rolling off the lips of our most senior government leaders?

Last Friday, at a speech in Pensacola, Florida, for which he was paid the princely sum of $22,000, former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell pulled a Sergeant Schultz, saying he "knows nothing" about Iranians in Benghazi.

The question about the Iranian presence in Benghazi was written ahead of time and deliberately crafted by former U.S. intelligence officers to give him the opportunity to tell the truth without divulging classified matters.

Morell could have made a general comment to the effect that the U.S. has been concerned for years with the growing Iranian intelligence presence in many parts of the world. He might have mentioned Iran’s reckless eagerness to kill Americans, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Washington, DC, where the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guards got caught by the Department of Justice sending a flunky to blow up the Saudi ambassador at a bustling restaurant...

Here was the question, as read out by the moderator to Morell:

“Was the CIA aware of the Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in Benghazi during the uprising against Qaddafi, and later, in the lead-up to the attacks on Sept 11-12, 2012? Was the CIA aware of the arrival on July 31, 2012 of a 7-man team of so-called Iranian Red Crescent workers in Benghazi?”

There were many ways Morell could have answered that question truthfully, even artfully, without getting into classified matters or jeopardizing the ongoing (and foolish) nuclear talks with Iran.

Instead, he chose a flat-out lie.

Here’s what he said, word for word, from an audiotape of his presentation that evening:

“[Long pause] So. There were no Iranian operatives in Benghazi. There were no Hezbollah operatives in Benghazi. I can tell you that with great, great certainty. The people who showed up at the State Department facility that night were a mixture of folks who just wanted to cause trouble, folks who just wanted to have a good time, and Islamic extremists.”

The presence of Iranian and Hezbollah operatives in Benghazi was well known to the CIA, which had been reporting on their activities on a regular basis. It was well known to Ambassador Stevens, who was present at a briefing by the embassy’s Emergency Action Committee in June 2012 where the CIA Chief of Station made a Powerpoint presentation on Iran’s efforts to move men and money to Benghazi.

It was also known to the local media, which published pictures of the seven-man Iranian team of Red Crescent workers who arrived in Benghazi on July 31, 2012 and were “kidnapped” almost immediately. It is no state secret that the Red Crescent society, the Muslim counterpart to the Red Cross, has been used repeatedly by terrorists in Gaza, the West Bank, Somalia and Sudan for operations having nothing to do with its humanitarian charter.

I have posted some of those photographs at my on-line reader’s guide for my latest book, Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi, here.

But Morell was not content to leave it there, with his stunning affirmative denial that Iranian and Hezbollah operatives were present in Benghazi.

Instead, he went on to present a detailed – and totally false – picture of a bunch of goofballs out for a Friday night prank.

“It was a mixture,” he went on.

“And if you watched the video, if you watched the video of what played out that night at that compound, what you will see is not an organized military assault. You will see a bunch of people come through the front gate. You see them spread out over the compound. You will see them run by buildings. You will see them not looking for Americans. You will see them trying to break down doors in a comedic fashion, literally, Three Stooges style. Some doors they get in. Some doors they try a couple of times and give up. When they go into a building where there are America ns they don’t find them because they aren’t looking for them. They run out of the buildings with suits, Xboxes, all sorts of things like that. They set fires to buildings and that’s how the ambassador and one of his security officers died. But there’s no absolutely no evidence that they set those fires to kill the Ambassador and his security officer.”

Now, nobody thinks the Iranians were dumb enough to strut in front of the security cameras. But as I disclose in Dark Forces, they were conducting surveillance and managing the overall operation, including the deliberate arson, from a building across the street that overlooked the compound.

Morell goes on to claim, against all evidence, that the organized jihadis who broke through the front gate and advanced “using silent military handsignals,” according to eyewitness accounts, had been spontaneously inspired by watching videos of protests at the U.S. embassy in Cairo earlier that day.

“And what happened in Cairo a few hours earlier was that there was a large protest and the protestors got over the fence and did a lot of vandalism, burned some vehicles at the embassy, and the folks in Benghazi saw that and said, hey, let’s do the same thing. That’s why it wasn’t organized, and that’s why there were large groups of different kinds of folks,” Morell said.

Actually, what happened in Cairo was also an organized assault, sparked by calls from the brother of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahri two days earlier for jihadi groups to storm the embassy and kill the Americans inside. Videos of their assault showed them scaling the embassy walls, taking down the stars and stripes, and hoisting the black flag of al Qaeda in its place.

Friends, it’s time to demand the truth. Please forward this email to your friends, and do what you can to ensure it reaches Rep. Trey Gowdy and other members of the Benghazi Select Committee and their staffs.

And it’s time for those who are spreading deliberate lies to be held accountable.


Hat tip: New English Review.