Exclusive: Former CIA Official: Obama ‘October Surprise’ Airstrike in Libya ‘Would Be Criminal’
The former senior CIA official told Breitbart News that with America’s lack of intelligence on the ground in Libya, the fallout for any sort of airstrike could be catastrophic, leading to civilian casualties, and more broadly, to the fall of a weak but moderate Libyan government. He pointed out that the government in Pakistan has been forced to answer for US airstrikes inside Pakistan, thanks to the high level of civilian casualties; such scrutiny for a weaker and far more moderate government in Libya would cause its collapse. “The danger is what straw will break a very weak, moderate, democratically elected government in Libya,” he stated. “There are people on the ground with relationships with the Tripoli government. This government is hanging on by a thread, building a coalition to keep the extremists at bay and the moderates together. Any unilateral US attack that isn’t looked upon as something done in conjunction with Libyan forces will be very difficult for this government to survive.”
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The former senior CIA official stated that it is usual for the Department of Defense to put together contingency lists in the aftermath of foreign policy catastrophes like the murder of our ambassador in Libya. He also said that he had confidence that the Department of Defense would stand against any airstrike inside Libyan targets: “They’ll have enough people who will say, ‘this is purely political.’”
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With that level of politicization of our defense strategy in the White House, this official states that a “wag the dog” scenario, in which airstrikes are undertaken in order to make the president seem stronger going into an election, is a very real possibility. “We’re 30 days before the election,” he said. “People have been crying wolf over ‘wag the dog’ since the movie came out. But this would be it. There’s not one intelligence officer – even the Director of National Intelligence – who could look you in the eye and say, ‘Sure, the intelligence is good enough for a surgical strike using smart weapons from above.’
“If the administration pursues an airstrike at this time, both Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and CIA Director General David Petraeus should be removed from office … This would be criminal.”
By Jake Tapper
@jaketapper
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Oct 5, 2012 7:00amEmail Shows State Department Rejecting Request of Security Team at US Embassy in Libya
ABC News has obtained an internal State Department email from May 3, 2012, indicating that the State Department denied a request from the security team at the Embassy of Libya to retain a DC-3 airplane in the country to better conduct their duties.
Copied on the email was U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in a terrorist attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012, along with three other Americans. That attack has prompted questions about whether the diplomatic personnel in that country were provided with adequate security support.
No one has yet to argue that the DC-3 would have definitively made a difference for the four Americans killed that night. The security team in question, after all, left Libya in August.
But the question – both for the State Department, which is conducting an internal investigation, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding hearings next week – is whether officials in Washington, D.C., specifically at the State Department, were as aware as they should have been about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, and whether officials were doing everything they could to protect Americans in that country.
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The subject line of the email, from Miki Rankin, the post management officer for Libya and Saudi Arabia, reads “Termination of Tripoli DC-3 Support.”
Rankin informs Stevens and the others on the email, whose names have been redacted, that Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy “has determined that support for Embassy Tripoli using the DC-3 will be terminated immediately. Post’s request to continue use of the plane in support of the SST was considered. However, it was decided that, if needed, NEA will charter a special flight for their departure.”
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Email on next post
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Shown the email uncovered by ABC News, a spokesman for the committee said the “document is consistent with what the Oversight Committee has been told by individuals who worked in Libya. Ambassador Stevens and the diplomatic mission in Libya made multiple security related requests that were turned down by Washington based officials. Security related transportation has been identified as one of the particular items where embassy personnel did not receive the support they sought.”