As the Petraeus "All In" affair continues to unfold new revelations about the attack in Benghazi are the most interesting parts of it.
On October 26 Petraeus lover Paula Broadwell gave a talk (video) at an alumni symposium. She pointed out that three Libyans were held at the CIA "annex" compound in Benghazi and that this was probably the reason why it was attacked. That was know due to a Foxnews report that was published earlier that day:
According to a source on the ground at the time of the attack, the team inside the CIA annex had captured three Libyan attackers and was forced to hand them over to the Libyans.
Foxnews now stupidly asks if that Broadwell speech may have revealed classified information. But as Broadwell refereed to "the facts that came out today" she obviously had read the Foxnews report and just repeated its claims.
But there is a new much more important issue buried in today's Foxnews report:
A well-placed Washington source confirms to Fox News that there were Libyan militiamen being held at the CIA annex in Benghazi and that their presence was being looked at as a possible motive for the staged attack on the consulate and annex that night.
According to multiple intelligence sources who have served in Benghazi, there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.
The Libya annex was the largest CIA station in North Africa, and two weeks prior to the attack, the CIA was preparing to shut it down. Most prisoners, according to British and American intelligence sources, had been moved two weeks earlier.
The CIA compound in Benghazi was a black-hole prison the CIA was supposed to close. The CIA somewhat denies that it held prisoners there:
The CIA, though, categorically denied these allegations, saying: “The CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.”
The CIA is correct in that the Executive Order 13491 (pdf) denies it detention authority:
Sec. 4. (a) CIA Detention. The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.
But the CIA denial is irrelevant. The people who talked to Foxnews are claiming that prisoners were "held and interrogated by CIA contractors", not by the CIA itself. The Executive Order only refers to the CIA, not to the military. We know that "former" special operation soldiers were operating from the "annex". How much "former" these are is a yet unknown. The drone that came to observe the situation as the annex was attacked was operated by the military for observation of some alleged militant training camps near Benghazi. Also unknown is which "contractors" the CIA hired for that dirty part of the business it is no longer allowed to do itself.
We do know that U.S. Special Forces are involved in lot of secret operations in northern Africa. For example on April 20 three Special Force soldiers accompanied by three Moroccan prostitutes died in a traffic accident in Mali.
What the men were doing in the impoverished country of Mali, and why they were still there a month after the United States suspended military relations with its government, is at the crux of a mystery that officials have not fully explained even 10 weeks later.
If that Foxnews report gets confirmed it seems that the CIA station in Benghazi was not only involved in weapons transfers to Syrian insurgents but was also part of some combined operation with Special Forces in which contractors were used to do detention and interrogation "stuff" that the CIA and maybe even the special forces are no longer allowed to do.Are there more such prisons and to which one were the people who were held in Benghazi transferred to? The CIA prison in Somalia?
The prison and the questions it opens is of course something the Obama administration would have wanted to hide before the election and would explain its laughable "that Mohammed video made them do it" claims.