The
U.S. Military will reportedly begin training Senator John McCain’s
“heroes” in Libya despite knowing that terrorists will likely be on the
receiving end of such training. The Libyans will be the beneficiaries of
both conventional and Special Ops training. The Secretary of Defense
and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have reportedly been
apprised and are ok with it.
The
Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz quotes Admiral William McRaven of
U.S. Special Ops Command as saying the following during a recent panel
discussion:
“We are going to have to assume some risks,”
McRaven said. “Right now we have the authorities to do that training,
and I think as a country we have to say there is probably some risk that
some of the people we will be training with do not have the most clean
records, but at the end of the day it is the best solution we can find to train them to deal with their own problems.” {emphasis ours}
Training terrorists is the best solution?
It
was learned this past July and further confirmed last week that the
attackers in Benghazi who killed four Americans were highly organized,
coordinated, and well trained. In fact, a man suspected of possibly
leading the attack – Tarek Taha Abu Al-Azm – received military training
in the U.S. according to multiple Arabic sources.
Al-Azm: Benghazi suspect trained by U.S. Military.
Evidence
also suggests that Al-Azm was the real leader of the Jamal Network,
named after its founder Muhammad Jamal Abdo Al-Kashif. Both Al-Azm and
Al-Kashif are currently sitting in Egyptian jails as best we can
determine.
Last
month, the U.N. Security Council named Al-Kashif and the Jamal Network
as suspects in the Benghazi attack. The U.S. State Department went so
far as to identify the group and its leaders as terrorists. These
designations necessarily implicate Al-Azm, about whom very little is
written.
As
Gertz points out in his report, if the U.S. is training terrorists in
Libya, there’s a possibility they’ll be going to fight elsewhere:
Intelligence reports from earlier this year said some of the Islamists are engaged in training jihadists fighters who are then dispatched to Syria to join Islamist rebels there fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashir Assad.
The four-star admiral said the risks have been explained to senior leaders, including Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, and the regional combatant commanders. {emphasis ours}
In
addition to the Benghazi attackers being well organized, they also knew
intricate details about the compound. Much of this very well may be
attributable to the State Department’s reliance on the February 17
Martyrs Brigade (F17) to provide security. That group flies the al-Qaeda
flag on its Facebook page. There is also a significant
cross-pollination of leadership between F17 and Ansar Al-Sharia.
Speaking of Ansar Al-Sharia, Gertz writes:
The
group, Ansar al Sharia, continues to operate openly, despite promises
by President Barack Obama to bring those who carried out the Sept. 11,
2012 attacks to justice.
Additionally, Ansar al Sharia has grown
more belligerent in recent months, apparently abandoning propaganda
efforts to rebrand itself as a nonviolent militia.
More
than a year after the Benghazi attacks, no one has yet been brought to
justice for those attacks, the groups who carried them out are still
operating, one of the lead suspects in the attacks was an Egyptian
officer who was trained by the U.S. Military (al-Azm), and our Military
is being directed to train more of them in conventional and special ops.
Oh, and our Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are signing off on it all.
