Seven days before Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were murdered in our Benghazi Special Mission and CIA annex, an interview with Abdel Hakim Belhadj with Le Monde was republished. He became the head of Libya’s Transnational Government Military Council, said to be in sole control of Libya’s security in August 2011 until May of 2012. Belhadj and the CIA has ‘history.’
Abdel Hakim Belhadj aka Abu Abdullah Sadeq aka Abu Abdullah Saddiq
Flashback: Belhadj had an unfortunate interlude with the CIA in 2004 when he was arrested by the CIA (at the behest of Britain’s MI6) at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia (he may have also been arrested by CIA in Pakistan in 2001 and returned to Libya). Belhadj and his wife were sent back to Libya where he spent seven years in the Abu Salim Prison and reportedly says he was brutally tortured before sent back to Libya (whether by the CIA or Malaysians isn’t clear) and after.
Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi arranged Belhadj’s release in 2009. In August 2011, Belhadj led the charge to topple the gates of Gaddafi’s Tripoli Palace, although Gaddafi had fled to safer pastures. In that 7 days, Gaddafi’s government collapsed. Belhadj became the head of Libya’s Military Council and security for the country. Now his name may be tied to our Embassy and CIA annex deaths and woundings, and the story is much, much bigger.
CNN broke a story today that “dozens” of CIA were in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012 – far more than we have been told. Others are telling that story. I’d like to go in a different direction.
AllahPundit at Hot Air says Belhadj has ties to Osama bin Laden. Belhadj says he simply met him twice.
CNN is reporting twenty-one (21) Americans were working inside the CIA Annex on the night of September 11, 2012. They further report that the number of Americans between the Mission and Annex totalled 35 with 7 wounded.
Many sources believe that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi to transact business involving shipping arms to Syrian rebels. CNN reported in October 2011 that a shipment of SA-7 surface-to-air (SAMs) anti-craft missles (MANPADS) and rocket-propelled grenades traveled from Benghazi to Syria through southern Turkey. Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat at the Compound just a few short hours before he died.
SAMs can be used to shoot down airliners. “Thousands” of them went missing after Gaddafi met his end with a bayonet up his rear.
MANPADS
Was the task to gather the missing missiles and ship them out of harms way – maybe back to the U.S. or was the task to covertly smuggle them to Syrian rebels (you know them, the “moderates” that the Obama administration says we were NOT arming)?
Was Belhadj in charge of these SAMs and other weapons, in an exchange aided by Stevens and the Obama administration via the presence of “dozens” of unexplained and unreported CIA agents on the scene? He was the head of the Military Council and in charge of security. He had to be involved.
Gaddafi hated the Muslim Brotherhood. For years he made every attempt to wipe them out, and did a fairly good job of it, at least to the naked eye.
Files examined by Newsweek and The Daily Beast at Tripoli’s notorious Internal Security headquarters last week include extensive records on thousands of detainees. The most common charge? Jihad. The most common sentence? Life imprisonment.
Abu Abdullah Sadeq—Belhaj’s nom de guerre—topped the Gaddafi regime’s most-wanted list for years….together with other Afghan vets he [Belhadj] created the LIFG. “We wanted to tear down the regime,” says Belhaj. Source: The Daily Beast Page 1 September 2, 2011
In 1995 Belhadj tried, he lost and was once again on the run. …
…Belhaj found himself in serious trouble after Gaddafi abruptly decided to make peace with the West in 2003. As a gesture of support, the State Department added the LIFG to its list of terrorist organizations, and the vast resources of America’s intelligence services were added to the Libyan regime’s efforts to track down the group’s members. It didn’t take long: Malaysian authorities captured Belhaj in Kuala Lumpur and conveyed him to the CIA… Source: The Daily Beast Page 2
It seems fairly certain Belhadj’s LIFG is affiliated with al-Qaeda. What were his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Under the Political Isolation Law, if passed, anyone who held a position in the Qaddafi regime over the last 30 years would be banned for 10 years from holding office in the government. The law would effectively remove the President, the Prime Minister, and one-third of the GNC from office and would amount to a legal coup d’etat by the forces of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the Muslim Brotherhood. Source – May 2013
If you missed it, Kevin McCullough radio talk show host writing at Townhall had a bombshell story a few weeks ago. He had in his possession a copy of a document written in Arabic and translated by an Arabic speaker from a U.S. University. The Libyan internal government memo discussed the confessions of 6 Egyptians saying they were responsible for the assault on the Mission and Annex and…further said that Dr. Mohamed Morsi sent them and funded them. Morsi (Mursi) is the deposed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood former president now sequestered somewhere in Egypt by the Egyptian military. Walid Shoebat says he has a video of one of the attackers at the Mission looking into a security camera saying “we’re sent by Mursi.” Neither of these stories have been touched in the media. Are they true? I don’t know but neither should be difficult to confirm.
The stories of a botched kidnapping sanctioned by the U.S. to exchange Stevens for The Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman – in a U.S. prison convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) are rampant. Morsi would likely be jazzed to finance that operation while working side-by-side with Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.
U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens
Why would the CIA believe they could work with Belhadj and why would they want to? I can understand why Belhadj would see the co-operation a great opportunity for heavy-handed payback, but cannot resolve the CIA engaging him.
In 2007, LIFG was calling for a jihad against Gaddafi but also against the US and assorted Western “infidels”. (see source below)
Abdel Hakim Belhadj sued parts of the British government for their rendition deal with the U.S. to ship him and his pregnant wife back to Libya, with prison and torture awaiting. No resolution as yet that I can find.
In May 2012 Belhadj left his post in Libya’s Transnational Government.
Follows a fascinating background report on Belhadj:
How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli:
His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him….
Muammar Gaddafi’s fortress of Bab-al-Aziziyah was essentially invaded and conquered last week by Belhaj’s men – who were at the forefront of a militia of Berbers from the mountains southwest of Tripoli. The militia is the so-called Tripoli Brigade, trained in secret for two months by US Special Forces. This turned out to be the rebels’ most effective militia in six months of tribal/civil war.
Already last Tuesday, Belhaj was gloating on how the battle was won, with Gaddafi forces escaping “like rats” (note that’s the same metaphor used by Gaddafi himself to designate the rebels)…
After 9/11, Belhaj moved to Pakistan and also to Iraq, where he befriended none other than ultra-nasty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – all this before al-Qaeda in Iraq pledged its allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and turbo-charged its gruesome practices…
The LIFG [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] had been on the US Central Intelligence Agency’s radars since 9/11. In 2003, Belhaj was finally arrested in Malaysia – and then transferred, extraordinary rendition-style, to a secret Bangkok prison, and duly tortured.
In 2004, the Americans decided to send him as a gift to Libyan intelligence – until he was freed by the Gaddafi regime in March 2010, along with other 211 “terrorists”, in a public relations coup advertised with great fanfare…
Crucially, still in 2007, then al-Qaeda’s number two, Zawahiri, officially announced the merger between the LIFG and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM). So, for all practical purposes, since then, LIFG/AQIM have been one and the same – and Belhaj was/is its emir.
In 2007, LIFG was calling for a jihad against Gaddafi but also against the US and assorted Western “infidels”.
Fast forward to last February when, a free man, Belhaj decided to go back into jihad mode and align his forces with the engineered uprising in Cyrenaica.
Every intelligence agency in the US, Europe and the Arab world knows where he’s coming from. He’s already made sure in Libya that himself and his militia will only settle for sharia law.
There’s nothing “pro-democracy” about it – by any stretch of the imagination. And yet such an asset could not be dropped from NATO’s war just because he was not very fond of “infidels”….
Read the breaking CNN story here and be sure to read Hot Air’s story as CIA agents say they under tremendous pressure – unprecedented pressure – to keep quiet about Benghazi.
So many questions. I believe we haven’t yet seen the tip of the fuse of the coming explosion if Congress does it’s job. Read more at Reaganite Republican – think blackmail
Linked at AskMarion in Formation of Citizens Commission on Benghazi Announced – thank you!
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