Adm. James Lyons (Ret.) on Growing Benghazi Scandal
The nominations of John Brennan for CIA Director
and Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense are being held up by
Republicans in the Senate largely because of the unwillingness of the
Obama administration to come clean on the what the President knew, when
he knew it, and what he did during the seven hours that the Temporary
Mission and the annex in Benghazi were under attack on September 11th and 12th last year.
AIM recently interviewed Retired Admiral James Lyons. He
is the former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and a man
not afraid to tell it like it is. We need more men like Admiral Lyons to
stand up to the lies, hypocrisy and political correctness that so
dominates our national dialogue today.
The interview took place the day after outgoing
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony to Congress, which Adm.
Lyons discussed in our interview. It was before outgoing Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin
Dempsey testified before Congress, which raised questions about how
in-the-loop Obama was during the terrorist attack, which killed
Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
I asked Adm. Lyons what he thought of Hillary Clinton’s
question to the senators when she was feeling the heat from their
questions. “What difference does it make?” she angrily asked, referring
to how the men died. The questions asked of Sec. Clinton were trying to
get an answer to why the administration had claimed for weeks that the
attack was in response to an anti-Islamic video produced in the U.S.,
when records and testimony made it clear that it was a planned terrorist
attack on the 11th anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the intelligence community knew it from the first day.
Adm. Lyons answer to “What difference does it make” was,
“Richard Nixon found out what the difference is when you lie to the
American public—and in his lie, it was only a bungled burglary attempt;
nobody got killed. In this case, we had four Americans murdered.
Furthermore, we knew, within a matter of hours, that this was a
determined, preplanned terrorist attack. So you have to ask yourself,
why perpetuate this lie for almost two weeks?”
During the interview, Adm. Lyons gave his views on what
he thinks was going on in Libya at the time; on the “Arab Spring;” on
sending F-16s and tanks to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt; on
President Obama’s new national security team; and on the Law of the Seas
Treaty, among other topics. Below are excerpts from the interview. You
can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript here. You can read Admiral Lyons’ bio and learn more about his current activities here.
ROGER ARONOFF: You have been a persistent critic
of how the [Obama] administration has handled the attack on our special
mission compound in Benghazi. We’ve had a couple of reports, including
the Accountability Review Board, and then, yesterday, we had Secretary
of State [Hillary] Clinton’s testimony. Do you feel we’ve gained a more
clear picture of what really happened?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Not in the least: You’re still
getting the smokescreen. I must say that, quote, “Independent”
Accountability Review Board, from my perspective, was like having the
Mafia investigate a crime scene.
ARONOFF: Okay. Explain why. That was the one headed by Pickering, Thomas Pickering—
ADMIRAL LYONS: Pickering and—[Admiral Mike]
Mullen. Pickering, he’s the chairman of the International Crisis
Group—which is a Soros-funded group. Plus, with his long career in the
State Department, I wouldn’t consider that to be foremost in getting an
independent review. What really needs to happen here—and you could see
it yesterday in the testimony of Secretary Clinton—you’re never going to
get the true story until you appoint a Special Prosecutor, pull in, put
the people under oath to find out what actually went on.
ARONOFF: I want to give you, first, the
opportunity to clarify a quote that has been widely attributed to you—it
was on numerous websites. You were said to have told The Washington
Examiner that Benghazi was actually a bungled kidnapping attempt
perpetrated upon Ambassador [Christopher] Stevens, and that it was going
to be part of a hostage exchange for the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel
Rahman, who sits in jail in the U.S. for his role in planning the first
World Trade Center bombing in 1993. I’m sure you’ve seen that—
ADMIRAL LYONS: Right. First, yes, I appreciate
the opportunity to clarify because, first of all, I’ve never talked to
The Washington Examiner. Where this came up: I was on Lou Dobbs’s show,
and somebody must have copied down from that show, maybe submitted a
report or something, to The Washington Examiner. Lou asked me, “What do
[you] think went on? What [do you] suspect happened?” I said, “Well, if I
had to speculate, I believe this was a bungled, a bungled attack—a
kidnapping attack, to kidnap Ambassador Stevens, and hold him in
exchange for the Blind Sheikh.” You know there’s been a lot of pressure,
certainly from [Egyptian President Mohamed] Morsi; that’s one of his
objectives, to get the Blind Sheikh released. Now, again, [Dobbs] asked
me what I thought, and I speculated, because nothing else made sense to
me. We know that Ambassador Stevens was concerned over his safety there.
I mean, why would he stay there—first of all, why was he even there on
the night of 9/11? You have the significance of the date of 9/11—most
places, people hunker down. Then we had a lot of not only tactical, but
strategic warning of this attack. We can get into that now, if you’d
like.
ARONOFF: Yes, why don’t you give us some of that?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Let me say, from my viewpoint,
there was both strategic and tactical warning. In the previous June, we
had both the British Consulate and the International Red Cross close
their offices up due to the assassination attempt on the British Consul
General, and other assassinations. We had the bombing outside our
special mission compound on the 6th of June. On the 16th of August, the
cable was put out—“Look, in a determined attack, we cannot defend this
compound—” and they requested additional security assistance. They
didn’t get any.
The day of the attack, the Blue Mountain Security
manager, that afternoon, sensed there was something wrong. He put out an
alert on both his radios and cell phones. Prior to that, we know one of
the policemen who was assigned to guard the compound was seen taking
pictures of the inner layout the compound. We found a memo, later, by
Ambassador Stevens, saying he found this to be most troubling. We know,
according to reports, reliable reports, that road blocks were set up at
least three hours before the attack. We know the [Turkish] Consul
General, who was the last person to see Ambassador Stevens, had to go
through those road blocks…Then there was a British security team that,
through prior arrangements, would drop off or pick up equipment from the
compound. So there was more than ample evidence, signals—warnings that
something is not right, and knowing that [Stevens] feared for his
safety, why would he stay there? It makes no sense to me. That’s why I
speculated, “Perhaps this was supposed to be part of a kidnapping,
hostage situation, holding him in exchange for the Blind Sheikh”:
Because killing Ambassador Stevens made no sense to me, since he was the
great facilitator in funneling the arms to the rebels, to other
militias—many of which were al-Qaeda-affiliated, who had been fighting
our troops in Iraq. So why would you kill the golden goose? It made no
sense to me.
ADMIRAL LYONS: There’s one other thing I’d
mention—The leader of al-Qaeda, the day before, on 10 September, put out
a video calling for revenge on the U.S. for the killing of a key
al-Qaeda leader in Libya by the CIA. When we we’re talking about videos,
that’s the video that everybody should have focused on. Not the
14-minute string-up, the anti-Islamic string-up that nobody had ever
seen!
__________________
ADMIRAL LYONS: We had Lieutenant Colonel Wood and
his 16-man security force, which was at the Embassy in Tripoli. They
were there in August. They had been there for a number of months to beef
the security. The ambassador requested they stay, they wanted to stay,
yet they were denied and yanked out. The pleas for additional security
were ignored, denied.
__________________
ADMIRAL LYONS: You have to ask yourself, what was
the political agenda they were trying to create here? That the Arab
Spring has been such a wonderful, great success in Libya? That we can
now stand down, and we can rely on the 17th February Martyrs Brigade to
provide the security—which, incidentally, has close affiliation with
al-Qaeda in the Maghreb? None of this really, if you step back and
analyze it, makes any sense.
___________________
ADMIRAL LYONS: And we can get into what resources could have been brought to bear that weren’t.
ARONOFF: Yeah, let’s touch on that, because this
is something that I’ve followed and written about, too. Secretary of
Defense [Leon] Panetta, early on, when he was asked about this, said,
and I quote here, he said “The basic principle”—on why no troops were
sent in to attempt to save or rescue Stevens and the others, his answer
was this, and this is a quote: “The basic principle is that you don’t
deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without
having some real time information about what’s taking place. And as a
result of not having that kind of information, we felt very strongly
that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.” But then he
later indicated that he actually gave verbal approval to have the Marine
teams based in Rota, Spain to come there, to Tripoli and Benghazi. Then
there was the Marine unit that you wrote about, stationed in Sigonella,
Italy; none of them went. But it looks like Panetta has changed his
story on this—
ADMIRAL LYONS: …All those comforting words that
“We don’t want to put our forces at risk.” We had people at risk—they
were crying for help! In a situation, you go with the resources you have
available—and, in this particular case, we did have that 130-man Marine
force recon team sitting there at Sigonella. Even if I only got 50 of
them over there, that would have been significant in turning the
situation around. We may not have been able to save the ambassador, but
we certainly could have saved those other two SEALs that were over on
the annex.
And there’s another tactic that we’ve used over the
years very successfully in dispelling mobs, and scenes like we witnessed
there in Benghazi: We had F-16 aircraft that could have been there
within a matter of an hour or two. What you have them do is, you have
them make a low pass over the scene at full afterburner. It has a
telling effect—it really gets their attention. Plus, with the equipment
they have in their cockpit, they could have been utilized to take some
offensive action—if we had the courage to do so. And there’s another
thing here, too.
The independent Review Board made a statement that they
made some request to embassies, but let me tell you this: I know of no
request that was made to the Turkish Consul General, the Turkish
Consulate, the Italian Consulate, or that British Security Team that was
in Benghazi. All have said they received no requests for support. They
went on to say, “If we were requested, we would have provided it.”
_____________________
ARONOFF: It’s really incredible. I think the sort
of smokescreen that you referred to, that Secretary Clinton was
throwing out there yesterday, part of it was “Well, look at what all was
going on: All of our embassies were under siege that day, in Egypt, in
Tunisia and—” I guess—“in Yemen,” so they were looking at dealing with
all of those situations and, I think, suggesting they were just kind of
overwhelmed by what was going on, and maybe didn’t act right. This sort
of also led up to this scenario where Senator Ron Johnson, from
Wisconsin, was asking her about why they persisted in telling this story
about the anti-Islamic video that you referred to a few minutes ago.
Her answer was saying—she said, quote, “What difference [at this point]
does it make” whether it was because it was “a protest or because guys
were out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some
Americans?” So I ask you, Admiral Lyons: What difference does it make?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Well, let me answer it this way:
Richard Nixon found out what the difference is when you lie to the
American public—and in his lie, it was only a bungled burglary attempt;
nobody got killed. In this case, we had four Americans murdered.
Furthermore, we knew, within a matter of hours, that this was a
determined, preplanned terrorist attack. So you have to ask yourself,
why perpetuate this lie for almost two weeks? Why did [Clinton]
participate in that video—at taxpayer’s expense, I might add—that was
sent all around Pakistan condemning the 14-minute stringer anti-Islamic
video that nobody had seen? Certainly, with our embassy in Cairo, they
had put out their Great Apology the day before, and, really, there
wasn’t anybody in our embassy; the Egyptians were able to quickly
restore order there. In Libya, you had no such situation: You had,
really, no functioning central government in Libya. It’s really in total
disarray. The Arab Spring there has fostered a group of
al-Qaeda-affiliated militias that have now made available all [Muammar]
Gaddafi’s military equipment, much of which we’re seeing show up in
Mali, and certainly may have been a part of equipping the group that did
the terrorist attack in Algeria.
_______________
ADMIRAL LYONS: In perpetuating this lie, we also
had administration officials lying to Congressional committees. That’s a
felony. So, “What difference does it make?” It makes all the difference
in the world. You cannot flaunt the truth here, just walk away from it
and, basically, tell the American public to stuff it. That’s not
acceptable.
The point on the organizing the two Marine
anti-terrorist teams in Rota, that was good to go ahead and stand ’em
up. What I find incomprehensible: The first team, it took them 23 hours
to go a few hundred miles from Rota to Tripoli. I could go around the
world in 23 hours, so that makes absolutely no sense to me. And the fact
that they stood down the second team, which was supposed to go to our
special mission compound in Benghazi—the excuse being, “Well, all the
Americans are out of there”—makes no sense to me, since this was
American territory. That compound should have been immediately secured,
and certainly that Marine team was quite capable of doing that. Had they
done that, the FBI would have been immediately able to access that
scene and gain valuable information. Plus, we would have stopped the
looting, and, in this sense, that compound had to have certain
classified communications equipment; I can’t believe that they did not
have communications equipment—and you have to ask, What happened to that
equipment? Who has it today? I know Secretary Clinton made this grand,
flowing statement, “There was nothing classified in the compound.” I
find that incomprehensible.
ARONOFF: Yes, I mean, how do they know? Look, CNN, just walking through there, found [Stevens’s] log book!
ADMIRAL LYONS: Yes, of course!
ARONOFF: And then, three weeks later, The
Washington Post went in and found other things that no one had even
touched or picked up. I mean, it’s incredible.
ADMIRAL LYONS: What was it they wanted to keep our people from seeing there?
ARONOFF: Well, yes, I mean, that’s the question,
but they didn’t secure the place to keep reporters from just walking
through and picking up whatever they could find.
ADMIRAL LYONS: Yes, well, they couldn’t stop the reporters from going in, but they certainly could stop our military from going in.
ARONOFF: Right. The question, I guess, is where
this goes from here. Let me bring up one other aspect: Frank Gaffney of
the Center for Security Policy, and others, have speculated that really
what was going on here was that—and you made reference to this—the
weapons that we had supplied to the Libyans who were fighting to
overthrow Gaddafi, all these weapons, or many of these, were now being
supplied to the so-called rebels in Syria—some who were al-Qaeda and all
that, so this was sort of a gun-walking—think Fast and
Furious—operation into Syria, to other al-Qaeda people, and this is
what’s being sort of covered up here. Do you have an opinion on that?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Let me put it to you this way: I
agree with Frank’s statement there. We know that it was being funded
both by Qatar and the Saudi Arabians. What was going on would make
Iran-Contra look like child’s play.
ARONOFF: Hmm. So where is Congress? Why—I mean,
look: The Republicans control the House. Do they not have access to this
information? Do they lack—the guts? The vision?
ADMIRAL LYONS: I think really what has to happen
is, the House has to have the courage to appoint a Special Prosecutor.
We still don’t even know how Ambassador Stevens died. You’ve not been
able to interview any of the people that were rescued from Benghazi.
You’ve got to get these people in, put them under oath, and find out the
true story of what went on. Nothing else, to me, is acceptable.
ARONOFF: Yes. Let’s touch on a couple other
things sort of related in a way. One thing is the Arab Spring in
general: Now we see that we’re about to supply these advanced F-16
fighter planes and these Abrams tanks to Egypt. Egypt is now controlled
by the Muslim Brotherhood—
ADMIRAL LYONS: Exactly.
ARONOFF: —and Morsi, and we know what he thinks
of Israel. The question, the obvious question that hangs over this is,
Who are these weapons to be used against? And Why are we doing this?
What is your overall opinion of how this Arab Spring is going, and this
act in particular?
ADMIRAL LYONS: The Arab Spring is a total
disaster. We have uncontrolled militias, certainly throughout Libya,
Mali. You’ve got, certainly, the situation in Syria. You look at Iraq:
Iraq is far from any streaming success. The major weapons systems, the
F-16s and the Abrams tanks—the 200 Abrams tanks that are being
transferred—all of that commitment was done with [former Egyptian
President Hosni] Mubarak. So, to me, since they threw out Mubarak, I
would have canceled the deal. Why go forward with it?
ARONOFF: I think the theory goes that Morsi
played the role of this great peacemaker when he got Hamas to stop
[firing rockets at Israel].
ADMIRAL LYONS: Oh, now wait a minute. “Great
peacemaker”—Please, spare me! He’s the guy who endorses Hamas! Hamas is a
wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza! It is their group! So this
“great peacemaker” is just—pure hogwash! We’ve got to take our head out
of the sand. The Muslim Brotherhood penetration in this country is
really unconscionable: They’ve been able to penetrate almost every one
of our government agencies. You see it reflected down in the
administration’s directive, where we have to purge all of our training
manuals and instructors on anything that purports the truth about Islam.
Anything that is considered anti-Islamic must be purged, and our
instructors that don’t fall in line find themselves with new orders
elsewhere. We have the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, that our
great Secretary of State has endorsed, which impinges on our First
Amendment right of freedom of expression, and the administration is
embracing this, that we leave it up to the—what is it, 57 or 58 Islamic
states that make up that organization—to determine what they consider to
be insulting to Islam, and, therefore, they can impose sanctions or
bring you to trial, or whatever on this. None of this makes any sense to
me.
ARONOFF: Mm-hmm. Paper tigers. So today, our
posture, in relation to Iran and Israel—first of all, what’s the signal
being sent by these arms being shipped to Egypt, as well as the
appointments of [John] Kerry, [Chuck] Hagel, and [John] Brennan as
President Obama’s national security team? What does this say about our
posture toward both Iran and Israel?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Certainly, if I were Iran I’d be thrilled to death with those appointments.
ARONOFF: Why’s that?
ADMIRAL LYONS: Because none of them are for
taking any military action against Iran, which is giving them clear
sailing for the development of their nuclear weapon capability. And it
isn’t just their capability in Iran—you’ve got to look at what they’ve
done in Latin America. We have Iranian operational missile bases today
in Venezuela—fully up and operational. They’ve been able to accomplish
what the Soviet Union tried to do in Cuba in 1962. We have cities in the
United States today which are under the threat umbrella of those
missiles that are in Venezuela. It needs to be addressed. In fact, they
should be forced out of there post-haste—“Either take them out, or we’ll
take them out.” I don’t see that happening.
ARONOFF: What about Israel? What is the message to Israel with these appointments and these actions and—
ADMIRAL LYONS: It certainly cannot be
encouraging. I think they’re going to have to look at themselves to
become more self-reliant. Regretfully, none of this contributes to
maintaining the peace through a strong deterrence. When you show
weakness, which we’re doing, it only encourages those who would do us
harm. I mean, how many times do we have to go down this path to really
come to our senses on this? Here we had four Americans killed in
Benghazi—what do we do? Absolutely nothing. There are training camps—we
know there are training camps out there that these militias were using; I
wanted to destroy them! This idea of “Well, we’ve got to respect the
sovereignty of Libya”—not when our people are being murdered—and held
under duress.
ARONOFF: Just a couple more things here I’d like
you to comment on. The Law of the Sea Treaty keeps lurking right behind
the scenes; for years, with Senator [Dick] Lugar there, they were always
looking for an opportune moment to get it passed in the Senate and then
ratified. What is your opinion? You’ve obviously been out there on the
front lines—
ADMIRAL LYONS: Yeah, the LOST Treaty is
something. Why would you turn over your sovereignty to a UN-type
committee where you have no veto power and you know you’re going to be
outvoted 40 to 1? It makes absolutely no sense to me. You’re seeing this
being displayed by China out in the South China Sea, making their
illegal claims to, basically, the entire South China Sea, even though, I
believe, they have signed up to the Law of the Sea Treaty—but they will
not submit. They did it with an exemption: They said anything they
consider part of their territory, they will not submit to the Law of the
Sea Council for resolution. So you can see where that is leading!
Actually, another other case here: We’ve had this Law of the Sea
Tribunal, which has impacted—what was it—on Ghana, that involved telling
them what they could do or not do in their tributaries—
ARONOFF: Right.
ADMIRAL LYONS: —which are clearly territorial
waters! So why would subject ourselves to such a situation? It makes no
sense to me. We enjoy—we must—we enjoy and support the freedom of the
high seas. We’ve done it since our founding, it is recognized
international law, and there’s no reason for us to submit ourselves to a
UN council that clearly is against our interests.
ADMIRAL LYONS: This, again is the atmosphere, the
mentality of political correctness. The Muslim Brotherhood has a plan:
It is to institute sharia law in the United States in place of our
Constitution—they call it the “Stealth Jihad”—and, in their own words,
“to destroy us by our own miserable hands.” And they’re making quite an
amount of inroads, as you’re witnessing today.
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