The Select Committee on Benghazi on Benghazi released a proposed final report of its findings on Tuesday. The committee concluded that Muammar Qadhafi’s former military officers saved dozens of American lives during the September 11, 2012 Islamic terrorist attack on the American diplomatic compound.
Americans were rescued by Libyan Military Intelligence (LMI), a group the CIA did not know existed. LMI was not affiliated with the Libyan government or with any of the militias the CIA or State Department had presumably built relationships with. LMI is composed of former military officers under the Qadhafi regime who went into hiding for fear of being assassinated.
In the words of the proposed report, a CIA officer referred to as “Officer A” connected with LMI during the attack:
“Some of the very individuals the United States had helped remove from power during the Libyan revolution were the only Libyans that came to the assistance of the United States on the night of the Benghazi attacks.
The reason Libyan Military Intelligence was able to rescue the Americans from the CIA base after the mortar attacks—likely saving over two dozen lives—was due solely to the extraordinary efforts of Officer A, stationed in Benghazi. Officer A spent a lot of time on the night of the attacks trying to secure help.”
National police and militias courted by the Obama Administration abandoned Americans in peril during the Benghazi attack. An officer in the national police told Officer A, “There’s nothing I can do… I cannot continue to secure the perimeter [of the base].” The national police officer then connected Officer A to a colonel in Libyan Military Intelligence.
Officer A testified to a conversation he had with the colonel less than six hours into the attack:
“And I immediately made contact with this commander. He asked how he could help, and I told him, again, our general location, and I said, you know, we need you to come and secure this area. He had an idea, at that point, of events happening in that part of the city, and he told me that he would need to put a big force together, he cannot just come with one of his—I mean, like, two or three vehicles, that he would need to put a large force together and for me to give him some time to put that force together.”
Immediately after mortar attacks on the Benghazi compound, Officer A called the colonel and said, “We now really need you to come here.” A force of 50 armed trucks from LMI arrived within minutes and evacuated all American personnel to the airport.
A Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) – belonging to a unit dedicated to rapid response and reinforcement of global US government assets – took nearly 24 hours to arrive in Benghazi. The FAST platoon’s commander first heard of the attack on Fox News Channel.
The FAST platoon sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times.
Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff Martin Dempsey said that once military assets began mobilizing, “nothing stopped us, nothing slowed us.”
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