The REAL Benghazi Story: What the White House and Hillary Don't Want You to Know by Aaron Klein

INTRODUCTION
    T he most logical way to begin a book about the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is to recount the timeline of the murderous assaults that targeted our U.S. special mission and nearby CIA annex. The Obama administration itself has provided a substantial portion of the publicly known version of events about that fateful night, and this outline was later re-crafted in more detail by a State Department–sanctioned review of the attacks. Key elements of the official chronology, however, have since been contradicted by Benghazi victims and witnesses, while particulars provided by the government have been denied by those who were on the ground inside the doomed facilities, calling into question the entire government narrative about what really transpired.
    The White House should have lost all credibility on Benghazi after it was caught deceiving the American publicby claiming the onslaught was the result of popular protests against an obscure anti-Islam film. Within five days of the attack, United Nations ambassador Susan Rice infamously appeared on five morning television programs (on Sunday, September 16, 2012) to push the “spontaneous protest” fiction, claiming the attack was in response to a “hateful video.” Other Obama administration officials made similar claims. Four days after Rice’s disinformation campaign, Obama himself described “natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video.” 1
    It would later emerge that the Obama administration knew from the beginning this was a well-coordinated, well-planned jihadist attack. The United States had surveillance video from the mission that showed no popular protest, while Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. official in Libya at the time of the September 11, 2012, attacks, testified that he knew immediately the attacks were terror strikes, not a protest turned violent. According to Hicks, “everybody in the mission” believed it was an act of terror “from the get-go.” 2
    Numerous other whistle-blowers would later come forward with similar information. Even the CIA’s Libya station chief sent an e-mail to superiors in the aftermath of the attacks, stating that the storming of the compound was “not an escalation of protests.” 3
    Of course, we would need to suspend rationality to believe the administration’s original claim of a “spontaneous protest.” Tell me which spontaneous protesters would show up to the site with weapons, erect armed checkpoints surroundingthe compound, and evidence insider knowledge of the facility, while deploying military-style tactics to storm an American mission? Which “spontaneous protesters” would know the exact location of a secretive CIA annex, including specific coordinates that were likely utilized to launch precision mortar strikes? Who even believes “spontaneous” protesters are capable of mounting a fierce, hours-long gun battle with U.S. forces stationed inside the annex?
    The “spontaneous protest” claim is just the tip of the Benghazi misinformation iceberg. The State Department released an Accountability Review Board, or ARB, report that provided a timeline of the attacks, an accounting adopted by the Obama administration. The ARB is very specific about what it says happened that night. It claims the initial assault on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi started between 9:45 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time and lasted until about midnight, when all but two Americans were evacuated to the CIA annex about a mile away. According to the ARB, at midnight the annex was attacked intermittently for an hour by gunfire and RPGs. The next phase of the attack started at about 5:15 a.m. local time, the ARB claims, describing the second wave of attacks as consisting of heavy mortar and RPG assaults. 4
    However, witnesses on the ground, including CIA contractors who were inside the annex, said there was no lull in the fighting at all. 5 The “lull” claim was central to the Obama