“Attorney for U.S. whistleblower: 400 surface-to-air missiles were stolen from Benghazi,” Hot Air’s Allahpundit writes. Last year, Glenn Beck floated a wild conspiracy theory that the US was running arms out of the Benghazi embassy. Allahpundit today writes that actually, the reverse was happening, but the news, if true, is no less damaging for the Obama administration:
Powerline’s written more than one post attempting to debunk the “CIA was shipping SAMs to Syria from Libya” theory of what happened, which caught fire after CNN’s report. A congressional source, presumably on the GOP side, told them that even he’s skeptical of that. Michael Ledeen speculated in an e-mail to Powerline that Syria had nothing to do with it; what probably happened, he thinks, is that the CIA was trying to collect some of the heavier weapons Libyan rebels had acquired during the war with Qaddafi. That makes more sense. It does seem odd that the CIA would choose a fragile, dangerous place like Benghazi as a base for running missiles to Syria when they could do it from Qatar or Jordan, say, instead. If Ledeen’s theory is right, that the CIA was actually trying to recoup weapons rather than hand them out, then the scandal is — as it really always has been — about the light security in place at the annex and consulate to defend an arsenal as dangerous as 400 SAMs. You can understand, then, why both Obama and the agency would be so tight-lipped about the truth. Stockpiling a nightmare weapon in the heart of a city crawling with jihadis and then failing to protect the cache from a terrorist assault is a titanic security blunder. If true, it’s a giant embarrassment for the CIA and would have been a damaging blow to Obama’s counterterror credentials before the election last year if known.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Did Valerie Jarrett give the Benghazi stand-down order?
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