Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi by Kenneth R. Timmerman

open. The U.S. military invited a Muslim preacher to damn the souls of U.S. troops killed in battle, and to mock them. That has got to be a first.
    “When I met Barack Obama at the ramp ceremony at Dover Air Force Base, he came up to me and put his hands on my shoulders,” Strange said. “And he said, ‘Michael changed the way America lived.’ So I grabbed the president of the United States by the shoulders and said, ‘I don’t need to know about my son. I need to know what happened to my son.’ ”
    There is often tension between the parents of SpecOps warriors and the widows of their sons, who are worried about survivor benefits. Despite that, Karen Vaughn and Michael Strange said they had received phone calls from both active-duty and retired members of SEAL Team 6, “thanking us for what we were doing.”
    The downing of Extortion 17 showed just how dangerously misguided was the Obama policy of giving the Afghan government advance notice of U.S. Special Forces operations, without vetting the recipients of that intelligence or restricting it to a need-to-know standard. More U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan during the first two years of the Obama administration than during the entire eight years of George W. Bush. The rules of engagement in Afghanistan—changed twice under Obama to make it more difficult for U.S. troops to defend themselves—were getting American soldiers killed.
    “My son went to Afghanistan to fight the enemy,” Billy Vaughn said. “Now the brass are saying, we’re there to win hearts and minds.” As the funeral service at Bagram showed, that wasn’t working so well.
    In Benghazi, our Muslim allies would turn against us directly.

10
    THE ARMS PIPELINE TO SYRIA
    The Obama White House style of government was to move from crisis to crisis, rather than employing a sustained, coherent policy. As the flames of the Arab Spring leapt across the region, they shifted their attention from Egypt to Libya, and now they were ready to move on to Syria, without much care as to the mess they left behind. So it was that U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz told reporters during one of many events to commemorate the first anniversary of the uprising against Qaddafi that Washington was looking at a new target.
    “This past year, Libyans demonstrated courage, bravery, and heroism, overcoming forty years of enforced silence with a deafening roar,” Cretz said. “Libya’s freedom stands in stark contrast to the oppression ongoing in Syria; we join Libyans in standing with the Syrian people in their protest against tyranny.” 1
    Whether Cretz’s statement was a slip or an intentional warning, it signaled a noticeable shift in U.S. policy. And it gave all the appearances of a green light to arms smuggling operations that official Washington continued to deny.
    THE LETFALLAH II
    Islamist charities were springing up all across Libya, responding to Ambassador Cretz’s call to aid the Syrian rebellion. They began collecting weapons and supplies to send to jihadi groups battling secular dictator Bashar al-Assad. One of these, calling itself Knight Suleiman Israh in Misrata, cobbled together several shipping containers full of weapons, and contracted to load them onto a Syrian-owned cargo ship, Letfallah II , in early April 2012.
    Registered in Sierra Leone, the Letfallah II was owned by Mohammad Khafaji, a Syrian citizen, whose Khafaji Shipping Company was registered in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but operated out of Tartus, Syria, as Khafaji Maritime Co. Khafaji later told United Nations arms inspectors that he had been contacted by a shipping agent in Libya, who put him in touch with a Lebanese national who wanted to ship twelve containers from Misrata to Tripoli, Lebanon. 2
    That’s how the arms smuggling business worked. It was layers upon layers of cutouts and front companies, created in the expectation that the apparent complexity would deter simpler spirits from investigation and provide the participants with