Was Iran Involved in the Benghazi Assault?

Although it does not bear directly on Obama's failure to act during the Benghazi massacre there is an aspect of the entire episode that has not been explored in the media. Appearing on the Mike Huckabee show, Katherine Herridge poses the question, "Was there an effort, number one, to downplay the exposure of the size and the breadth of the CIA presence in eastern Libya? That, I think, is one of the great untold stories here."

Huckabee obviously had questions he wanted to ask and didn't follow Herridge's lead. Herridge again steered the conversation back to the CIA and weapons. "I believe that much of this will come back to weapons and the movement of weapons out of Libya to Turkey and then into Syria and what the United States knew about the movement of those weapons and whether or not the United States did anything to stop the movement of those weapons.

Herridge goes on to say she thinks Ambassador Steven's meeting with the Turkish ambassador was to stop the transfer of weapons. Here I part company with Herridge. First, the CIA did have a large presence in Libya. Readers will remember that what is now referred to as the CIA annex was called a safe house in early reports following the assault. Herridge points out that a ship loaded with arms arrived in Turkey. Unexpectedly? Is it not more likely that the United States, vis-a-vis Turkey was smuggling arms to Syrian rebels? Turkey is threatened by the civil war in Syria and Turkey is a NATO ally. Why would not Turkey, with the aid of the United States, seek to undermine the Assad regime? If one sees recent footage of the fighting in Syria one cannot help but notice that the rebels are using truck mounted 50 caliber machine guns very similar to those used by the Lybian rebels against Gaddafi. The Syrian rebels built them from scrap metal?

Syria would of course like to put and end to the gun running. Two facts are known. One, if Assad is to prevail it will be because of his air power and two, Gaddafi had thousands of manpads or shoulder fired surface to air missiles. Supposedly the CIA was hunting down Gaddafi's manpads to destroy them but is it unreasonable to think that some of them were shipped to Syria through Turkey? Suppose further that the killing of Ambassador Stevens and the attack on the CIA annex was for the purpose of ending the arms shipments to Syria.

Syria could never carry out such an attack but its ally Iran is capable of putting together such an operation. The Obama administration would have plenty of reasons to keep its involvement in gun running secret. If as a report coming from Israel, that Obama wanted to reestablish diplomatic relations with Iran is true he certainly wouldn't want to implicate Iran in the death of 4 Americans. Like Herridge, I too think weapons transfers where the cause of the attack but I'll have to wait to see whose theory is correct.