How Secretary Hillary Clinton Engineered the Obama Administration’s Illegal, Covert Diversion of Weapons from al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood Terrorists in Libya to ISIS in Syria
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
This article is the third of a series of articles explaining why President Obama enlisted the federal government’s national security and justice agencies to make sure Lt. General Michael Flynn never served as President Trump’s national security advisor. In September 2011, Flynn was promoted to Lieutenant General and assigned as assistant director of national intelligence in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). On April 17, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Flynn to be the 18th director of DIA. On April 30, 2014, President Obama forced Flynn to retire because Flynn had collected sufficient intelligence on Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to charge Obama and Clinton with high crimes and misdemeanors. The premise of this article series is that as Trump’s national security director in the White House, Flynn would have pursued President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” over their illegal, clandestine supplying of weapons to terrorists in Libya. This series of articles draws on reporting Jerome Corsi previously published in World Net Daily [WND.com] from 2011-2015 when he worked at WND.com as a senior staff reporter.
Why did Barack Obama turn against Muammar Gaddafi?
The answer may be deceptively simple: The moment that Gaddafi became inconvenient to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, Gaddafi became inconvenient to Obama.
In 2011, Gaddafi stood in the way of the al-Qaeda splinter group militia and the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan in Libya to advance the Arab Spring in North Africa by removing Muammar Qaddafi from power. The first article explained that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered an illegal, covert operation to run weapons to the al-Qaeda splinter militia groups and the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya. So, Obama and Clinton succeeded in converting Libya into a Sharia Law-driven Islamic terrorist state. After Qaddafi was deposed, Stevens was appointed U.S. ambassador to Libya. As U.S. ambassador, Stevens’s job shifted from overseeing the Obama-Clinton covert gun-running to Libya to supervising the shipment of arms from Libya to Syria to arm the rebels fighting Assad, some of whom ultimately become al-Nusra in Syria and some become ISIS. The second article examined the Marc Turi indictment. This case leaves no doubt Hillary Clinton was the chief architect of the Obama administration’s illegal, covert gun-running operation to Libya and subsequently to Syria. This third article examines the illegal, covert gun-running operation President Obama and Secretary Clinton organized, diverting weapons from Libya to Syria to support ISIS.
As Trump’s national security advisor, General Flynn could have accessed the classified documentary evidence required to charge Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with having engaged in “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” over their covert gun-running to al-Qaeda splinter militia groups and the Muslim Brother in Libya, as well as their clandestine gun-running to ISIS in Syria.
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Part 3
Documents released by Judicial Watch and separately by Wikileaks from 2015-2017 provided evidence the Obama administration implemented a policy suggested by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011 to arm the Free Syria Army rebels in Syria. Clinton’s goal was to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, complementing a strategy Clinton and Obama had already begun implementing to switch sides to support Al-Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated in Libya to topple Gadhafi. These documents back up Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made on December 27, 2016, that U.S.-led coalition forces had “supported” ISIS.
On May 18, 2015, Judicial Watch released more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense [DOD] and the Department of State that contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. Among the documents made public, Judicial Watch published a Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA} report written in August 2012 (the same time the U.S. monitored weapons flows from Libya to Syria) that said al-Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood-led the opposition in Syria.
In an interview with Democracy Now’s Juan González on July 25, 2016, Assange explained that the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks into the “Clinton Email Archive” contain some 1,700 emails that connect Clinton to Al Qaida and ISIS in both Libya and Syria. Assange stated that these emails prove Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implemented an Obama administration policy of supplying weapons to ISIS in Syria.
“So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates,” Assange explained in the interview. “So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails.”
In an email dated Aug. 17, 2014, released by Wikileaks, Clinton suggested to John Podesta, after she was no longer secretary of state, the following: “At the same time, we should return to plans to provide the FSA [Free Syria Army], with some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian regime.”
In an article published by National Review on Oct. 12, 2016, Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute, tied this statement to the Obama administration’s plans to equip Syrian fighters, specifically either the Free Syrian Army or “other moderate forces” to U.S.-led operation in coordination with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to steer weapons to Syria, “ostensibly to fight both Assad and ISIS.” McCarthy noted, however, that Clinton’s 2014 memo to Podesta asserts the Saudi and Qatari governments both support ISIS and other “radical Sunni groups.”
On August 30, 2016, the New York Times released an audio recording of remarks then-Secretary of State John Kerry made to a small group of Syrian civilians behind closed doors. In these remarks, Kerry admitted the Obama administration not only hoped ISIS would depose the regime of Assad al-Bashar in Syria but also gave arms to the jihadist army and its allies to carry out the task.
In 2011, Obama and Clinton engaged in a policy shift, deciding to implement regime change events toppling the governments of Gadhafi in Libya and Assad in Syria, even if it meant arming radical Islamic terrorist groups that traced back to al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood. On June 20, 2011, Clinton’s longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal sent a confidential email to Clinton at the State Department that included \ an article published by David W. Lesch, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Trinity University in San Antonio. In his opinion piece, Lesch argued a regime change strategy could be effected in Syria if the U.S. could find opposition groups in Syria capable of establishing “a Benghazi-like refuge from which to launch a rebellion and to which aid can be sent.”
In a subsequent confidential email dated July 24, 2012, Blumenthal further advised Clinton that the “growing success of the rebel forces of the Free Syria Army, FSA,” inspired him to believe the Assad regime was increasingly vulnerable to being toppled. In an email dated Feb. 24, 2012, Blumenthal characterized the FSA as “loosely organized and uncoordinated,” noting it was “for the most part, local militias, many of them civilian based, that are simply calling themselves the FSA to appear to be part of a whole.” Blumenthal continued in that email to comment the armed resistance to Assad “is not well funded or well armed.”
On Feb. 28, 2012, Jacob Sullivan, a State Department senior policy advisor to Secretary Clinton, forwarded to Clinton an opinion piece published in the New York Times by foreign correspondent Roger Cohen. In the opinion piece, Cohen made the link suggesting the strategy Obama and Clinton had used to topple Gadhafi in Libya should be used to topple Assad in Syria. “As the Bosnian war showed, the basis for any settlement must be a rough equality of forces. So I say step up the efforts, already quietly ongoing, to get weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Train those forces, just as the rebels were trained in Libya,” Cohen wrote. Payback time has come around: The United States warned Assad about allowing Al Qaeda fighters to transit Syria to Iraq. Now matériel and special forces with the ability to train a ragtag army can transit Iraq — and other neighboring states — into Syria.” Then, on Sept. 18, 2012, one week after the disastrous Benghazi 9/11 terror attack, Blumenthal, in a confidential memo to Clinton. In the memo, Blumenthal alerted Clinton to the possibility of an FSA military victory taking over Damascus. He noted that this possibility had caused Assad’s wife and close relatives to urge Assad to flee Syria to avoid “the fate of Assad’s former ally Muammar al Qaddafi of Libya, who was captured and killed by rebel forces while attempting to flee his home territory in Sirte.”
In 2013, then-Senator John Kerry joined forces with Senator John McCain to represent the Free Syria Army, or FSA, as “moderates” among the rebel forces. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 3, 2013, Kerry cited Elizabeth O’Bagy. Kerry argued that the war in Syria is “not being waged entirely or even predominately by dangerous Islamists and al-Qaida die-hards.” Instead, “moderate opposition forces—a collection of groups known as the Free Syria Army” are leading the struggle. At that time, O’Bagy was a 26-year-old graduate student currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Arab studies and political science at Georgetown University, who was working on a dissertation on woman’s militancy. On August 30, 2013, O’Bagy published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “On the Front Lines of Syria’s Civil War,” which ran with a tagline, “The conventional wisdom – that jihadists are running the rebellion [in Syria] – is not what I’ve witnessed on the ground.” On September 27, 2013, reporter Sarah Hurtubise writing in the Daily Caller, revealed that McCain had hired O’Bagy as a legislative assistant, ignoring that she had been fired from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) for fabricating her Ph.D. In a statement issued after Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the ISW issued a statement: “The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”
Before ISW fired her, O’Bagy worked as a senior research analyst and leader of the ISW Syrian team. In that capacity, O’Bagy authored for the ISW a March 2013 report entitled “The Free Syrian Army,” in which she argued:
The opposition movement in Syria has been fragmented from its inception, a direct reflection of Syria’s social complexity and the decentralized grassroots of the uprising. This condition has plagued Syria’s armed opposition since peaceful protestors took up arms and began forming rebel groups under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the summer of 2001.
In 2013, O’Bagy also worked as the political director of the Washington-based Syrian Emergency Task Force, or SETF. This group encouraged Americans to send money to buy weapons for the Free Syria Group. O’Bagy played a central role in organizing McCain’s controversial trip to Syria in May 2013. On May 27, 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that O’Bagy, in her capacity as political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said had given the newspaper a telephone interview from Turkey. In the interview, O’Bagy explained that McCain’s office approached the task force two weeks earlier to ask if the Syrian Emergency Task Force could arrange for him to meet with Syrian rebel leaders in Syria. O’Bagy, who accompanied McCain on the Senator’s May trip to the Middle East, followed through, arranging for McCain to meet operatives of the Free Syrian Army who had ties to ISIS. McCain met with FSA commanders in two meetings in Gaziantep, Turkey. One meeting was about a half mile inside the Syrian border at the Bab Salameh border crossing, where McCain talked with the Asifat al-Shamal, identified as the FSA’s Northern Storm Brigade. In the other meeting, McCain met with Gen. Salim Idriss, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. Idriss asked McCain to urge the United States to give heavy weapons to the FSA, set up a no-fly zone in Syria, and conduct military air attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Returning to the central theme, Obama and his coup d’état co-conspirators could not afford to risk allowing Lieutenant General Flynn to serve as President Trump’s national security advisor in the White House. As a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, Flynn would have been able to gather the internal classified documents that could prove to the American people the Obama administration’s treasonous gun-running operations in Libya and Syria.
In 2020, Jerome Corsi published Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, from which much of this article was drawn. In 2019, he published Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” explaining how the Mueller prosecutors confronted Dr. Corsi for over two months for hours at a time in a closed conference room with no windows. Dr. Corsi effectively ended the Mueller “Russian Collusion” investigation when he refused to take the Mueller prosecutors’ plea deal, alleging he had lied to the FBI. The FBI never indicted Dr. Corsi—further proof the Mueller prosecutors were the ones telling the lies.
