Joint Chiefs, key
lawmaker held own talks with Moammar Gadhafi regime
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By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 28,
2015
First of three parts
Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so
distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libyathat they opened their own diplomatic channels with
the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to
secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.
The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and
authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered
conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms
thatMrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S.
into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence
community’s concerns.
“You should see these internal State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress. They’re just full
of stupid, stupid facts,” an American intermediary specifically dispatched by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be
reported to U.S. officials.
At the time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil
war that grew out of the Arab Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who
wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator. Mrs. Clinton argued that Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a
humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Obama, NATO allies and the United Nations to authorize military intervention.
Gadhafi’s son and heir apparent, Seif Gadhafi, told American
officials in the secret conversations that he was worried Mrs. Clinton was using false pretenses to justify unseating
his father and insisted that the regime had no intention of harming a mass of
civilians. He compared Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for war to that of the George W. Bush
administration’s now debunked weapons of mass destruction accusations, which
were used to lobby Congress to invade Iraq, the tapes show.
“It was like the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report,” Gadhafi said in a May 2011 phone call to Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat serving at the time. “Libyan
airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now
the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya.”
Seif Gadhafi also warned that many of the
U.S.-supported armed rebels were “not freedom fighters” but rather jihadists
whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”
“And now you have NATO supporting them with ships, with airplanes,
helicopters, arms, training, communication,” he said in one recorded
conversation with U.S. officials. “We ask the American government send a
fact-finding mission to Libya. I want you to see everything with your own eyes.”
The surreptitiously taped conversations reveal an
extraordinary departure from traditional policy, in which the U.S. government
speaks to foreign governments with one voice coordinated by the State Department.
Instead, the tapes show that the Pentagon’s senior uniformed leadership and a congressman from Mrs. Clinton’s own party conveyed sentiments to the Libyan regime
that undercut or conflicted with the secretary of state’s own message at the
time.
“If this story is true, it would be highly unusual for
the Pentagon to conduct a separate set of diplomatic
negotiations, given the way we operated when I was secretary of state,” James
A. Baker III, who served under President George H.W. Bush, told The Times. “In
our administration, the president made sure that we all sang from the same
hymnal.”
Mr. Kucinich, who challenged Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic
presidential nomination, acknowledged that he undertook his own conversations
with the Gadhafi regime. He said he feared Mrs. Clinton was using emotion to sell a war against Libya that wasn’t warranted, and he wanted to get all
the information he could to share with his congressional colleagues.
“I had facts that indicated America was headed once
again into an intervention that was going to be disastrous,” Mr. Kucinich told The Times. “What was being said at the State Department — if you look at the charge at the time — it
wasn’t so much about what happened as it was about what would happen. So there
was a distortion of events that were occurring in Libya to justify an intervention which was essentially
wrong and illegal.”
Mr. Kucinich wrote a letter to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in August explaining his communications in a
last-ditch effort to stop the war.
“I have been contacted by an intermediary in Libya who has indicated that President Muammar Gadhafi
is willing to negotiate an end to the conflict under conditions which would
seem to favor Administration policy,” Mr. Kucinich wrote on Aug. 24.
Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to his letter, he said.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to provide any comment about the
recordings.
The State Department also declined to answer questions about separate
contacts from the Pentagon and Mr. Kucinich with the Gadhafi regime, but said the goal of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama was regime change inLibya.
“U.S. policy during the revolution supported regime
change through peaceful means, in line with UNSCR 1973 policy and NATO mission goals,” the State Department said. “We consistently emphasized at the time
thatMoammar Gadhafi had to step down and leave Libya as an essential component of the transition.”
‘President is not getting accurate information’
Both inside and outside the Obama administration, Mrs. Clinton was among the most vocal early proponents of
using U.S. military force to unseat Gadhafi. Joining her in making the case were French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and her successor as secretary
of state, John F. Kerry.
Mrs. Clinton’s main argument was that Gadhafi was about to engage in a genocide against
civilians in Benghazi, where the rebels held their center of power. But defense
intelligence officials could not corroborate those concerns and in fact
assessed that Gadhafi was unlikely to risk world outrage by inflicting
mass casualties, officials told The Times. As a result, Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
strongly opposed Mrs. Clinton’s recommendation to use force.
If Mrs. Clinton runs for president next year, her style of leadership
as it relates to foreign policy will be viewed through the one war that she
personally championed as secretary of state. Among the key questions every
candidate faces is how they will assess U.S. intelligence and solicit the
advice of the military leadership.
Numerous U.S. officials interviewed by The Times
confirmed that Mrs. Clinton, and not Mr. Obama, led the charge to use NATO military force to unseat Gadhafi as Libya’s leader and that she repeatedly dismissed the
warnings offered by career military and intelligence officials.
In the recovered recordings, a U.S. intelligence
liaison working for thePentagon told a Gadhafi aide that Mr. Obama privately informed members
of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter” and that the nation’s highest-ranking
generals were concerned that the president was being misinformed.
The Pentagon liaison indicated on the tapes that Army Gen.
Charles H. Jacoby Jr., a top aide to Adm. Mullen, “does not trust the reports
that are coming out of the State Department and CIA, but there’s nothing he can do about
it.”
In one conversation to the Libyans, the American
intelligence asset said, “I can tell you that the president is not getting
accurate information, so at some point someone has to get accurate information
to him. I think about a way through former Secretary Gates or maybe to Adm.
Mullen to get him information”
The recordings are consistent with what many
high-ranking intelligence, military and academic sources told The Times:
Mrs. Clinton was headstrong to enter the Libyan crisis,
ignoring thePentagon’s warnings that no U.S. interests were at stake and
regional stability could be threatened. Instead, she relied heavily on the
assurances of the Libyan rebels and her own memory of Rwanda, where U.S.
inaction may have led to the genocide of at least 500,000 people.
“Neither the intervention decision nor the regime change
decision was an intelligence-heavy decision,” said one senior intelligence
official directly involved with the administration’s decision-making, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity. “People weren’t on the edge of their seats,
intelligence wasn’t driving the decision one way or another.”
Instead of relying on the Defense Department or the
intelligence community for analysis, officials told The Times, the White House
trustedMrs. Clinton’s charge, which was then supported by Ambassador to
theUnited Nations Susan E. Rice and National Security Council
member Samantha Power, as reason enough for war.
“Susan Rice was involved in the Rwanda crisis in 1994,
Samantha Power wrote very moving books about what happened in Rwanda, and
Hillary Clinton was also in the background of that crisis as well,” said Allen
Lynch, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia. “I
think they have all carried this with them as a kind of guilt complex.”
Humanitarian crisis was not imminent
In 2003, Gadhafi agreed to dismantle his weapons of mass
destruction and denounce terrorism to re-establish relations with the West. He
later made reparations to the families of those who died in the bombing of
Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
News media frequently described the apparent
transformation as Libya“coming in from the cold.”
Still, he ruled Libya with an iron grip, and by February 2011 civil
war raged throughout the country. Loyalist forces mobilized tanks and troops
toward Benghazi, creating a panicked mass exodus of civilians toward Egypt.
Mrs. Clinton met with Libyan rebel spokesman Mahmoud Jibril
in the Paris Westin hotel in mid-March so she could vet the rebel cause to
unseat Gadhafi. Forty-five minutes after speaking with Mr. Jibril, Mrs. Clinton was convinced that a military intervention was
needed.
“I talked extensively about the dreams of a democratic
civil state where all Libyans are equal a political participatory system with
no exclusions of any Libyans, even the followers of Gadhafi who did not commit crimes against the Libyan
people, and how the international community should protect civilians from a
possible genocide like the one [that] took place in Rwanda,” Mr. Jibril told
The Times. “I felt by the end of the meeting, I passed the test. Benghazi was
saved.”
So on March 17, 2011, the U.S. supported U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1973 for military intervention in Libya to help protect its people from Gadhafi’s forthcoming march on Benghazi, where he threatened
he would “show no mercy” to resisters.
“In this particular country — Libya — at this particular moment, we were faced with
the prospect of violence on a horrific scale,” Mr. Obama declared in an address
to the nation on March 28. “We had a unique ability to stop that violence: An
international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the
support of Arab countries and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves.”
Yet Human Rights Watch did not see the humanitarian
crisis as imminent.
“At that point, we did not see the imminence of
massacres that would rise to genocidelike levels,” said Sarah Leah Whitson,
executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division for Human
Rights Watch. “Gadhafi’s forces killed hundreds of overwhelmingly unarmed
protesters. There were threats of Libyan forces approaching Benghazi, but we
didn’t feel that rose to the level of imminent genocidelike atrocities.”
Instead, she said, the U.S. government was trying to
be at the forefront of the Arab Spring, when many dictator-led countries were
turning to democracy.
“I think the dynamic for the U.S. government was:
Things are changing fast, Tunisia has fallen, Egypt has fallen, and we’d better
be on the front of this, supporting a new government and not being seen as
supporting the old government,” Ms. Whitson said.
On the day the U.N. resolution was passed, Mrs. Clinton ordered a general within the Pentagon to refuse to take a call with Gadhafi’s son Seif and other high-level members within the
regime, to help negotiate a resolution, the secret recordings reveal.
A day later, on March 18, Gadhafi called for a cease-fire, another action the
administration dismissed.
Soon, a call was set up between the former U.S.
ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, and Gadhafi confidant Mohammed Ismael during which Mr.
Ismael confirmed that the regime’s highest-ranking generals were under orders
not to fire upon protesters.
“I told him we were not targeting civilians and Seif
told him that,” Mr. Ismael told The Times in an telephone interview this month,
recounting the fateful conversation.
While Mrs. Clinton urged the Pentagon to cease its communications with the Gadhafi
regime, the intelligence asset working with the Joint Chiefs remained in
contact for months afterward.
“Everything I am getting from the State Department is that they do not care about being part of
this. Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” the Pentagon intelligence asset told Seif Gadhafi and his
adviser on the recordings.
Communication was so torn between the Libyan regime
and the State Department that they had no point of contact within the
department to even communicate whether they were willing to accept the U.N.’s mandates, former Libyan officials said.
Mrs. Clinton eventually named Mr. Cretz as the official U.S.
point of contact for the Gadhafi regime. Mr. Cretz, the former ambassador toLibya, was removed from the country in 2010 amid Libyan
anger over derogatory comments he made regarding Gadhafi released by Wikileaks. As a result, Mr. Cretz
was not trusted or liked by the family.
Shutting the Gadhafis out of the conversation allowed Mrs. Clinton to pursue a solitary point of view, said a
senior Pentagon official directly involved with the
intervention.
“The decision to invade [Libya] had already been made, so everything coming out of
the State Department at that time was to reinforce that decision,”
the official explained, speaking only on the condition of anonymity for fear of
retribution.
As a result, the Pentagon went its own way and established communications
with Seif Gadhafi through one of his friends, a U.S. businessman, who acted as
an intermediary. The goal was to identify a clear path and strategy forward in Libya — something that wasn’t articulated by the White
House or State Department at the time, officials said.
“Our big thing was: ‘What’s a good way out of this,
what’s a bridge to post-Gadhafi conflict once the military stops and the
civilians take over, what’s it going to look like?’” said a senior military
official involved in the planning, who requested anonymity. “We had a hard time
coming up with that because once again nobody knew what the lay of the clans
and stuff was going to be.
“The impression we got from both the businessman and
from Seif was that the situation is bad, but this [NATO intervention] is even worse,” the official said,
confirming the sentiments expressed on the audio recordings. “All of these
things don’t have to happen this way, and it will be better for Libya in the long run both economically and
politically if they didn’t.”
Pentagon looks for a way out
The Pentagon wasn’t alone in questioning the intervention.
The week the U.N. resolution authorizing military force was
passed, Sen. Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat, expressed his own concerns.
“We have a military operation that’s been put to play,
but we do not have a clear diplomatic policy or clear statement of foreign
policy. We know we don’t like the Gadhafi regime, but we do not have a picture
of who the opposition movement really is. We got a vote from the Security
Council but we had five key abstentions in that vote.”
Five of the 15 countries on the U.N. Security Council
abstained from voting on the decision in Libya because they had concerns that the NATOintervention would make things worse. Mrs. Clinton worked to avoid having them exercise their veto
by personally calling representatives from Security Council member states.
Germany and Brazil published statements on March 18,
2011, explaining their reasons for abstention.
“We weighed the risks of a military operation as a
whole, not just forLibya but, of course, also with respect to the
consequences for the entire region and that is why we abstained,” Germany said.
Brazil wrote, “We are not convinced that the use of
force as contemplated in the present resolution will lead to the realization of
our most important objective — the immediate end of violence and the protection
of civilians.
We are also concerned that such measures may have the
unintended effect of exacerbating tensions on the ground and causing more harm
than good to the very same civilians we are committed to protecting.”
Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the
U.S., told The Times that history has proved those concerns correct.
“The U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya was meant to create a no-fly zone to prevent
bombing of civilians,” said Mr. Kislyak. “NATOcountries that participated in this intervention were
supposed to patrol the area. However, in a short amount of time the NATO flights — initially meant to stop violence on
the ground — went far beyond the scope of the Security Council-mandated task
and created even more violence inLibya.”
On March 19, the U.S. military, supported by France
and Britain, fired off more than 110 Tomahawk missiles, hitting about 20 Libyan
air and missile defense targets. Within weeks, a NATO airstrike killed one of Gaddafi’s sons and three
grandsons at their the family’s Tripolicompound, sparking debate about whether the colonel
and his family were legitimate targets under the U.N. resolution.
Mr. Gates, the defense secretary, said the compound
was targeted because it included command-and-control facilities.
Even after the conflict began, U.S. military leaders
kept looking for a way out and a way to avoid the power vacuum that would be
left in the region if Gadhafi fell.
As the intelligence asset working with the Joint
Chiefs kept his contacts going, one U.S. general made an attempt to negotiate
directly with his Libyan military counterparts, according to interviews
conducted by The Times with officials directly familiar with the overture.
Army Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. African
Command, sought to set up a 72-hour truce with the regime, according to an
intermediary called in to help.
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who was acting
as a business consultant in Libya at the time, said he was approached by senior
Libyan military leaders to propose the truce. He took the plan to Lt. Col.
Brian Linvill, the U.S. AFRICOM point of contact for Libya. Col. Linvill passed the proposal to Gen. Ham, who
agreed to participate.
“The Libyans would stop all combat operations and
withdraw all military forces to the outskirts of the cities and assume a
defensive posture. Then to insure the credibility with the international
community, the Libyans would accept recipients from the African Union to make
sure the truce was honored,” Mr. Kubic said, describing the offers.
“[Gadhafi] came back and said he was willing to step down and
permit a transition government, but he had two conditions,” Mr. Kubic said.
“First was to insure there was a military force left over after he left Libya capable to go after al Qaeda. Secondly, he wanted to
have the sanctions against him and his family and those loyal to him lifted and
free passage. At that point in time, everybody thought that was reasonable.”
But not the State Department.
Gen. Ham was ordered to stand down two days after the
negotiation began, Mr. Kubic said. The orders were given at the behest of the State Department, according to those familiar with the plan in the Pentagon. Gen. Ham declined to comment when questioned by The
Times.
“If their goal was to get Gadhafi out of power, then why not give a 72-hour truce
a try?” Mr. Kubic asked. “It wasn’t enough to get him out of power; they wanted
him dead.”
Libyan officials were willing to negotiate a departure
from power but felt the continued NATO bombings were forcing the regime into combat to
defend itself, the recordings indicated.
“If they put us in a corner, we have no choice but to
fight until the end,” Mr. Ismael said on one of the recordings. “What more can
they do? Bomb us with a nuclear bomb? They have done everything.”
Under immense foreign firepower, the Gadhafi regime’s
grip on Libyabegan to slip in early April and the rebels’ resolve
was strengthened.Gadhafi pleaded with the U.S. to stop the NATO airstrikes.
Regime change real agenda
Indeed, the U.S. position in Libya had changed. First, it was presented to the
public as way to stop an impending humanitarian crisis but evolved into
expelling the Gadhafis.
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta says in his book “Worthy
Fights” that the goal of the Libyan conflict was for regime change. Mr. Panetta
wrote that at the end of his first week as secretary of defense in July 2011,
he visitedIraq and Afghanistan “for both substance and
symbolism.”
“In Afghanistan I misstated our position on how fast
we’d be bringing troops home, and I said what everyone in Washington knew, but
we couldn’t officially acknowledge: That our goal in Libya was regime change.”
But that wasn’t the official war cry.
Instead: “It was ‘We’re worried a humanitarian crisis
might occur,’” said a senior military official, reflecting on the conflict.
“Once you’ve got everybody nodding up and down on that, watch out because you
can justify almost anything under the auspices of working to prevent a
humanitarian crisis. Gadhafi had enough craziness about him, the rest of the
world nodded on.”
But they might not be so quick to approve again,
officials say.
“It may be impossible to get the same kind of
resolution in similar circumstances, and we already saw that in Syria where the
Russians were very suspicious when Western powers went to the U.N.,” said Richard Northern, who served as the British
ambassador to Libya during part of the conflict. “Anything the
Western powers did in the Middle East is now viewed by the Russians with
suspicion, and it will probably reduce the level of authority they’re willing
to give in connection to humanitarian crises.”
Mr. Kucinich, who took several steps to end the war in Libya, said he is sickened about what transpired.
He sponsored a June 3 resolution in the House of
Representatives to end the Libyan war, but Republican support for the bill was
diluted after Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, proposed a softer
alternative resolution demanding that the president justify his case for war
within 14 days.
“There was a distortion of events that were occurring
in Libya to justify an intervention which was essentially
wrong and illegal because [the administration] gained the support of the U.N.
Security Council through misrepresentation,” said Mr. Kucinich. “The die was cast there for the overthrow of the
Gadhafi government. The die was cast. They weren’t looking for any information.
“What’s interesting about all this is, if you listen to
Seif Gaddafi’s account, even as they were being bombed they still trusted
America, which really says a lot,” said Mr. Kucinich. “It says a lot about how people who are being bombed
through the covert involvement or backdoor involvement of the U.S. will still
trust the U.S. It’s heart-breaking, really. It really breaks your heart when
you see trust that is so cynically manipulated.”
In August, Gadhafi’s compound in Tripoli was overrun, signaling the end of his 42-year
reign and forcing him into hiding. Two months later,Gadhafi, 69, was killed in his hometown of Sirte. His son
Seif was captured by the Zintan tribe and remains in solitary confinement in a
Zintan prison cell.
Since Gadhafi was removed from power, Libya has been in a constant state of chaos, with
factional infighting and no uniting leader. On Tuesday, an attack on a luxury
hotel in Tripoli killed nine people, including one American. A
group calling itself the Islamic State-Tripoli Province took responsibility for
the attack, indicating a growing presence of anti-American terrorist groups
within the country.
Copyright © 2015 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelly Riddell is a reporter and editor at The
Washington Times. She does both investigative work and writes the campaign blog
“Trail Tales,” which tracks stories from the 2016 presidential contest. A
political junkie, she’s been living and writing in D.C. for more than a decade
before joining The Times for outlets like Bloomberg News and U.S. News and
World ...
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