Saudi militants were behind the massive car bombing and assault on Yemen’s military headquarters that killed more than 50 people, including foreigners, investigators said in a preliminary report released Friday.
Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was retaliation for US drone strikes that have killed dozens of the terror network’s leaders.
The attack – the deadliest in Sanaa since May 2012 – marked an escalation in the terror network’s battle to undermine the US-allied government and destabilise the impoverished Arab nation despite the drone strikes and a series of US-backed military offensive against it.
US forces also have been training and arming Yemeni special forces, and exchanging intelligence with the central government.
Military investigators described a two-stage operation, saying heavily armed militants wearing army uniforms first blew up a car packed with 500 kilograms of explosives near an entrance gate, then split into groups that swept through a military hospital and a laboratory, shooting at soldiers, doctors, nurses, doctors and patients.
Officials earlier said 11 militants were killed, including the suicide bomber who drove the car. It was not clear if the 12th attacker was captured or escaped.
The investigative committee led by Yemen’s Chief of Staff Gen. Ahmed al-Ashwal, said militants shot the guards outside the gates of the military hospital, allowing the suicide bomber to drive the car inside, but a gunfight forced him to detonate his explosives before reaching his target.
It said the 12 militants killed, included Saudis.
Two military officials told The Associated Press that wounded soldiers had told them the assailants who stormed the hospital separated out the foreigners and shot everybody in the head.
Other military officials said American security agents were helping with the investigations, but that could not be confirmed. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to brief reporters.
Yemeni commandos and other security forces besieged the militants before they could reach the ministry’s main building, preventing them from going further than the ministry’s entrance gate. All the attackers were killed by 4:30 pm Thursday, according to the committee.
Yemeni security forces launched a manhunt in the capital to find the perpetrators, sparking gun battles that killed five suspected militants and a Yemeni commando, officials said.
The committee, which sent its report to Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, did not explain how it came to its conclusions.
The report, read on state TV, raised the death toll to 56 and said more than 200 people were wounded.
The foreigners killed included two aid workers from Germany, two doctors from Vietnam, two nurses from the Philippines and a nurse from India, according to Yemen’s Supreme Security Commission.
But a spokesman for the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs, Raul Hernandez, said on Friday that seven Filipinos were killed in the attack, including a doctor and nurses, while 11 others were wounded.
The victims were among 40 Filipino workers in the hospital. Hernandez said that the Philippines’ honorary consul reported that the others survived by pretending to be dead.
It was not immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting accounts. But officials from the military hospital said Friday that at least 10 foreigners had been killed.
The United States considers the Yemeni al-Qaeda branch to be the most active in the world and it has escalated drone attacks against the militants in Yemen.
DynCorp is one of the most lucrative and infamous military contractors in the world, perhaps only surpassed by Halliburton. They both have a documented history of gunrunning, drug dealing, and human trafficking.
In addition, the actual work that they do on the record is sub par and their rebuilding efforts have gotten terrible reviews, especially DynCorp.
Despite this history of nefarious behavior and poor work, Dyncorp was just awarded a brand new $72.8 million dollar contract by the US government. Not only that, but they have also been given an advance exoneration from any liability.
That’s right, our wonderful government has just given DynCorp almost $73 million to continue what many believe will be shabby work that may only be used as a front for more sinister operations.
“DynCorp of West Virginia, one of the largest military contractors in Afghanistan, was awarded a $72.8 million contract to train pilots for the Air Force about one week after the special inspector general for reconstruction called the company’s earlier work at the Kunduz army base “unsatisfactory.”
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) wrote a scathing report in 2010 and a followup this year which found “serious soil stability issues . . . structural failures, improper grading, and new sink holes” that threatened the well-being of troops stationed there.
One sink hole was found near an electrical power transformer, whose failure “would result in a loss of electrical power over a large portion of Camp Pamir, causing significant financial loss and increasing the risk of injury through fire and electrical shock,” the report said.”
Dyncorp’s crimes go way deeper than this wasteful and careless construction work, as was mentioned earlier they are also heavily involved in clandestine operations that would make your average citizen cringe if they heard any of the details.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) did an investigation of the company and found 10 instances of misconduct, including a whistleblower lawsuit in which DynCorp agreed to pay $7.7 million to resolve allegations that it submitted inflated claims for the construction of camps in Iraq.
This same sort of behavior was reported from Halliburton when they destroyed hundred thousand dollar trucks to get them off the books and spent millions on air conditioning for empty tents, all in order to inflate their budgets.
The State Department’s own inspector general even filed a report claiming that DynCorp should pay the government $157,000 to reimburse them for food shortages at Camp Falcon in Kabul, Afghanistan, between November 2009 and January 2010.
These official reports are only scratching the surface though, there is a much darker side to these defense contractors.
“Some of the world’s largest multinational corporations such as DynCorp and Halliburton were exposed as major players in the global human trafficking market.
These companies did not work alone, but cooperated with each other through various subsidiaries and had the luxury of government protection.
When suspicion was brought upon these companies it was swept under the rug by government officials, even high-ranking members of the establishment such as Donald Rumsfeld were implicit in covering up this scandal.
On March 11th 2005 he was questioned by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and he admitted on the record that the allegations did have credibility, but he pushed the blame off onto a few “rogue” employees.
He used the “few bad apples” line that the government always dishes out when they are caught up in scandal.
Although Rumsfeld and other high ranking officials claimed that they would look into the case, they actually prevented any serious investigations from taking place.
This happens every day, even organizations like the UN and NATO have come under fire for running slave rings out of third world countries when they are on “peacekeeping missions”
When Rumsfeld was questioned by Cynthia McKinney about Dyncorp and their supposed child sex/slavery ring and why our country keeps giving this company more and more money, Rumsfeld of course shifted all blame away from the government and Dyncorp as a whole.
“Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business.
But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program.
Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?”
A RICO lawsuit filed in 2002 on behalf of a former Dyncorp employee directly claimed that children were being sold by employees in Bosnia.
Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.
According to the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic, “in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorpwere engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”
Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston’s effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States.
The quote from the whistleblower below pretty much sums up the horrors we are dealing with.
“My main problem,” he explains, “was [sexual misbehavior] with the kids, but I wasn’t too happy with them ripping off the government, either. DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do.”
Although most employees of DynCorp are obviously just trying to do their job, the fact that this company has such a horrific past should be reason enough not to award them contract after contract with no real investigation of the past allegations levied against them.
A blind man in the dark with ear muffs on knows that something happened in Benghazi, Libya more than a spontaneous angry mob pissed off over a Grade Z video attacked an American Consulate and killed the US Ambassador to Libya.
I hate internet conspiracy theories, and loathe slinging a new one into the mix, but the evidence available adds up one way: the attack, well-planned, was surgical payback for CIA activity in the area. Stevens wasn’t the target at all, he was just a celebrity in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guff about the dumb Prophet movie was the first cover story for the US Government and when that fell apart like cardboard in the rain, the State Department shifted the meme to flag waving over Stevens’ death.
Let’s see what we know:
– The attack was not spontaneous. It involved a large number of men, perhaps as many as 125, fighting in a coordinated fashion, using weapons such as RPGs and mortars on multiple targets. Yes, yes, lots of people carry guns around Libya, but not RPGs and certainly not crew served weapons like mortars. It appears also that the so-called Libyan security forces assigned to protect the Consulate either conveniently disappeared on cue or saw the smack coming down and ran to save themselves. This information is widely available from media outside the US, but scare in US media sources for some reason.
– The attack did not target Stevens. Indeed, famously, his body was only pulled from the ruins of the Consulate by a secondary crowd. Whether the crowd abused the body or dragged it to a hospital, it clearly had no idea or concern for who it held. The Consulate attackers went for documents, and ignored the Ambassador. Stevens just happened to be there, wrong place, wrong time.
– Half the US personnel evacuated out of Benghazi were CIA. While it is common knowledge that the CIA stations personnel abroad, it seems very unusual to have half a mission’s complement to be Agency. The New York Times reports that though the Agency has been cooperating with the new post-Qaddafi Libyan intelligence service, the size of the CIA’s presence in Benghazi apparently surprised some Libyan leaders. The deputy prime minister, Mustafa Abushagour, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal last week saying that he learned about some of the delicate American operations in Benghazi only after the attack on the mission, in large part because a surprisingly large number of Americans showed up at the Benghazi airport to be evacuated.
– In its reporting on the large number of CIA personnel in Benghazi, the New York Times agreed to withhold locations and details of Agency operations at the request of Obama administration officials, who said that disclosing such information could jeopardize future sensitive government activities and put at risk American personnel working in dangerous settings.
– The UK’s Independent noted that the Consulate attackers made off with documents listing names of Libyans who were working with Americans, and documents related to oil contracts. This strongly suggests the attack itself may have been a diversion to steal these documents and the Ambassador’s death, in U.S. terms, merely collateral damage. The organized attacking mob did not seem to be primarily interested in looting or stealing computer stuff.
– Many wondered why the media was reporting from early on the deaths of four Americans at the Benghazi Consulate, while Clinton continuously only mentioned two (Ambassador Stevens and computer person Sean Smith). Well, that’s because she did not want to tell us that the other two who lost their lives were “former” Navy SEALS now acting as State Department “contractors.” Even when Clinton finally acknowledged the SEALS’ deaths following widespread press reports, she only mentioned that one’s role was as security for the Ambassador.
Clinton pointedly did not mention what the other SEAL was doing in Libya. That is because the other deceased man was in Libya on an intel mission. The SEAL told ABC News that he was in Libya in the field tracking down and blowing up MANPADS, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. The US saw its way to allowing those weapons to be used against Qaddafi and now wants to take them back so they are not used against us. Such ops are not State Department work and fall cleanly into CIA territory.
– The State Department’s curious mix up over who was providing security at the Benghazi Consulate also may point toward other US government Agencies. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland initially said “at no time did we contract with a private security firm in Libya,” while federal procurement records easily Googleable showed a contract for “security guards and patrol services” on May 3 for $387,413.68. An extension option brought the tab for protecting the consulate to $783,000. The contract lists only “foreign security awardees” as its recipient. Was typically fastidious Nuland’s wrong answer simply because she was misbriefed, or was it in fact an honest answer, that the guards were not State Department contractors at all?
According to Danger Room, the State Department frequently hires security companies to protect diplomats in conflict zones. It usually is done through what’s known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract, in which a handful of approved firms compete to safeguard specific diplomatic installations.
In 2010, State selected eight firms for the most recent contract. Blue Mountain wasn’t among them, and the State Department did not explain why the Benghazi consulate contract did not go to one of those eight firms. How the State Department could have even hired a foreign firm outside that blanket contract is unclear. State’s Inspector General had criticized State’s management of personnel security firms, so unilaterally expanding the pool just for one Libyan Consulate seems off base.
– The US government has had a heck of a time getting its story straight over what happened in Benghazi, most famously in sending UN ambassador and attack dog Susan Rice around to claim the attack was purely spontaneous even as the White House backed away from the idea. We’ve already mentioned Clinton’s duplicity over the identities and roles of the two deceased American “ex-” SEALS. Even long-time State drone Patrick Kennedy, Under-Secretary at the State Department, said at one point he was convinced the assault was planned due to its extensive nature and the proliferation of weapons.
The election-year focus on President Barack Obama meant that the White House had at first been catching most of the heat for the tragedy in Benghazi. It’s certainly true the explanations from White House spokesman Jay Carney and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have strained common sense — mainly, the idea that the attack could be blamed solely on an anti-Islamic video, and that there was a protest outside the consulate at 10 p.m. (there reportedly wasn’t,) among other misleading details. That initial story has crumbled, and it took Robert Gibbs to get the Obama administration back on message on the Sunday shows.
State’s later calling reporter Michael Hastings an “asshole” and telling him to “fuck off” in relation to CNN’s use of Ambassador Steven’s found diary just adds fuel to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of all this.
– Of course, there is a sort of precedent for this, most famously in 1991 when the KGB used a fire in the US Embassy in Moscow as a cover to roam around the building collecting documents,
Look, if all you have to do is tell the truth, it is pretty easy. Making up a cover story on the fly requires revisions. It may not be in our lifetimes that we learn what really happened in Libya, but something more than just a protest gone wild did happen.
Saudi militants were behind the massive car bombing and assault on Yemen’s military headquarters that killed more than 50 people, including foreigners, investigators said in a preliminary report released Friday.
