Not-So-Streetwise Professor -- Benghazi Fast and Furious-Style Gunrunning to Syria Jihadis Not 'Plausible'

The not-so-Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong of the University of Houston

Ah the power of denial. At this blog we’ve already detailed that Denial is not a river in Egypt for the entire ‘Streetwise Professor’ clique known as Dr. Craig “I’m so fanatically pro-Establishment I’ll say Ron Paul supporters are like the genocidal Khmer Rouge” Pirrong, @Liberty “I think @ReginaldQuill and Mr. X may be the same person just messing with my head” Lynx and @Reginald “America’s bitter clingers are all backed by Russia” Quill. Above all this group has shown a stubborn, fanatical determination to:

1) Absolve the U.S. government, including the Obama Administration they all pretend to despise, of involvement in serious crimes, as opposed to simple incompetence. In this case, no matter how deliberately pathetic the security for the Benghazi compound was or how great the lengths including blackmailing Petreus the White House must go to ensure no word of Obama’s ‘stand down’ order leaks out, an innocent or quasi-plausible explanation must be found other than the one highly credible former military and intelligence operatives have put forward in mainline news sites such as Business Insider: that Benghazi was at the center of a massive gun and missile running operation from Libya to Syria to arm the anti-Assad rebels, including jihadist members of the Muslim Brotherhood with links to Al-Qaeda.

2) What makes this denial all the more curious is that among the theories about Benghazi, some including  private investigator Doug Hagmann have pointed the finger at Iran as a state sponsor of the attack on the consulate. Hagmann has even suggested that Russian intelligence tried to warn Amb. Chris Stevens prior to the attack through a message from the Turkish ambassador to Libya that Moscow knew all about Fast and Furious po Arabski and wanted Washington to cease and desist, particularly in facilitating the flow of SA-7 MANPADs from Gaddafi’s arsenals that could be used against airliners in Russia and all over the world. There has also been speculation on Hagmann’s part and that of others that Amb. Stevens was getting ‘cold feet’ over the gun running to the jihadis and wanted to put a stop to it.

3) The University of Houston Professor, who purports to be an expert on everything including his own lawless MF’d Global’d commodities industry, writes the following:

…those who believe that the CIA was smuggling guns to the Syrian opposition are logically challenged.  They “reason” as follows: 1. The CIA was collecting weapons in Benghazi.  2. Weapons were shipped from Libya to Islamic extremists in Syria.  Ergo, 3. The CIA was shipping weapons from Libya to Islamic extremists in Syria.  Er, no.  It’s far more plausible that concerns about weapons going to Islamists in Syria and elsewhere caused the CIA to try to stem the flow, and that’s what they were doing in Benghazi.) 

What do you mean “Er no”?, kemosabe? Are you an acknowledged expert on covert operations like Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who says criminal and impeachment charges should be moved forward over Benghazi? Are you a former Army special operator who used to run the unit to kill Osama bin Laden who has sources who’ve told you that large quantities of Gaddafi’s weapons were being deliberately smuggled from Libya to Syria, like Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer USA (ret.)? Are you former CIA agent Clare Lopez, who says the Obama Administration was deliberately gun running to Syrian Islamists? No, you aren’t. You’re just a sorry ass fake libertarian academic who complains about Jon Corzine making your commodities industry into a lawless joke but does nothing about it beside the occasional blog post. You certainly haven’t gone on TV and called for Corzine’s arrest or held a sign outside your beloved CME meetings. You occasonally bitch about the TSA touching your private parts. But you don’t back the Texas Legislature when it tells the TSA to bugger off from its illegal body cavity searches, or even gets the federal government to threaten an illegal air blockade of Texas in retaliation for stopping the TSA gropedowns.

No, you’re part of the old boys insiders club or at least you think you are, and that goes a long way — along with some fanatical Russophobia — in explaining why you feel the need to cover for the sorry ass CIA on this one. But here’s the problem Professor — the Establishment you want so badly to be a part of is cracking up. It is going batcrap insane. And lines are being drawn. All this obfuscation won’t hide that fact.

For another, there are reports from Jennifer Griffin claiming that “multiple sources” confirm that the CIA was holding prisoners at the Benghazi annex.  Indeed, Broadwell made the same claim in a speech at the University of Denver on the same day Griffin first made a rather ambiguous reference to prisoners at the site: interestingly, this was after Broadwell had been questioned by the FBI. (Warning shot across the bows of the administration? Dunno, but this can’t be coincidental.)

Again, misdirection play and false conclusion from bad premise. It is QUITE plausible that not only was Benghazi being used as a weapons smuggling hub with the CIA and NATO (especially French) military complicity, but also that the Agency had a few detainees at the Benghazi not-so-black site. The two are hardly mutually exclusive possibilities. And the presence of detainees Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or the Al-Qaeda franchisee group Ansar Al-Sharia wanted busted out of CIA jail would explain the faked ‘kidnapping by bandits’ of several Iranian Red Crescent members who were likely Revolutionary Guard operatives weeks before the attack. The Iranians had to disappear fast early this summer in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion among the CIA and American special forces in Libya, so they faked their own kidnapping after the walls of the consulate complex were tested with a single mortar round. This is consistent with what Douglas J. Hagmann’s sources at Northeast Intelligence Network are telling him about the weeks leading up to the attack.

But let’s step back for a minute and consider why Iran would hit a CIA site in Libya. What would be the motive? And if the Obama Administration knows Iranians may have been involved, why has it held this fact back instead of immediately leaking it to direct Republicans in Congress toward fighting Iran instead of the Administration’s incompetence and lies? Why did the Administration trot out the ridiculous lie that the attack was about an “Innocence of Muslims” video nobody had yet seen, and even have Paula Broadwell repeat this lie at the University of Denver (Broadwell’s Dad, in a comment Pirrong scrupulously ignores, hints that this isn’t about his daughter but is part of a much, much bigger conspiracy).

Could it be that Obama ordered the stand down while watching the consulate burn live via drone because he didn’t want to screw up delicate, pre-election negotiations between his top advisor Valerie Jarrett and the Islamic Republic of Iran over Iran promising to suspend uranium enrichment?

Could it be that Iran engaged in the negotiations as a ploy while it used Sunni double agents to infiltrate the CIA operations in Benghazi, including the massive missile and gunwalking effort that aided enemies of Iran’s ally Bashir Assad?

Could it be that Iran infilitrated this operation with the express intent of gathering material to save its own nuclear program from Israeli and American air strikes down the road, by having unequivocal proof that CIA and NATO armed and funded card carrying members of Al-Qaeda to fight in Syria? Talk about blackmail potential from such explosive data…why assume that because Hagmann, Schaffer and Pieczenik know a little bit about the attacks and who was responsible for the lax security and standdown orders that FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS including those of Iran and Russia don’t know more?

Think: if you’re Iran, and you lack the ability to deter an Israeli strike or prevent the bombs from falling if Bibi gives the go order, what options are left to protect your regime and its nuclear plants but blackmailing the West and the White House into halting such strikes?

When Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said he didn’t have enough information to send in special forces or call in air strikes (an assertion Pirrong has attacked but has not dug into deeper), could it be that Panetta did not want to admit a state-sponsored terrorist attack was underway? And why were the consulate premises left unsecured even after the attack, such that the Al-Qaeda/Ansar Al Shariah boys could rifle through whatever documentation were left at the site and gather whatever kompromat they needed about what was happening there?

At any rate, Pirrong’s lame explanation that the CIA was trying to gather in guns and missiles misses a point: that horse had long since left the barn door. If the CIA really were sincerely trying an SA-7 buyback program from Libya and the rest of the Middle East, it was already too freakin’ late. Several SA-7s were already ‘captured’ by the Syrian rebels in that country, and Col. Austin Bay’s Strategy Page has reported that dozens if not hundreds of the MANPADs were already on the ground in the Palestinian territories including Gaza. And in any case this ‘explanation’ also smacks of Fast and Furious kingpin Attorney General Eric Holder’s claims (you all notice he’s not going anywhere, he is truly the firewall for the Obama Administration’s darkest crimes) that F&F was just a gunwalking operation that went wrong. Uh huh, the BATF and the rest of the Administration needed to walk THOUSANDS of guns into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels ‘just to see how the arms flow’.

Riiiiiiiight. And yet this sorry excuse for a libertarian is willing to believe the Obamanoids would allow guns to flow to the psychopaths in the Mexican drug cartels but not international jihadists. Obviously, the willigness to believe the former while excluding the latter is a weak psychological ’see no, hear no, speak no evil’ defense against the horrible truth: that criminals have now thoroughly infiltrated the U.S. government, and are willing to make a total farce of the ‘war on terror’ including arming the other side to achieve their evil geopolitical designs. And as we’ve written at this blog before, you no longer need to take Alex Jones word for it or that of other ‘fringe’ ‘conspiracy theory’ ‘tin foil hat wearer’ media. This is now breaking wide into the open and the damage control efforts to put the genie of Al-CIA-aeda gun running back into the bottle are failing.

It’s not JUST incompetence Pirrong. It’s EVIL. Wake up and smell it before they decide your role as useful idiot on the Right is not so useful anymore and the feds shut your blog down for some SOPA/PIPA whatever bogus ‘copyright violation’. And before your private retirement accounts get looted with impunity by the next Jon Corzine.