Kenneth Timmerman’s new book, Dark Forces: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi, focuses on far more than just the events that occurred during the storming of the American consulate in Libya by Islamic jihadists on September 11 2011.
According to Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, the book “contextualizes” by taking an historical narrative of the events leading up to the fateful day for America and the aftermath of the crisis, which took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Ty Woods.
Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot Radio, channel 125, the author explained that he has worked for 35 years in the region as a war correspondent and reporter. Timmerman was the first American journalist allowed into Libya in 2004, hours after the State Department dropped the travel ban it had placed on the country during the Reagan years.
“Why was the travel ban removed? Because its leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, had gone from being an enemy of the United States to being somebody who had given up, and who had given up his weapons of mass destruction,” he explained. Timmerman recounted what one of Gaddafi’s advisors told him: “Gaddafi turned white when he saw Sadham Hussein being pulled out of his hidy-hole in Iraq.” The Libyan leader said he didn’t want to go the way of the Iraqi leader and had become more agreeable to America’s policies.
Unfortunately for Gaddafi, things turned out just as badly for him as they did for Sadham, as he was murdered by Islamists, who were in the process of taking control of the north African country. During that time, Timmerman explains, clandestine arms deliveries by the United States and its allies ended up in the hands of Islamist guerrillas.
Dark Forces posits that the Obama administration’s policy toward Libya and the Middle East systematically supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist groups to overthrow autocrats like Gaddafi in the region.
Timmerman argues that the overthrow of the mission and the killing of the four Americans in Benghazi was a state-sponsored terrorist attack orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moreover, he told Bannon that the state department had ignored pleas from diplomats to provide greater security for the American embassy. Timmerman added that Ambassador Stevens “had been begging, begging the state department and personally begging Hillary Clinton for additional security, both in Tripoli and in Benghazi.” Sadly, the author claims, all of his “repeated entreaties had been rejected by Hillary personally and the State Department.”
Notably, Bannon pointed out that Stevens had “a gravitational pull” toward the region from his days in the Peace Corps. He was an idealist about the Middle East and was intrigued by Sufism. The author agreed that Stevens at one time was an Arabist and had an attachment to the Arab world. However, he insisted that by the time of the September 11 mission fiasco, “all that romanticism was gone. The mysticism was gone. He knew that he was dealing with killers and he also knew that his days were numbered.”