Interrogating Benghazi

Petraeus' girlfriend let the cat out of the bag quite a while ago: the CIA had a little prison in (actually, near) the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.  Persons thought to pose too great a threat to the political settlement in Libya the CIA has been promoting were scooped up and confined there, sometimes "interrogated harshly," sometimes moved on to larger detention facilities and sometimes ... ?

Some actors on the Libyan political scene resented this, and in particular the Ansar al Sharia militia resented - can you imagine such wickedness? - the detention there of 2 or 3 of its officers. It calculated (perhaps, not without assistance) that by a local concentration of military power it could take the prison/consulate and free these prisoners, and it did so, other things made possible by the overthrow of consulate security also being done at the same time.

Since it was in a public speech that the Ms. Broadwell announced this bit of news, the CIA had to issue a public denial (surprise, surprise). (Article)

Sen. McCain's sources, one assumes, are at least as good as Ms. Broadwell's.  So whether it was Broadwell's speech that tipped them off or they already knew, McCain and his Washington collaborators were fully aware, well before their recent spate of denunciations targeting Susan Rice, that the CIA had something in Benghazi it had to cover up.  The "Innocence of Muslims" film, or rather its sudden and thus far unexplained discovery by Muslims worldwide, might almost seem to have been ready-made cover. Almost, but for the fact that the "Innocence" agitation was already underway when the consulate attack occurred.

One might address this temporal difficulty by supposing that the entity responsible for causing "Innocence" to be publicized in far-flung Islamist circles also had a hand in instigating the attack on the consulate.  Then the picture changes from one of temporal inconsistency to one of almost-perfect timing.  But why should "the entity" want to see its own prison overrun? (It will be noted that while, over at the consulate, the ambassador and his bodyguards were killed, all the CIA personnel got away from the prison safely.)

One suspects that Ansar al Sharia wanted its officers back more than the CIA really wanted to hold them, but the pressing question is:  Who wanted to kill Chris Stevens?

Did Stevens know about the CIA torture facility in the Benghazi consulate, and if so, did he approve?  It seems doubtful he could have been without knowledge, and certain he could not have approved.  One supposes (one hopes, at least) that the same could be said of the State Department itself, and one doubts that conditions in our Libyan facilities were or are unique.

Since writing the preceding paragraph I have had second thoughts. I suspect that the "highest levels" of the State Department were (the plural number here being a mere conventional fig-leaf) not so unsympathetic toward the use of American diplomatic facilities for illegal imprisonment and torture as I had hoped. This would mean that suspicions regarding the Secretary's reactions to unfolding events may have been as better founded as I tended to think.

The prospect for a truly Watergate-scale investigation and scandal is suddenly clear (or it would be in an era unlike this post-9/11 one, when leadership at every point of the political compass only competes to cry "By jingo!" the loudest).  If this agitation continues, even given Washington's "know no evil" attitude toward our own "security" operatons, can it fail to bring the CIA abuse of American diplomatic facilities in the Middle East -- and perhaps even more nefarious activities of the American "intelligence" apparatus -- under the glare of international floodlights?  But then why is an arch-neocons Senator vigorously and unflaggingly attacking a State spokesperson for her faithful promotion of the CIA cover story?

The likes of McCain and Graham, of course, can only be dupes in such a deep and devious game.  But who is pulling their strings?  And to what end?