By Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack
**SHOEBAT EXCLUSIVE**

It has been learned that one week prior to the Benghazi attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, CIA Director David Petraeus met with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan. This finding, reported by Hurrieyt at the time, further bolsters brand new claims by Seymour M. Hersh, the man who broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal story in 2004.

In early 2012, the Obama administration, along with the administration of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reached an agreement that would have Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia provide funding for an operation run by then CIA Director David Petraeus (the Petraeus Operation), according to Hersh’s report. The purpose of the operation, carried out by the CIA and Great Britain’s MI6, was to move weapons from Libya into Syria, using back channel ‘rat lines’.

Petraeus meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotoglu in 2011.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who’d recently met with the House Intelligence Committee just days prior to this death, met with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin within two hours of the attack.

In January of this year, a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) made news when it released an 85-page bipartisan report on the Benghazi attacks. According to Hersh, there was an addendum or “highly classified annex” to the report which detailed the Petraeus operation. As to who was issued this highly sensitive document, House Speaker John Boehner and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers were reportedly among them.

According to a ‘former intelligence official’ cited heavily by Hersh, the classified annex revealed that the Special Mission Compound where Ambassador Christoper Stevens was murdered was nothing more than a front for negotiating the weapons transfers from Libya to Syria through Turkey.

Last year, after outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in front of a Senate Committee about Benghazi, Boehner appeared on a radio show one day later and admitted to having knowledge about weapons being shipped to Turkey:

The question asked of Boehner had to do with an exchange between Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Clinton, who testified that she had no knowledge of weapons being shipped from Libya to Turkey. According to Hersh’s source, not only was Petraeus overseeing an operation that was doing just that but the operation itself involved Hillary Clinton’s State Department, as evidenced by Stevens’ presence in Benghazi:

If Boehner had classified information about weapons being shipped to Syria from Libya, via Turkey as far back as January of last year, how long before that did he know about it? Despite a majority of House Republicans (185 – 38) who are calling for a Select Committee to investigate what happened in Benghazi, Boehner continues to refuse to appoint one. It stands to reason that if Boehner knew what was going on in Benghazi prior to the attacks, he wouldn’t want the truth about Benghazi to come out now.

That leads to another one of the eight congressmen who would have received the Senate Intelligence Committee annex report (according to Hersh’s source) in his capacity as House Intelligence Chairman – Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI). That Rogers hasn’t come forward with this information is suspect enough; ditto for Boehner. However, as Shoebat.com reported in November, Rogers also admitted that Ambassador Stevens appeared before his committee shortly before the Benghazi attacks.

As Shoebat.com reported, there was a series of curious events that took place in less than two weeks recently.

• March 24th: Catherine Herridge reveals former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell’s employer – Beacon Global Strategies – is home to several close Hillary Clinton allies and former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee under Rogers, J. Michael Allen. In the report, circumstances surrounding Allen’s departure raise ethical and possibly legal concerns.
• March 28th: Rogers announces that he will not seek re-election in 2014; he will be resigning to become a talk radio show host.
• April 2nd: Morell testifies in front of House Intelligence Committee. It’s learned that he consciously made the decision to protect the State Department when crafting the talking points, which is convenient in light of his job at Beacon.
• April 4th: The Washington Free Beacon reports that a CIA official committed suicide by jumping from a five-story building.

According to Hersh’s source, another consequence of the Benghazi attack was the cessation of the Petraeus operation. Turkey’s Erdogan was still funding the effort but the CIA was out and Erdogan wasn’t happy about picking up the slack, which allegedly made him desperate for action from the Obama administration on Syria. According to Hersh, there was a dinner meeting at the White House in May of 2013 that included Erdogan, his Intelligence Chief and Turkey’s Foreign Minister. Secretary of State John Kerry and then National Security Adviser Tom Donilon flanked Obama at the dinner.

White House meeting in May, 2013. Seated Clockwise beginning with John Kerry at 12:00; Barack Obama, unknown female, Tom Donilon, Ahmet Davotoglu (Turkish Foreign Minister), Erdogan, and Hakan Fidan (Turkish Intelligence head)

Hersh, who contends that the dinner meeting was called by Erdogan to press Obama to act in response to his ‘red line’ being crossed, writes:

In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government… was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability.

Al-Nusra = Al-Qaeda = Barbarians = Slaughterers of Christians.

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The Infamous August 21, 2013 Chemical Weapons Attack
There is no arguing that Turkey’s Erdogan was desperate for a shift of momentum in Syria. Not only had the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi been removed from power in Egypt but attempts by the Obama State Department – along with Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham – to have Muslim Brotherhood leaders released, failed miserably by August 7th, as Shoebat.com reported.

Beginning on August 27, 2013, Shoebat.com reported on the evidence that Syrian rebels were the ones responsible for the chemical weapons attack six days earlier. Since publishing that report, we have updated it with additional reports that further bolster those claims. It can be said with a high degree of certainty that Bashar al-Assad’s regime was not responsible for those attacks. There is far more evidence to implicate the rebels and, by extension, Erdogan’s regime.

Erdogan fingered in Syria’s chemical weapons attack last year.

This leads to a motive by Erdogan to prompt action by the Obama administration, as Hersh writes:

Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’

Perhaps the money quote in Hersh’s piece about who was responsible from the chemical weapons attack comes a bit later from the “former intelligence officer” he cites as a source:

“We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line.”

If Hersh is correct, there are members of Congress who must know it. If the U.S. presence in Benghazi was about arming Syrian jihadists through Turkey, countless innocent Christian lives have been ended as a result. Any member of Congress who knew that before the September 11th attacks in Benghazi has blood on his hands and any member of Congress who continues to remain silent about it is complicit in war crimes.

The right thing to do would be for any self-respecting member of Congress to call out Turkey for what it is and call for the cessation of a U.S. alliance with that country.

So far, there have been no takers.