Two years ago, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared before a Senate panel investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, Sen. Rand Paul quizzed her about a report, which first emerged on the conspiracy theory outlet WorldNetDaily, alleging that the U.S. was secretly transferring arms from Libya to Syrian rebels through Turkey. Paul admitted at the time that he did not “have any proof” to back up his claims, and a Republican-led House committee later debunked the theory.
Not having any evidence hasn’t stopped Benghazi conspiracy theorists before, and it isn’t stopping them now.
Today, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing group Judicial Watch, spoke with WorldNetDaily’s Jerome Corsi — best known for spreading bizarre rumors about Obama’s birth certificate and secret gay life and passing them off as journalism — about another conspiracy theory that his group has cooked up about the Benghazi attack.
Fitton alleges that the Obama administration wanted Ambassador Chris Stevens to get kidnapped so they could then release Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian Islamist convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in return for Stevens’ freedom.
What proof does Judicial Watch have? Like Sen. Rand Paul, Fitton freely admitted that his group has “no evidence” at all, besides claims made by other Benghazi conspiracy theorists.
Did the Obama administration plan to allow a U.S. ambassador to be kidnapped to set up a prisoner-exchange scenario that would provide a pretext for releasing the “Blind Sheik” imprisoned for plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing?
That’s one of the provocative explanations for the administration’s puzzling actions before, during and after the Benghazi attack that has prompted an investigation by the Washington, D.C.-watchdog Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told WND Tuesday his group is preparing to take legal steps to force government disclosure of documents pertaining to plans the Obama administration had to release “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence at the Butner Federal Correction Institution in North Carolina.
“Given what we know now, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the terrorist attack on Benghazi could have been a kidnapping attempt aimed at releasing the Blind Sheik,” Fitton said.
He noted, however, there is “no evidence” that the Obama administration may have been complicit in any kidnapping plot related to the Benghazi attack.
