Did John Brennan's actions play a role in Benghazi attacks?

When coupled with the shocking claim by John Guandolo, that Barack Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, converted to Islam while a station chief in Saudi Arabia in the 1990's, some of the details released from a new book written by a retired Green Beret and a Navy SEAL may take on added significance. Among other things in the book, Brennan's orders while operating from the White House are identified as the motivation for the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi.

Brennan is Obama's nominee to replace David Petraeus as CIA Director.

But first, take a look at some other relevant information taken from the book, starting with power players at the CIA who wanted Petraeus gone as CIA Director.

Via The Daily Mail:

Media reports indicate that the FBI began investigating Petraeus' affair with Broadwell after Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, a friend of Petraeus and his wife Holly, reported that she had received threatening emails from the mistress warning her to stay away from Petraeus.

The authors say that Kelley's report may have started in the FBI investigation - but CIA officers pressured the Justice Department to keep the inquiry open.

Webb said his sources in the FBI told him federal agents wanted to close down their investigation when they learned that nothing illegal had happened, but they were told to keep digging. The FBI investigators, Webb says, never wanted to out Petraeus' affair.

The FBI reports to the Department of Justice, which is headed by Attorney General Eric Holder. Surely, something as big as investigating the CIA Director had to be something Holder was aware of. Based on the fact that the subject of the investigation was someone like Petraeus, Holder almost necessarily had to have approved pushing it forward, but to what end?

Was it - at least in part - to open the door for Brennan to head the CIA? Early indications are that authors Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy don't appear to go that far but they certainly piece together the groundwork for such a scenario.

Again, via the Daily Mail:

Murphy and co-author Brandon Webb also revealed that the September 11 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, was retaliation by Islamist militants who had been targeted by covert U.S. military operations.

The book claims that neither Stevens nor even Petraeus knew about the raids by American special operations troops, which had 'kicked a hornet's nest' among the heavily-armed fighters after the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser, had been authorizing 'unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,' according to the e-book. Brennan is Obama's pick to replace Petraeus as head of the CIA.

If this is true, it would mean that Obama himself could be directly accountable for the attacks in Benghazi because Brennan was ordering these raids from the White House. As such, he was a direct arm of the Obama administration. These raids weren't just carried out on orders of the administration. They apparently weren't made known to the people who would ultimately face what could be identified as their consequences.

Petraeus was furious, they say, because he was kept in the dark about the raids being conducted without his knowledge by the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) across Libya and North Africa.

Webb and Murphy claim that the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate and a CIA outpost in Benghazi proved to Petraeus that he was an outsider in the Obama administration and that he would remain marginalized as long as he was at the CIA.

The central premise of 'Benghazi: The Definitive Report' is that the attacks were precipitated by secret raids JSOC had performed in Libya. An attack on the Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia days before September 11 may have been the final straw.

According to what Webb and Murphy are saying here, Petraeus was forced out and Brennan's orders to raid Islamist strongholds led to the Benghazi attacks on an unsuspecting consulate and CIA Annex. At least calling that last part into partial question is the fact that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith both seemed more than just a little concerned about coming under attack. Stevens sent cables to the State Department requesting more security and Smith made reference to losing his life while gaming from the consulate / Special Missions Compound (SMC) on the day of the attacks. That said, it's still possible that a growing threat was felt but not fully understood.

Check out this particularly explosive excerpt from the book. It seems to add credence to the concerns of Senator Rand Paul, raised during his questioning of Hillary Clinton last month:

John Brennan also ran a highly compartmentalized program out of the White House in regard to weapons transfers, and Stevens would not have been trusted with that type of information. Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict.

Ostensibly, that "exported them overseas" part is a reference to weapons sent from Libya (the annex?) to the Syrian rebels (via Turkey?).

If Petraeus and Stevens were kept in the dark relative to Brennan's raids and those raids served as the motivation for the attacks on the consulate and annex, that places blood directly on the hands of those behind Brennan's orders and secretiveness with respect to them. Under such a scenario, it would appear that Brennan is less qualified to be CIA Director than Petraeus was after the affair became public.

Also, if the claims of Webb and Murphy are true, Obama must certainly know that truth. If so, why would he be nominating Brennan to replace Petraeus unless he was fully behind what Brennan was allegedly doing?

That leads us directly to a covert, pro-Muslim Brotherhood strategy coming directly from the Obama White House, which brings us back to the claim made by Guandolo, that Brennan secretly converted to Islam while in Saudi Arabia and that he was turned by the Muslim Brotherhood specifically.

People might point to Brennan's orders to raid Islamist locations in Libya as evidence that he did NOT convert to Islam because his new religion would forbid him from attacking his own. In reality, the concept of Muruna, espoused by none other than the Brotherhood's most senior spiritual adviser - Yusuf al-Qaradawi - sanctions the killing of Muslims if doing so furthers the cause of Islam.

Again, just operating under the premise that Guandolo has already put forth...

If Brennan's objective was to raid Islamist strongholds for the purpose of confiscating weapons that could then be sent to the Syrian rebels in the latter's fight to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, such a thing would be perceived by the Brotherhood as a greater good.

The bottom line, however, is this: If Brennan was the guy behind operations that both left the consulate and the Annex unprepared to defend against attacks caused by White House policy AND if Brennan was the guy behind secretly ordering weapons be sent to Syrian rebels, all of that is made much worse by Obama's decision to nominate him for CIA Director in the first place.

That would tie Obama directly to gun-running from Libya to Syria and THAT would make Fast and Furious look like child's play by comparison.

The cherry on top would be this administration's attempt at gun control in the U.S. while arming al-Qaeda.