Earlier this week I read a stunning article from Roger Simon of PJ Media contending that slain U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi on September 11 to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups that had originally been provided to them by the U.S. State Department. Simon quoted two unidentified former diplomats who asserted that Hillary Clinton and the State Department, not the CIA, were the driving forces behind the effort to arm the Libyan rebels.

Earlier this week I completed an exhaustive review of open-source U.S. and foreign media reports going back to 2011, and was able to corroborate some elements of the diplomats’ version of events, and contradict others.

‐ Some Libyan rebel leaders, including at least one who had spent time in a training camp in Afghanistan and who was in that country in September 2001, specifically asked Western countries to send Stinger missiles.

‐ Qaddafi’s intelligence services believed that the rebels were having the missiles smuggled in over the country’s southern border — but they believed the French were supplying the missiles.

‐ There is no evidence that the U.S. supplied the weapons, but it appears they gave their blessing to a secret Qatari effort to ship arms across Libya’s southern border in violation of a United Nations arms embargo.

‐ Anti-Qaddafi forces also obtained a significant number of anti-aircraft missiles from the regime’s bunkers early in the conflict.

‐ Enough Stinger missiles disappeared from regime stockpiles during the civil war to become a high priority and serious worry for the administration.

The U.S. is now covertly monitoring, and perhaps assisting, the transfer of arms from Libyans to rebel forces in Syria through Turkey.

Before its civil war, Libya had an estimated 20,000 “man-portable air-defense systems” or MANPADS, like these held by insurgents in Iraq.