“I want them to hate him,” a federal prosecutor said quietly on the evening of October 2 as his colleagues packed up. It had been a long first day in the trial of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the man charged with instigating the tragic 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Khatallah, a middle-aged man with a long gray and yellow beard, sat quietly for over five hours in one of the wood-paneled courtrooms of the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse—barely fidgeting, not looking at the benches to his left, which were filled with government officials, reporters, and spectators all looking at him.
His six-week trial is going to revive the controversy over Benghazi. The violent attacks that occurred at the U.S. mission and a nearby CIA annex on the night of September 11, 2012, left four Americans dead, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. They also triggered hyperbolic remarks and partisan rancor. The contradictory statements and foggy accounts of the night’s events from Obama administration officials led to intense efforts by Congress to pin down exactly what happened. Lawmakers held hearings and produced lengthy reports. But many questions were left unanswered. Monday marked the first day of a trial that should set the story straight.
Khatallah is facing 18 counts, including murder and providing material support for terrorists. He has pleaded not guilty on all charges. He wore a blank expression as a top federal prosecutor laid out what to expect in the weeks ahead.
Jurors, he promised, would hear from a man named “Ali” who, at the behest of the U.S. government and in exchange for $7 million, grew close to Khatallah in Libya and lured him to his capture in 2014. “I would have killed all the Americans that night,” Khatallah allegedly told Ali of the Benghazi attacks, “if others had not gotten involved and stopped me.”
They’ll hear emotional retellings from people at the U.S. mission and CIA annex the night of the attacks, as well as testimony from arson and weapons experts. All of it, assistant U.S. attorney John Crabb argued, will prove one thing: that Abu Khatallah is responsible for the deaths of four Americans.
“Those four Americans were killed because the defendant hates America with a vengeance,” he told jurors. “He didn’t light the fires, and he didn’t fire the mortars,” but Khatallah planned the attacks, incited the fighters, and ensured that no one interfered with the assault or helped the besieged Americans, Crabb said. “He got others to do his dirty work.”
About a week before the attacks, Khatallah and a few of his associates stocked up on weapons at a militia camp, Crabb reported. Aided by an elaborate model of the compound and annex as well as video footage, Crabb then walked the jury through the events of the night. He referred to the participants in the attacks as Khatallah’s “associates.”
Crabb barely touched on Khatallah’s terror affiliations or those of the other attackers. He mentioned Ubaydah bin Jarrah (UBJ), a militia led by Khatallah, which sought to establish sharia in Libya, and he referenced Ansar al Sharia (AAS), which merged with UBJ around 2011.
AAS has well-established connections to al Qaeda. A government report published not long before the Benghazi attacks noted that AAS “has increasingly embodied al Qaeda’s presence in Libya.” Some analysts initially thought that AAS was merely a local extremist group that operated independently. But AAS abandoned any pretense in the months following Benghazi and broadcast lectures by Osama bin Laden to its followers. The U.N. has formally recognized the links between al Qaeda and AAS.
Terrorists with broader ties to al Qaeda also participated in the attacks. There were fighters in Benghazi with links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Al Qaeda in Iraq, as well as to the Egypt-based Muhammad Jamal network, according to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the attacks. The State Department terror designation for the Jamal network explicitly links it to al Qaeda as far back as the 1980s.
Crabb showed surveillance footage of armed men streaming through the mission gate in Benghazi at about 9:45 on the night of September 11. Some of them then stormed the building where Stevens was holed up and set it on fire, resulting in the ambassador’s death as well as that of Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department information officer.
Two of the first witnesses called to the stand, diplomatic security agents Scott Wickland and David Ubben, added tragic detail to Crabb’s brief retelling.
“My face was covered in soot, my eyeballs were black, my teeth were black, my feet were in pretty bad shape,” said Wickland, who was in the burning building with Smith and Stevens.
Ubben testified that he repeatedly went into the burning building to find the ambassador and Smith. The smoke made his eyes, nose, and throat feel like they were on fire. “Extremely thick, very acrid, very toxic,” he remembered. “The smoke is so thick you’re gulping for air.”
Crawling on his hands and knees due to smoke, Ubben ran into a body, which he recognized as Smith’s. “Stumbling upon him the way that I did, I could tell very quickly from his body type,” he said evenly. “I knew it was Sean.” Ubben dragged the corpse outside and reentered the villa to find Stevens.
All the while, Crabb said in his opening statement, Khatallah was “on the perimeter” ensuring that no one could help the trapped Americans.
Khatallah’s lawyer Jeffrey Robinson agreed the defendant had been present that night but insisted he did not orchestrate or even participate in the attacks. He had not been setting up roadblocks or warding off emergency responders but was, Robinson said, simply warning people to stay away because of the dangerous gunfire.
“He didn’t shoot anyone,” he said. “He didn’t set any fires.” Robinson said Khatallah had heard about a “protest” and wanted to see what was happening. By the time he entered the mission, the Americans had left and the building was already blazing, according to Robinson.
Crabb showed surveillance footage of Khatallah entering the mission with an AK-47 around midnight. He went into the building that contained an office with secret documents, from which attackers were filmed emerging with maps and other items. Ali told the government that Khatallah possessed books, computers, maps, charts, and weapons from the compound, Crabb reported.
Robinson disputed this. Khatallah, he said, walked into the building and walked right out. He went home and didn’t go anywhere near the CIA annex. “You don’t go home if you are planning and leading an attack on a CIA annex,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
The attack on the nearby CIA annex began after midnight, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, were killed on the roof of the building by precision mortar fire. The attack left Ubben badly injured, Wickland testified. “It’s hard to see your friend like that,” he said. “I didn’t think Dave was going to live.”
The six-foot-four Ubben—walking without assistance and moving his arms freely after over 40 surgeries—showed jurors the scars on his arm, leg, and head. “I could see my leg. It was a mess. It was just hanging on by a little bit of flesh,” he said of the battle at the CIA annex. “But I was committed to surviving. I was going to get out of there. I had made that decision already.”
Ubben’s responsibilities at the mission included the room containing sensitive government information, and prosecutors asked him about the maps and other items stolen by the attackers. Some of the documents in the office contained coded coordinates and labels representing the nearby CIA annex, he said.
The prosecution also asked Ubben about the mortars that badly injured him. He said that mortar fire is a skill that must be “learned,” and that one can hit a target directly with coordinates or familiarity. Crabb said in his opening that there was evidence that Khatallah was well-versed in how to use mortars and had trained others.
But the defense rejected any attempt to tie Khatallah to the attacks via the maps or mortars. Robinson insisted Khatallah was simply a “soft target” for the government—someone they decided they could blame for the attacks. For one thing, he said, he was easy to find. The New York Times interviewed Khatallah a month after the attacks at a luxury hotel in Benghazi, where the terror suspect was “sipping a strawberry frappe.” Robinson alleged that other individuals, not Khatallah, had masterminded the attacks—but that this information was kept classified by the government.
He also warned jurors to be skeptical about believing the government’s witnesses, especially the Libyans set to testify. “When you hear them, you’re not going to believe them,” he said. He pointed especially to Ali, who he said was doing whatever it took “to collect” the $7 million offered to him and go along with the government script.
The early days of the trial were focused on a play-by-play of the night in Benghazi. The prosecution promises to piece together Khatallah’s involvement in the coming weeks and to look closely at his activities before and after the attacks.
By 2014, the intelligence community had identified around 80 individuals with “some level of participation” in the attacks, according to a congressional report. To this day, Khatallah is the only one charged publicly—and he is being tried in civilian court.
The trial’s setting also revives yet another debate—over whether terrorists should be tried in military or civilian tribunals. And Khatallah’s military capture in the run-up to the trial adds an especially unusual twist. He was kidnapped by Delta Force operators and hauled aboard the USS New York for a 13-day journey to the United States during which he was interrogated by intelligence officials for information on active threats. Days later, he was read his Miranda rights and re-interrogated by FBI agents who began to make the case against him for the Benghazi attacks.Abu Khatallah is thus the first terrorist captured in a military raid to be tried before an American jury.
On Monday morning, Khatallah walked casually and freely into a D.C. courtroom. He sipped some water and swiveled in his chair slightly. But Crabb made clear that despite the setting of the trial, he would not let lines be blurred.
“This is a terrorism case,” he said. “Plain and simple.”
Jenna Lifhits is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
