Hi, it's Sarah from The Watch Floor. Thanks for tuning in. We're doing a special edition today because good news, FBI got Boy Scout. If you don't know Boy Scout, we're going to explain to you who he is today, but he was one of the attackers at the U.S. consulate doing the attacks against us in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. We have never stopped seeking justice for that crime against our nation. In fact, from day one, Cash and Dan would sit in meetings and say, we're going to get them. And they did. Today, I'm proud to announce that the FBI has arrested one of the key participants behind the Benghazi attack. Zubar Albaqash landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 3 a.m. this morning. He is in our custody. He was greeted by Director Patel and U.S. Attorney Janine Pirro. Hillary Clinton famously once said about Benghazi, What difference at this point does it make? Well, it makes a difference to Donald Trump. It makes a difference to those families. And 14 years later, it makes a difference to law enforcement who made the difference in this case. Abba Koush will now face American justice on American soil. We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. If you have our book, Me and Dave Boombenton's Benghazi Know Thy Enemy, you can actually open his profile and we can work off of that. So if you go to the B section and get to the profiles, he's going to be terrorist number 36 in the book. So right here, you know, as they're saying in the press, Zubair Al-Bakush. Bakush, but his full name is Zubair Hassan Omar al-Bakush. Zubair has been an interesting character, and he's long been a focus of ours, less to do with the fact that he was one of our attackers, but more to do with our concerns around kind of this idea of indoctrinating the second generation. So prior to ever becoming a terrorist, Zubair was always involved in the Libyan scouts, So this is the same as like the Boy Scouts or the Scouts in the United States. It formed in Libya kind of back in the 1950s. And he was one of these kind of adult senior scout leaders, you know, ran different units of the Scouts. But the concern is once he joined and got involved in terrorism after 2011, he then started recruiting these kids out of the Scouts to become terrorists. I mean, this is a huge problem. we're always dealing with because you have to deal with the bad guys, but then you also have to stop that indoctrination, you know, of this next generation of terrorists and this next generation of bad guys. So it's really good to see him off the streets. His son is also, you know, in the scouts. So we do also have to watch his activities to make sure he doesn't take on some of these indoctrination roles his father was doing. Now, I want to give you a little bit of background on him from the night of our attacks. So, on the night of the attacks, he attacked the consulate as part of the group, Antal Sharia Benghazi. Now, just to be very, very simple, about, So, I'd say five, six months prior to our attacks, there are a lot of efforts by terrorists to come together and make united fronts. So one of these goals was under this banner of Ansel Sharia Benghazi So how it worked it said hey we gonna umbrella a bunch of groups under us So if you belong to a group let say you a member of AQIM you can also be a part of Ansel Ashari Benghazi. Let's say you haven't, you know, hung your hat yet with a terrorist group. That's okay. You can still come join the group and then be a member of the group. So it went both ways, which is really interesting. That's why sometimes when we talk and say terrorist at the time was al-Qaeda and he was Ansel Sharia. That's why. Now that it's so many years later, it's called Ansel Sharia Libya, and now it's become an official branch and affiliate of al-Qaeda. So it's like an al-Shabaab or a JNIM. So it gets its command and control from core al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and falls in line like any affiliate. And that's why we're really focused, as you can imagine, on the current set of these Libyan terrorists. Some have deployed here to the United States. So that night, that evening, he went with a grouping, as you can imagine, of Ansel Asharia terrorists to the attacks. Now, during the attack, the largest number of terrorists came from Ansel al-Shariah Benghazi. And that's because it was the biggest terrorist group in Benghazi at the time. It had about 5,000 members. Now, its leader, who's now dead, Mohammed al-Zahawi, was a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden. He had relations with him back in Sudan. So, of course, when the idea of this attack came up, it was directed by Dr. Ayman al-Zahawahiri, then, you know, the leader of al-Qaeda. and he gave the plot, which was supposed to be a kidnapping, to, you know, AQIM, the North Africa branch, and then at that time it went to a terrorist, Muktabel Muktar, who masterminded the consulate piece of the attack. Now, MBM, as we like to call him, was actually very close to a lot of these leaders in Ansel, or Sharia, and he recruited them to be part of the attack, and then they also were doing a lot of joint training training to prepare for the attack and the interesting thing about that it was actually in the whole other side of Libya. They were hosting that in western Libya not actually over in like Benghazi or Darna where a lot of the terrorists came from. So they moved them out of the area for training probably so you know less people could collect on it and it wouldn't leak. So it's just a very interesting thing. So at least half the attackers were from this group. The interesting thing is that group had different commanders who ran pockets of them. But the key commander of the attack that night was AQIM's head for Libya. His name was Omar al-Shillelagh. Well, as I said, NBM planned this as a kidnapping of the ambassador. and as you saw that didn't happen so Omar Shillelagh got very upset even real time during the attack was calling senior leaders around midnight and being like this failed and he put the entire blame on Ansar or Sharia which it really wasn't the reason why it's just the ambassador got so far in the building and they couldn't get to him that's why they were unable to kidnap him So he put the whole blame on them. And it's really interesting. Al Qaeda started cutting Anto al-Sharia from some of the upcoming plots and attacks they were going to do jointly. One was in Aminas. It was the big oil facility attack in Algeria that happened just months later in January. So that would have had another 30 terrorists at that event, which would have been crazy. And they all got cut because of Omar's complaint, right, to then Drupdal, who ran AQIM, saying you don't want to bring these terrorists into the attack. Obviously, over time, that thought against them went away. And a lot of it was to do with the fact in 2014, the same network went and did capture the Jordanian ambassador in Libya. So then they got a win. Al Qaeda was happy again and everything went forward from there Now one other really interesting thing about Zubair you know Boy Scout is he was like a lot of Libyans who had no real terrorist background but they volunteered to fight during the Libyan Revolution Well, unfortunately, during the revolution, most of the militias were run by terrorists or at least in some way had a relationship with a terrorist group. So he, as you see in the book, joined the Free Libya Martyrs Brigade. Now, you'll hear this name a lot, especially in our book, because a lot of attackers fought in this brigade during the revolution, And it's because the brigade was run by a very famous terrorist from Benghazi, Wissam bin Hamed. So this is another key relationship Zubair has, because as you know, as we've talked about many times, it was then Wissam bin Hamed, who is the mastermind of the second piece of the attacks that night. So he's the one that set up the mortar strike on the CIA annex that occurred on September 12th, that obviously killed our CIA brothers, you know, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty. So Zuberi has an interesting historic relationship to Assam. Now, when we talk about the case, right, because he's now been brought to the United States, what's this case going to look like against him? Well, the interesting thing is Benghazi is like a small town. I like to tell people it's really similar in size and geography. to something like a Green Bay, Wisconsin. So Zubair wasn't just at the attack. He was identified by a large number of individuals of being at the attack. And then, of course, we even have a couple of people here in custody, you know, in the United States who can identify him as being there. So there really is probably going to be no issue with the court case, because he was, you know, 100% an attacker on the ground inside the consulate that night. So that's a very good thing for the court case. Another thing a lot of people don't talk about, but I do really think it's important, is these terrorists didn't just do Benghazi. They did a host of other things. Well, Zubair was one of the terrorists involved in a very high level assassination plot in Libya. So when we talk about Libya, we always talk about General Khalifa Haftar because he's kind of the strong man in the east. And he's really the Libyan general who went after and either captured or killed the majority of the terrorists who did this attack against us. But during the revolution, you know, Haftar wasn't the only one of these senior commanders running a revolution against Gaddafi. So Zubair ended up assassinating kind of like Haftar's equal, you know, and his name is Major General Abdel Fattah Yunus, and then he's from the Al-Badi tribe. So a really interesting thing is Zubair also carried out this very significant assassination of an individual who might have actually ended up becoming, you know, the president of Libya. So a lot of people just focus on the night of our attacks, but these individuals go on to do so many things. Now, we've been tracking on Zubair for probably about 11 years now, and we don't lots of times say how we do our investigations or the sources and methods behind it. But now that Zubair is arrested, it really doesn't matter. So when me and Dave Boone Benton were tracking Zubair, it was really interesting because Zubair had a Facebook page, but then his son also had a Facebook page. And as you know, even if a parent doesn't spend that much time on Facebook, the younger generations are over shares and spend a lot of details. and it was through tracking his son's page that we then found out Zubair had a really bad stroke in 2015 and he ended up spending a lot of time at home At that time he was in Tripoli So if you remember when we talked about the second Libyan civil war that was from about 2014 to January 2017 General Haftar had to deal with the fact that terrorists took over the city of Benghazi. So it was a combination of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and they controlled the entire city. So he put in this operation called Operation Dignity and basically went neighborhood to neighborhood and fleshed out the terrorists. So of course when this was happening he was killing a lot of members of Ansel El Sharia and a lot of our Benghazi attackers. So Zubair and a number of other senior terrorists involved in our attacks fled to Tripoli. So Zubair has been in Tripoli that entire time like 11-12 years. Well then he has this stroke which has affected his health and his physical condition. I mean, if you watch the video of him coming off the airplane today, that's why he's having such difficulties with his movement. And then they put him directly in a hospital bed because he is pretty much bedridden. I mean, he can get up and do some things. He's not like, you know, in a bed on a respirator all the time, but he obviously isn't like operationally capable or a physical threat at this point to anyone. So, you know, that's just something to keep in mind why you saw him in the condition he was in. Plus, you know, I made a little joke because it's really like 80 degrees in Tripoli right now. And then they bring him on this plane into freezing, you know, northern parts of the United States. So he also was just shaking. And a lot of people like, oh, he's very fearful. It's like, no, he's just he's freezing, right? Like me, Libyans don't like to be cold. So that's just another interesting piece. We don't know how the FBI collected on him over the years. We did pass that Facebook page years ago, you know, to the FBI when we found it. We even alerted Facebook about the page and they didn't take it down. We have this problem, right, where terrorists get to use social media and they're on social media with us and sometimes they're looking at your social media and you aren't even aware of it. It's actually, you know, a very, very dangerous thing because, sure, I target terrorists, but of course a number of them, as you can imagine, target me back. So anyway, today is a really exciting day. As we said, FBI got Boy Scout. You know, we want to see this trend continue of the attackers at our event being detained, you know, there are more than 170 terrorists who carried out these attacks, and we think there's at least 70 still at large, and then there's some very senior plotters still out there. Now, another thing is, besides the free terrorists, and we've discussed this numerous times, there's terrorists, of course, that attacked us in prison in Libya, but some of those prisons are not secure. Some of them are terrorists, kind of are treated like heroes, and then others are at risk of being released at any time. And al-Qaeda has even planned operations to attack and has attacked some of these prisons. So we also just want to keep it on people's radar that there are very high profile terrorists in our attack at risk of being released from prison. So anything you can do to push to help keep these terrorists detained. And then also some of the key plotters are still at large. We'd spend a lot of time talking about Abdulazim Ali Musa bin Ali. He was a key plotter in our attacks, the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris, the Manchester Arena bombing on Ariana Grande's concert. And now he's sent terrorists here to the United States to participate in upcoming attacks on our homeland. So we are constantly pushing to get him on FBI's top 10 most wanted list. So if anyone wants to advocate for that, you know, it would really, really mean a lot to us because, again, we want to not just bring the terrorists to justice, but we want to stop the ones who are still operationally viable from harming more people and specifically, of course from harming Americans. So thanks for tuning into our special edition here at the Watch Floor.
