By Sam Huntington
I saw an advert the other day for a desert-colored sweatshirt with writing on the front that read, “Never forget Benghazi.” I thought of a different marketing strategy. It’s the same desert-colored sweatshirt with writing on the front reading BENGHAZI, and underneath Hillary Clinton Did That.
The U.S. only had a regular diplomatic presence in Libya after withdrawing its ambassador in 1972. The American diplomatic mission closed in 1979. Since the early 2000s, however, the U.S. began to normalize diplomatic relations.
During Congressional hearings, Ambassador Stevens’ top deputy, Gregory N. Hicks, testified that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was in Benghazi in 2012 because “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted the post made permanent.” It was understood that the secretary hoped to announce that effect during a visit to Tripoli later in the year. Hicks also stated that “Chris [Stevens] wanted to make a symbolic gesture to the people of Benghazi that the United States stood behind their dream of establishing a new democracy.”
In 2013, news sources indicated that around 35 US personnel were working in the diplomatic mission in Benghazi at the time of the September 11-12, 2012 attack, of whom about 21 were CIA agents. Within months of the start of the Libyan revolution in February 2011, the CIA had begun building a covert presence in Benghazi. During the war, elite counterterrorist operators from the United States Special Operations Command were deployed to Libya as analysts, instructing the rebels on specifics about weapons and tactics.
Stevens was named “First Liaison” with the Libyan opposition in March 2011. After the end of the war, both the Department of State and CIA were tasked with continuing to identify and collect arms that had flooded the country during the war, particularly shoulder-fired missiles numbering around 20,000, whose source was believed to be the United States. Some sources posit that Stevens’ main task was to recover those weapons as soon as practicable. The problem was that Stevens wasn’t the only individual who knew about the weapons or was interested in obtaining them. More information than this is likely classified forever and ever.
Almost everyone already knows this, of course, but not officially — not even after two years and eight hundred pages of findings by the House Select Committee on Benghazi that hit the streets in the summer of 2016. Steadfast journalists informed us that the House report was the “definitive account” of what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012. You remember — right? It was the terrorist attack that was prompted by a pornographic video that ended up killing four Americans: Ambassador Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and two CIA protection specialist contractors named Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
The pundits also told us that the House report was somewhere between a Tom Clancy thriller and Michael Dobbs’ novel, The House of Cards. In this drama, Hillary Clinton performed as Secretary of State — a woman with her sights set on the American presidency. It makes us wonder whether the House Report convinced voters to reject her in favor of Donald J. Trump in 2016. Is that what “Russia, Russia, Russia” was all about?
The House Report was a sequel, of course. There were other investigations. And public testimonies. Naturally, the whole novella was highly political. Democrats accused Republicans of being on a witch hunt, but investigators offered essential lessons so that mistakes are not repeated. But if there was one clear thing, Hillary Clinton failed to demonstrate decisive, principled leadership.
Her failure, and that of President Barack Obama, was in promoting a false narrative for public consumption — even though in emails, Hillary Clinton informed her daughter that very night by email that she knew it was an al-Qaida attack. But Clinton let the false narrative fester for two weeks. You remember it, right — the anti-Islam video titled Life of Muhammad, produced by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Anaheim.
The attack unfolded when a force of 70 heavily armed men suddenly attacked the American compound. Stevens and Smith died in the subsequent fire, and Doherty and Woods were killed in the next attack on the CIA annex.
But even though the Obama administration knew the truth of the events on September 11-12, White House spokesman Jay Carney continued muddying the water with inaccurate accounts of the Benghazi timeline. On September 14, he said: “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack. The unrest we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that … many Muslims find offensive.” When Hillary Clinton refused to cover the Sunday morning talk shows on September 16, the administration ordered Susan Rice into the breach. Rice, who had no first-hand knowledge of the attack, was forced to rely on information provided by Obama’s national security advisor, Ben Rhodes. Rhodes instructed Rice, “Underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
After the release of the House Report, journalists claimed, “We never thought there would be some smoking gun proving that four brave Americans might have been saved. Instead, we sought evidence that Clinton managed a terrible ordeal and its fallout with exemplary skill and integrity. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that either. It will be up to American voters to make the final judgment on her performance.” And, of course, the American voters did make their final judgment on her performance. That being the case, why am I writing about this now?
One never knows if Hillary Clinton still fancies herself as presidential material. I don’t, but Clinton is a puzzle. I’m writing this to remind my readers, few though they are, what a low creature Clinton is.