National Review Online
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Nine months before a terrorist attack on U.S. government
facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killed four American officials, including
ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the State Department dispatched a security
officer to assess the threat there. In an interview with the House Select
Committee on Benghazi, the officer recounted his report to a superior at State,
then under the direction of Secretary Hillary Clinton:
I told him that this was a suicide
mission; that there was a very good chance that everybody here was going to
die; that there was absolutely no ability here to prevent an attack whatever. .
. . He said, “Everybody back here in D.C. knows that people are going to die in
Benghazi and nobody is going to care until somebody does die.”
The Select Committee issued its long-awaited report on
Tuesday. In many ways, it is a disappointment — an outcome guaranteed by Obama
administration stonewalling, abetted by congressional Democrats’ tireless
interference. The committee held few public hearings to hold officials
accountable, and major questions it was created to examine remain unanswered:
Why did the State Department and CIA have compounds in Benghazi, one of the
most dangerous places in the world, particularly for Americans? What was
President Obama doing during the hours of the siege, particularly once he knew
our ambassador was missing? Why, despite the presence of military assets, was
no rescue attempted? And why — when the threat was extraordinary, and after
months of jihadist attacks on Western targets in the region — was no plan in
place to extract the Americans from Benghazi?
Nevertheless, the report is a devastating account of
staggering dereliction of duty and deception by the president and his top
subordinates. Front and center in every phase of this disgraceful episode is
Mrs. Clinton, whose appalling judgment and character flaws are amply
illustrated in its pages.
The committee’s voluminous report is ably summarized in
the concurrence appended by two Republican members, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike
Pompeo of Kansas. The Benghazi terrorist attack occurred 56 days before the
2012 presidential election. In his campaign for reelection, President Obama
repeatedly declared that the killing of Osama bin Laden signaled the defeat of
al-Qaeda and its network of affiliates. In reality, the terror threat still
remained grave, especially in a post-Qaddafi Libya that had collapsed into
chaos and provided a refuge for terrorists, including groups tied to al-Qaeda
and ISIS.
Jihadist strongholds flourished especially in eastern
Libya, and Benghazi was the most prominent among them. Clinton saw the city as
the centerpiece of the anti-Qaddafi resistance and envisioned establishing a
permanent State Department mission there to memorialize her achievement. The
reality, however, was that Benghazi ran rampant with anti-Western terrorists
who carried out serial attacks during 2012. Realizing the peril, the U.N.,
Great Britain, and other nations pulled their people out. Clinton not only left
ours there; she turned a deaf ear to pleas for better security. In fact, the
Benghazi “facility” — not a consulate, much less an embassy — appears to have
been designated “temporary” precisely to rationalize skirting the stringent
security provisions the State Department requires for permanent outposts.
Again, as Jordan and Pompeo observe, the committee never got an answer to the
obvious question: “What was so important in Benghazi that it meant risking the
lives of Americans in what many apparently considered a suicide mission?”
The attack on the facility, which Obama was briefed on by
top Defense Department officials shortly after it began, threatened to destroy
the president’s campaign claims. He clearly distanced himself from the response
— i.e., from the core responsibilities of his office — although State
Department officials were made aware that the White House was very concerned
about the politics. Clinton, already plotting her 2016 campaign, had similar
worries, given her portrayal of post-Qaddafi Libya as an Arab Spring success
story where a stable, representative government was taking shape.
Politics thus controlled the response to the attack — to
the extent that there was a response. Shockingly, the world’s most powerful
military was entirely unprepared to deploy military assets to attempt to rescue
the dozens of Americans fighting for their lives. The administration has
claimed that there was no time for a response, that the siege appeared to have
terminated at the State Department compound — where Ambassador Stevens and
State Department technician Sean Smith were attacked — before war planes or
armed drones could have gotten there, and that it only later unexpectedly
resumed at the nearby CIA compound. This misstates the facts. The siege never
ended for those under attack. They faced hostile fire at the State compound,
while moving between compounds, and at the final battle at the CIA site, where
trained jihadi fighters deployed mortars that killed security officers Tyrone
Woods and Glen Doherty. But Obama and his subordinates never even tried to
relieve the Americans under attack. It is not that rescue craft turned around
once reports led them to believe it was too late to get to Benghazi; they never
left the ground in the first place.
The spin, though, launched immediately. Even as jihadists
continued firing at Americans and torching American facilities, even as
Ambassador Stevens was missing and feared dead or abducted, Clinton and Obama
went to work crafting a fictional account of events. Shortly after 10 p.m.,
Clinton issued a statement depicting the ongoing violence as an overwrought
response provoked by an anti-Muslim video.
Key administration players knew from the first that this
was a lie. Their best intelligence (including a last, desperate call from
Stevens himself) was that the siege was a terrorist attack — coordinated by
trained militants and obviously unrelated to violent, anti-American protests in
Egypt earlier in the day. Clinton herself clearly knew it was a lie: As the committee
report demonstrates, at the same time she was feeding the “blame the video”
narrative to the pubic (and, execrably, to the parents of the fallen security
officials at the solemn ceremony when their remains were returned), she was
telling the truth to foreign officials and her daughter Chelsea. As she told
the Egyptian prime minister in a phone call: “We know that the attack in Libya
had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”
The administration went into full damage-control mode,
with White House apparatchik Ben Rhodes — who would later craft the false
narratives that pushed Obama’s Iran deal over the goal line — counseling that
the administration’s “goals” included “to underscore that these protests are
rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
The entire episode is shameful: Foreign-service and
intelligence personnel were left in what State Department insiders knew was a
death trap even as the threat to them increased. When the inevitable attack
came, they were left on their own. And when it came time to explain themselves,
administration officials lied: Obama, Clinton, Rice, Rhodes, Carney, and the
rest — serially and systematically. That most of the Americans in Benghazi were
saved owes to the incredible valor of security personnel on the scene, two of
whom gave their lives while the government responsible for protecting them
refused to give the time of day.
Four years later, we still do not have all the answers.
But the answers we do have are a disgrace, and they demand a reckoning.
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