Benghazi

Benghazi

Our illustrious former Secretary of State asked the question in a very defensive, belligerent way of a Congressional Inquiry Committee, “At this point in time, what difference does it make?”  That’s a little like a person driving drunk and killing someone asking the same question.  The victims of their negligence are all dead so what else is there to think about?      

The real scandal of Benghazi is not that the people that carried out the attack on our embassy in Libya were not taken into custody.  The scandal is that the State Department put the Ambassador and his aides into a completely indefensible position.  When someone is thrown into a shark infested sea and he/she is killed by them we don’t look for the sharks that killed the person.  We bring to account whoever it was that threw the person there. 

Ambassador Stevens made four urgent appeals to the State Department for security to be beefed up at the embassy according to Fox News Investigative Reporter Catherine Herridge.  The latest appeal was made just weeks before when Ambassador Stevens sent a dispatch that 10 different militia groups and an Al Qaeda training camp were active in the area and that the embassy could not sustain an organized attack.  And appeals that were made for assistance the night of the attack were totally ignored.  Air time from Tripoli to Benghazi, from which aid could have come, is 49 minutes.   The Navy Seals were killed by mortar fire seven hours after the attack began.  

The atmosphere in Benghazi was so hostile that Britain pulled its diplomatic personnel out.  The Red Cross evacuated their people too.  We didn’t because it would have exposed the false narrative, that the administration was trying to promote, that it successfully rendered Al Qaeda a nonthreatening force in the area.  That notion was to help President Obama’s reelection bid and caused the Presidential Election soon
to be held to be another element in the formula that brought about the demise of Ambassador Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith and Naval Seals Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.  The administration gambled with the lives of these people and lost.  I wonder if State Secretary Hillary Clinton would have asked her same question if Chelsea had been put in such an untenable position.