R
Ridgerunner
Guest
The failure to provide security for Stevens and others in Benghazi was only a part of a bigger picture; a sordid part, yes, but only a part.
For still unfathomable reasons, Hillary Clinton and Obama attacked Libya, whose government was, at that point, cooperating with the U.S. regarding terrorism. They didn’t ask congress about it or even tell congress. They just did it. Obama now admits it was a mistake, but Hillary Clinton doesn’t. What didn’t Obama know, going in, that Hillary did know? Well, she was getting “intelligence” reports from Sidney Blumenthal, a sometime Clinton Foundation employee and longtime Clinton operative, who was working on oil deals in Libya at the time. What deals, and with whom?
So, why did the U.S. attack Libya? Perhaps Obama, a fan of the “Arab Spring” (all revolutions are good) didn’t really know the game, since he didn’t know about the Blumenthal/Clinton dialogue and would have opposed had he known.
So now, Obama says it was a mistake to attack Libya, and Obama is not one to admit mistakes lightly. So that leaves Hillary Clinton as the only architect who has no regrets.
Stevens also requested more and better security. He didn’t outright refuse it at all times, as some who want to blame the victim say. At a point, the Brits got out, warning the U.S. government that there was no real security. Stevens then communicated that the situation was not secure. And what security did the government provide? Local terrorist groups who, not surprisingly, took a powder or perhaps even joined the “bad guys” when the shooting started.
And what was Stevens doing in a war zone anyway? We are given to understand he was trying to “buy back” weapons provided to the terrorists by the U.S. government, to send to insurgents in Syria; insurgents who we were later given to understand were Al Quaeda affiliates and who, as we speak, are fighting each other.
And then Clinton lied about the Benghazi attack. Why? Was it to give cover to having put those terrorists in power to begin with? “Oh, you see, those people are like little children. Insult their religion and they’ll attack, so there is no foreign policy failure here.” Perhaps she just didn’t want to admit America backed the wrong horse, and certainly didn’t want anybody to wonder why we did.
Trey Gowdy & Co seem to have gone down the same rabbit trail Hillary Clinton laid out for them. But did nothing come of it? We don’t know, and we won’t know until the FBI gets finished digging into the same subject matter. Who got the FBI interested in Blumenthal? Certainly not the STate Department.
That the whole Libya/Benghazi episode was an astonishing failure cannot be seriously denied. That we were trying to set up a gun running operation is beyond denial. What is not known is why we went to war against Libya in the first place, since it was clearly against America’s interest to do that. Did Blumenthal (and therefore the Clintons) have an undisclosed interest in the deposition of Khaddaffi?
We don’t know. Possibly the FBI investigation will at least find traces of the trail.
But no matter what, this is not just a matter of arguing whether Stevens did or did not request real security or when he did or why.
