Seven months later, no one has paid: The US Consulate in Benghazi in flames, with Ambassador Chris Stevens dying inside, Sept. 11, 2012. (Reuters)
On Wednesday, the FBI released photos of three men present at the deadly jihadist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the bureau has asked the Libyans’ help in identifying them.
Which nicely highlights the fact that it’s been more than seven months since Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed — and yet there’s been no justice, nor even vengeance, in the matter.
Nor much exposure: We know little more today than we did in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco.
Indeed, the State Department’s Inspector General is now investigating the Accountability Review Board that reported on Benghazi in December, Fox News reported yesterday. What Fox called “well-placed sources” say the IG is trying to find out if the State panel failed to interview key witnesses who’d come forward.
In fact, Washington power attorney Victoria Toensing — a Reagan-era deputy assistant attorney general with a strong background in intelligence work — says she’s got a whistle blower inside State who’s itching to go public.
But so far she’s been stymied by officials who won’t act on her request for a security clearance so she can deal with classified material the case entails. Other attorneys for as many as three other potential witnesses from inside State and CIA say they’re having the same problem.
In fact, some whistleblowers allege that they’ve been threatened with reprisals should they come forward — even though federal law explicitly protects whistleblowers.
At his Monday press conference, President Obama shrugged off questions about all this, saying, “I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody has been blocked from testifying.”
He’ll be aware soon enough. Next week, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), will open new hearings on Benghazi — and they could be explosive. He promises to expose new information the administration “has tried to suppress.”
Issa — who previously held the administration’s feet to fire over the still-unresolved Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal — has twice requested guidelines from State, but a department spokesman recently denied that any whistleblowers have come forward and scoffed at reports that they’ve been intimidated.
In fact, word is that some of the whistleblowers may testify that help in the form of a rapid-response force was only hours away — but, for whatever reason, was not authorized.
That would directly contradict the claims of State’s laughably named Accountability Review Board: Its pro forma report denied that timely military assistance to the beleaguered compound, which was attacked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, was even possible.
The dodging-accountability report blamed — wait for it — inadequate security at the consulate (and at what we now know was a nearby CIA “safe house”) as well as “management deficiencies” for the deadly fiasco.
And it pointedly exempted from criticism then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who departed Foggy Bottom shortly thereafter.
Its only embarrassing admission was the board’s finding that the administration’s immediate-aftermath effort to blame the assault on an obscure, anti-Islamic video was utterly baseless.
The administration plainly wishes the whole subject would go away. The attack happened “a long time ago,” President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said this week, complaining about being questioned on the matter. Earlier, Secretary of State John Kerry, testifying before Congress, whined, “We got a lot more important things to move on to and get done.”
But they won’t “get done” — not until the administration finally comes clean about Benghazi.
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” barked Clinton at last year’s Senate hearings on Benghazi, dishonestly framing the disaster as a false choice between a “protest” and “guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans.”
In fact, it was an organized, planned attack on a US consulate — legally, our sovereign terrority — that killed four Americans. And neither the dozens of individual attackers, nor the organization behind them, has been made to pay.
And the secret to stopping the next such attack lies in knowing what happened — and in making those behind it suffer.
Nor have we had good answers for why the administration spent a week blaming that video for the attack — which last month’s “Interim Progress Report” from several House committees called “a deliberate effort to mislead the American people.” Well, yes: The administration, via the CIA, knew within hours that a branch of al Qaeda had claimed responsibility.
The media ignored the report as Republican partisanship; after all, it also clearly laid the blame for the reduced security in Libya at Clinton’s feet.
Of course, the media has also shown profound disinterest in locating and speaking with the more than two dozen survivors of the attacks, some of whom were treated at Bethesda Hospital, who have never been seen in public. What stories would they have to tell?
Starting with next week’s hearings, we just may find out.