By The Editors
National Review Online
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.
