A huge wave of public testimony, reports and documents on what happened in Benghazi now floods Washington, and little of it focuses on the role of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton before, on, or after Sept. 11, 2012.
Over
the past 18 months, there have been at least seven public congressional
hearings and three fact-finding reports on the terrorist attack. If not
invisible,
Mrs. Clinton is certainly portrayed as being only in the background during
Benghazi, unaware of key events.
In the early post-
Benghazi
days on Capitol Hill, Republicans tried to pry “what did she know and
when did she know it” information out of witnesses. But in later
hearings, her name came up rarely — if at all.
On key questions, there is a dead end. For example, the nation’s two most senior military officials said they never spoke with
Mrs. Clinton during the eight-hour crisis in
Benghazi,
Libya.
The
State Department
refused to cooperate for a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
investigation, Republicans say, and her name is not in the final report.
Mrs. Clinton testified that she was never informed about how susceptible the
Benghazi diplomatic mission was to attack or about requests for more security officers. On the infamous
Benghazi talking points, that process was carried out below her level, she said.
At the recently concluded public hearing of Michael J. Morell, the
CIA deputy director who coordinated the “talking points” with State, references to
Mrs. Clinton, who leads in polls to be the next Democratic presidential nominee, were made twice as asides, not as to
Benghazi facts.
P.J. Crowley, who was
Mrs. Clinton’s top spokesman at State in her first year, said Republicans have tried to nail her but there simply is no evidence.
“
Benghazi
happened on her watch, so she will always have a connection to the
attack,” Mr. Crowley said. “There have been some efforts to make it
about her, which I suspect will continue despite the lack of evidence.”
Lawyer
Victoria Toensing
has another view. She said members of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence displayed incompetence while questioning Mr.
Morell.
“Nobody from the House committee asked about her,” said
Mrs. Toensing, who represents
Gregory Hicks, the chief of mission in Tripoli that day who was among the first to blow the whistle on lax security in
Benghazi and a lack of help from
Washington during the crisis. “Was that hearing somewhat incompetent? Yes.”
Mrs. Toensing said the investigative failings pertaining to
Mrs. Clinton began much earlier in the search to explain the deaths of U.S. Ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens and his aide, Sean Smith.
State’s own investigation, by the accountability review board, gave
Mrs. Clinton
a pass. It never interviewed her on facts and decided that culpability
lay at a much lower level, said former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, a
co-chairman of the board.
His report said
Stevens was in
Benghazi that day “independent” of
Washington.
“It’s a lie. An outright lie,”
Mrs. Toensing said, adding that
Mrs. Clinton’s fingerprints can be seen on that point.
“One of the most important facts about her is left out. Why was Chris in
Benghazi?” the attorney said. “He was in
Benghazi because on the day he was sworn in, Hillary met with him privately [in May 2012] and said she wanted him to go to
Benghazi and assess whether it could be made a permanent post.”
Stevens met with
Mr. Hicks and “Chris told him about this priority of the secretary’s,”
Mrs. Toensing said. After the new ambassador took care of many initial tasks, September became the month he had to act on
Benghazi before the fiscal year — and thus money — ended Sept. 30.
“He was there because of Hillary Clinton, and when the [accountability review board] interviewed Greg [
Hicks], Greg said that to Pickering,”
Mrs. Toensing said.
The
review board took notes but did not transcribe its witness testimonies,
which would have formed a more complete historical record.
Mr. Hicks has been denied access to the notes,
Mrs. Toensing said.
Talking points issued
Mr. Crowley,
Mrs. Clinton’s former spokesman, said there is historical precedence for putting a mission in a contested area such as
Benghazi. The
State Department erected two large complexes in Iraq and Afghanistan amid wars to further the goal of “expeditionary diplomacy.”
Mrs. Clinton embraced the strategy, he said.
“This trend helps explain what Chris Stevens was doing in a post-conflict environment in
Libya,”
Mr. Crowley said. “He understood better than anyone that diplomats
cannot hermetically seal themselves off from danger and do the job they
were sent to do.
Benghazi is about the nature of conflict in the 21st century, not about any one person.”
In January, a second major report emerged on
Benghazi. This one, too, was
Clinton-less.
The
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a bipartisan report
that attempted, after months of investigation, to lay out an official
chronology of what officials did to prepare for and respond to the
attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission.
Mrs. Clinton’s name is not mentioned in the report.
The committee’s Republicans wrote in an addendum that the
State Department stonewalled the investigation by refusing requests for documents and witnesses.
“We
surmise that this lack of forthrightness stems from a desire to protect
individual political careers, now and in the future, and the
Department’s reputation, at the expense of learning all the facts and
apportioning responsibility,” the Republican senators wrote.
Then there are the long-debated “talking points,” President Obama’s first report to the nation about what happened in
Benghazi.
The White House-
State Department-
CIA
back-and-forth emails that produced the Sept. 16, 2012, talking points
contain no reference to the secretary of state. Her fingerprints do not
appear during two days of intense exchanges during which
Clinton aides rejected various
CIA versions. In the end, the
CIA
produced a brief statement that blamed protesters — an assertion
Republicans say fit the president’s re-election campaign themes but not
the facts.
The
CIA’s
first version turned out to be accurate, but under internal and outside
pressure during two days, all references to al Qaeda and Islamic
terrorists were removed.
‘She’s definitely culpable’
As
Mrs. Clinton worked that late afternoon on Sept. 11 and into the night, no U.S. military help ever arrived at a
CIA annex under attack for eight hours. Two former Navy SEALs were killed in their effort to protect
CIA officers and huddled diplomats who were rescued from the burning compound.
Retired
Army Gen. Carter Ham, who led U.S. Africa Command at the time, has
stated that no one from State on Sept. 11 ever asked for a military
rescue attempt.
Mrs. Clinton’s
role in that lack of a request? Gen. Ham was not asked that question
when he appeared in secret before a House Armed Services subcommittee in
June, according to a declassified transcript.
Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle is known to be fiercely loyal. When CNN attempted to produce a
Clinton
documentary that would likely be favorable, all 100 aides and Democrats
contacted refused to cooperate. Director Charles Ferguson canceled the
project.
“I discovered that nobody, and I mean nobody, was
interested in helping me make this film,” Mr. Ferguson wrote in The
Huffington Post.
Larry C. Johnson, a former
CIA official and State counterterrorism official, said the same thing that happened to Mr. Ferguson happened to
Benghazi investigators.
“It’s
part of the ‘protect Hillary’ deal. That’s what’s going on,” Mr.
Johnson said. “But she’s definitely culpable. The security at the annex
and so-called consulate was the responsibility of the
State Department.
Libya
was one of the top five foreign policy priorities for the Obama
administration and Hillary Clinton. She didn’t do anything. That’s the
point.”
In her own words
Mrs. Clinton’s aides also tried to control post-attack information coming out of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.
When Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, visited the embassy, a
State Department
attorney — referred to by one Republican as a “spy” — was not allowed
in his briefing because his security clearance was not high enough.
The next thing
Mr. Hicks knew, he was getting a phone call from Cheryl Mills,
Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff.
“She was very upset,”
Mr. Hicks told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
An example of a brief and unsuccessful attempt by Republicans to find
Mrs. Clinton culpable occurred in February 2013 at a Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire Republican, noted
Stevens‘ cable to the
State Department on Aug. 15, one month before the attack, in which he said the
Benghazi compound could not sustain an assault.
At
the witness table sat the nation’s two highest military officials:
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Joint
Chiefs chairman. Asked whether they discussed the deteriorating
security situation in
Benghazi with the secretary of state, both men said they had not.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, asked what conversations the men had with
Mrs. Clinton between the first attack on the diplomatic mission and the next morning when the
CIA annex was shelled. Mr. Panetta said he and Gen. Dempsey never spoke with
Mrs. Clinton during those critical hours.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, asked whether it was true that
Mrs. Clinton never saw
Stevens‘ Aug. 15 warning, Gen. Dempsey answered, “Well, I don’t know that she didn’t know about the cable.”
Asked whether he would be stunned if she never saw it, Gen. Dempsey responded, “I would call myself surprised that she didn’t.”
For now, the lone source for a detailed account of what
Mrs. Clinton did and did not do regarding
Benghazi is — herself.
In
January 2013, as her four years as secretary of state came to an end,
she sat alone before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to tell
the
Benghazi story as she saw it.
About
Stevens‘ request for more security, she said: “The specific security requests pertaining to
Benghazi,
you know, were handled by the security professionals in the department.
I didn’t see those requests. They didn’t come to me. I didn’t approve
them. I didn’t deny them.”
On the talking points, she said: “I
wasn’t involved in the talking points process. As I understand it, as
I’ve been told, it was a typical interagency process.”
On what she
did that night at her desk in Foggy Bottom, she testified: “I
participated in a secure videoconference of senior officials from the
intelligence community, the White House and DOD. We were going over
every possible option, reviewing all that was available to us, any
actions we could take.”
