Why Benghazi Makes a Difference

Lewis Morris 

The release of the final report from the House Select Committee on Benghazi spoke volumes about the lack of concern Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the administration have for American national security. The report, which was completed despite every effort of Obama’s White House and congressional Democrats, points out in no uncertain terms that the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues could have been prevented. But Obama’s craven political narrative was paramount, and Clinton now declares “it’s pretty clear it’s time to move on.” She has the White House to win, after all.

The report rightfully castigates the administration for failing to provide needed security for the American embassy in Libya despite the repeated reports from Benghazi about security threats in the area. Those security threats, by the way, were created by the Obama-Clinton policy of decapitating Libyan leadership and leaving a vacuum in its place.

What is worse, however, is the cover-up that Obama, Clinton and their cronies engaged in to protect their own skins.

The attack on the American facility in Benghazi was a political inconvenience for Obama, and it was treated as such. Taking place on September 11, 2012, in the midst of Obama’s re-election campaign, the terrorist attack proved false his narrative that al-Qaida had been “decimated.”

The administration was so invested in that story that they were caught flat-footed when emergency calls came from the Benghazi compound. Rep. Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, noted, “At the time of the mortar attack, at 5:15 am, not a single wheel of a single U.S. military asset was headed towards Libya. So this was seven hours after the initial attack, and the world’s most powerful military can’t get a single wheel turning towards the region.”

Instead of owning up to its intelligence failure and its inability to protect Americans in the field, Obama chose to blame the attack on a YouTube video. This claim, which Clinton trotted out on the night of the attack — after she had already told the Egyptian prime minister that it was al-Qaida.

Then-UN ambassador Susan Rice followed by trumpeting the video story in media interviews, but it quickly fell apart under scrutiny. But ever the team player, Rice stuck to the story, and she was later rewarded by being named National Security Advisor.

It’s virtually certain Rice was given her marching orders by Obama, though she was not given any intelligence information about the situation that preceded the attack or the details of what actually took place.

When that story came apart, and Clinton sat before Congress to explain, she literally shrugged and shouted at congressional Republicans, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

What Clinton knew or what she failed to understand about the developments in Libya in 2012 will likely be forever a point of speculation. Her private email server, which the State Department and the White House let her have despite numerous security questions, has been wiped clean of anything that would truly compromise her political future.

The Benghazi committee’s final report concludes that the administration was more concerned with Obama’s re-election campaign than protecting personnel in Libya and certainly more than admitting their mistakes after the fact.

The report states unequivocally, “What we did find was a tragic failure of leadership — in the run up to the attack and the night of — and an administration that, so blinded by politics and its desire to win an election, disregarded a basic duty of government: Tell the people the truth.”

There was no mention by American personnel in Libya about a video fomenting unrest, or of any protests related to it. What is noted in the final report, however, in voluminous detail, is the fact that the administration ignored calls for stepped up security in Benghazi and ignored concerns about increased unrest, again, fomenting in the wake of Obama and Clinton’s failed Libya policy.

Yet the Leftmedia has been triumphantly running headlines declaring “no new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”

It can only be surmised that Obama and Clinton hoped that when the 3:00 a.m. call came that Americans overseas were under attack that the whole thing would blow over. The president and his secretary of state hoped that the inconvenience of Americans under fire would not derail Obama’s chances for re-election, and that the timing of the attack would not refute the narrative that Obama had defeated Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Democrats released their own report Monday ahead of the official House report, and took several hundred pages to chastise House Republicans, Mitt Romney, and even Donald Trump for creating a so-called partisan witch-hunt to embarrass Obama and Clinton. Truth be told, those two have done that all on their own. The worst point of all is that four brave Americans died so that Obama and Clinton could protect the sham that is their political careers.

“A lot of people tell pollsters they don’t trust me,” Clinton admitted earlier this week. “I personally know I have work to do on this front.” As this damning report makes clear, she’s earned every ounce of that distrust.