Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens to opening statements before testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, in Washington, DC on January 23, 2013. (photo: Molly Riley/UPI)
24 January 13
ecretary of State Hillary Clinton let Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) have it in her testimony about Benghazi on Wednesday. It was not the only emotional or pointed moment.
I share her frustration at the bad faith and conspiracy theories that
underlay a lot of the question. (Some of the below points are new, some are being revised from an earlier posting.)
1. Republican senators keep saying that it should have
been "easy"; to find out what happened on September 11, 2012, by simply
debriefing US personnel who had been there. John McCain, Ron Johnson
and the others who make this charge are the most cynical and
manipulative people in the world. The Benghazi US mission was very
clearly an operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that is the
reason that the Obama administration officials have never been able to
speak frankly and publicly about it. McCain and the others know this
very well, and they know that their public carping cannot be "simply";
answered because the answers would endanger sources and methods. The
consulate was amazingly well-guarded by some 40 CIA operatives, many of
them ex-special forces, in a nearby safe house. These were viewed by
consular officials as "the cavalry."; It is still not clear what
Ambassador Chris Stevens and the CIA were doing in Benghazi, and unless
we know that we can't know why they were attacked. (They were not
overseeing the shipping of weapons to Syria; the Syrian revolutionaries
complain bitterly that the US *prevents* them from getting medium and
heavy weapons).
2. Republicans keep posturing that their questions
about Benghazi are intended to bolster US security. In fact, they are
harming it. Republican hearings in the House of Representative have
disgracefully revealed the names of Libyans talking to the US consulate,
thus endangering their lives and harming US efforts to understand the
situation in the country, since who would risk talking to the embassy if
they know about Darrell Issa's big mouth?
3. The GOP figures keep saying that it was obvious
that there was no demonstration at the Benghazi consulate against the
so-called "film,"; the 'Innocence of Muslims' that attacked the Prophet
Muhammad. But in fact Libyan security officials repeatedly told wire services on September 12 that there was such a demonstration, and that the attack issued from those quarters. An American resident in Benghazi at that time confirms that there were such demonstrations that day.
The secular-minded revolutionary militia that guarded the US consulate
for the Libyan government kept the demonstrations far enough away from
the consulate gates that they would not have shown up in security
videos.
4. Benghazi, a city of over a million, is not
dominated by "al-Qaeda,"; contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina has repeatedly said or implied. The city had successful
municipal elections in May, just before I got there. The number one vote-getter was a woman professor of statistics at the university.
While political Islam is a force in Benghazi, only some relatively
small groups are militant, and it has to compete with nationalist,
tribal and regional ideological currents. In Libya's parliamentary
elections of July, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood did very poorly and
nationalists came to power. Women won 20% of the seats! The elected
Speaker of Parliament, Muhammad Magarief, called for a secular constitution for Libya and a separation of religion and state.
5. Contrary to repeated assertions that it was obvious that terrorist groups were rampaging around in the city, members of the Benghazi municipal council told then US ambassador Chris Stevens that security in the city was improving in summer, 2012.
In fact, one Senator John McCain said during a visit
to Libya last February, "“We are very happy to be back here in Libya
and to note the enormous progress and changes made in the past few
months... We know that many challenges lie ahead… but we are encouraged
by what we have seen.” Doesn't sound to me like McCain was running
around like Chicken Little warning that the sky was about to fall on US
diplomats there. Want to know who else came along on that trip? Lindsey
Graham, who likewise didn't issue any dire warnings in its aftermath.
6. Contrary to the "Libya-is-riddled-with-al-Qaeda";
meme of the GOP politicians, there is a strong civil society and tribal
opposition to fundamentalist militias in Benghazi, of which Amb. Chris
Stevens was well aware. Tripoli-based journalist Abd-al-Sattar Hatitah
explained in the pages of the pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat
[Sept. 30, 2012, trans. USG Open Source Center]:
"It appears that the simple rule Benghazi's people thought of applying was based on other experiences in which the radical Islamists or militants in general managed to grow, prosper, and expand by seeking protection from the tribes, as happened in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. But the civil movements which became very active [in Benghazi] after the fall of Al-Qadhafi's regime were the ones that formed alliances this time with the tribes, the notables, wise men councils, and civil society figures against the militants. This is akin to the "Sahwat"; in Iraq. The alliance managed to expel the brigades from the town and encouraged the nascent Libyan authorities to tighten their restrictions on all armed manifestations...He adds that [a meeting by secular notables with the tribes] was also attended by representatives from the army chiefs-of-staff and the Interior Ministry as well as a number of members from the National Congress (parliament). "All civil society organizations also took part with us. Everybody consented to issuing the statement against the presence of the [fundamentalist] brigades and we distributed 3,000 copies. "
This was around September 3. After the attack on the
US consulate, tens of thousands of people in Benghazi demonstrated
against the violence and in favor of the US and Stevens. Then they
attempted to sweep the fundamentalist militias from the city.
7. Al-Qaeda is not for the most part even a "thing";
in Libya. The only formal al-Qaeda affiliate in the region is al-Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a Libyan but an Algerian
organization. Just calling all Salafi groups "al-Qaeda"; is propaganda.
They have to swear fealty to Ayman al-Zawahiri (or in the past, Usama
Bin Laden) to be al-Qaeda. The main al-Qaeda connection in Benghazi is
to Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in northern Pakistan by a US drone
strike in June. Some of his close relatives in Benghazi may have been
angry about this (depending on how well they liked him), but they are
not known to form a formal al-Qaeda cell. There are also young men from
Dirna in the Benghazi area, some of whom fought against the US in Iraq.
Their numbers are not large and, again, they don't have al-Zawahiri's
phone number on auto-dial. Sen. McCain was a big supporter of the US
intervention in Libya and seems to have been all right with Abdul Hakim
Belhadj being his ally, even though in the zeroes Belhadj would have
been labeled 'al-Qaeda.'
8. Ansar al-Sharia (Helpers of Islamic Law) is just an
informal grouping of a few hundred hard line fundamentalists in
Benghazi, and may be a code word to refer to several small
organizations. There are no known operational links between Ansar
al-Sharia and al-Qaeda. It is a local thing in Benghazi.
9. Leaders of Ansar al-Sharia have denied that they directed their organization to attack the US consulate and have condemned the attack.
10. Lindsey Graham and others point to instances of
political violence this past summer in Benghazi as obvious harbingers of
the September 11 consulate attack. But it was a tiny fringe group, the
Omar Abdel Rahman Brigades, that claimed responsibility for setting off a
small pipe bomb in front of the gate of the US consulate last June. This is what the US statement said last June:
"There was an attack late last night on the United States office in Benghazi,” a US embassy official said, adding that only the gate was damaged and no one was hurt. The diplomat said a homemade bomb had been used in the attack on the office, set up after the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qadhafi and kept open to support the democratic transition "
You'd have to be a real scaredy cat to pack up and
leave because of a thing like that, which is what Sen. Graham keeps
saying should have been the response. Likewise the same small cell was
responsible for attacks on the office of the Red Cross and on a convoy
of the British consulate, which injured a consular employ. Security
isn't all that great in Benghazi, though actually I suspect the criminal
murder rate is much lower than in any major American city. I walked
around freely in Benghazi in early June, and couldn't have disguised my
being a Westerner if I had wanted to, and nobody looked at me sideways. A
pipe bomb and a shooting, neither of them fatal, did not stand out as
dire in a city full of armed militias, most of them grateful to the US
and Britain for their help in the revolution. You can understand why the
Red Cross packed it in after a couple of attacks, but the US government
is not the Red Cross.
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