Yes, But Why Did They Die In Benghazi?
I watched the entire Benghazi Hearing live on C-Span 3’s webpageyesterday.
I shudda stayed in bed, for the only real piece of significant new news was that Hillary actually did make a call to Tripoli that night: All the other new news revealed during those many hours of testimony and commentary disguised as questioning involved peripheral details about stuff already known to anyone who has paid any attention to the descriptions of the actual event as those descriptions have come out over the last 8 months.
Specifically, those four Americans did not die that night because of bad security-related decisions made prior to September 11, 2012, or because U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied during her “full Ginsberg” on Sept. 16th, five full days after the event: They died because a horde of mostly unidentified men led by unknown persons intruded into the compound in Benghazi in unknown ways and for unknown reasons.
Full stop.
The only really important issues about the event in Benghazi involve who the intruders were, how they made their intrusion, and why the intrusion was made—everything else is secondary!
To this day no individual(pick up the discussion by Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, Bill Roggio, and John Batchelor at about the 9:00 minute mark) or group has claimed responsibility for the event, and no individual or group has been publically identifiedby the Obama Administration (or anyone else, for that matter) as being culpable for the event. The Hearing shed no light on this matter because it did not address the matter.
Nor did it address how the intruders gained access to the compound nor why, for heaven’s sake, the intruders proceeded directly to, and trashed, an unoccupied building upon first gaining such access.
Surely, the intruders could not have had that as their reason for the intrusion, yet that is what they did before they leisurely made their way to the compound’s main building where they made a half-hearted attempt to breach the secure areas of that building prior to setting the building afire.
The hearing did not address the intruders’ apparent bloodless firefight with the compound’s occupants whilst Sean Smith and Ambassador Chris Stevens were choking to death, nor did it address how Tyrone Woods’ rescue team bloodlessly entered and exited the fully-occupied compound.
In his testimony, Ambassador Stevens’ deputy, Gregory Hicks, said that “about 60” intruders exited the compound during or after the rescue team’s exit from the compound, but no light was shed on why the intruders exited and then returned or what the intruders did while in the compound on both intrusions other than run around shooting ineffectually and burning and trashing things recklessly.
It is incomprehensible to me that no one on the Committee or anywhere seemingly is interested in discovering why the intruders intruded or what the intruders could have done within the compound because of the unknown reason or reasons that they wanted to make the intrusion.
I have written extensively on these pages about the event, comprehensively summarized hereand here.
Those summaries, with their multiple links, explain why I remain angered that the four who died that night in Benghazi died, apparently, because a gun-running operation was being run out of the compound and its associated annex, and because the compound was probably attacked for some reason because that gun-running operation was being run.
And my anger is intensified because that operation and the cover-up of that operation has been and is being ignored by the media and most observers and because that operation and its cover-up is obfuscated by the focus on what are, actually, external issues.
Even Ted Cruz missesthe point!
As this sordid tale continues to unfold, I suggest that concerned individuals keep in mind that while the cover-up of the peripheral circumstances before, during, and after the event (crime) is important and while that cover-up is what may lead to unpleasant consequences for Hillary and others, it is, in fact, the crime, the reasons for the crime, and the cover-up of the reasons for the crime that are the thingsthat are really important.
And those things are the reason four Americans died on that long night eight months ago!
Patna 