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Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: What We Still Don’t Know About
Benghazi
Amy Payne
March 14, 2013
Yesterday,
President Obama nominated a new
ambassador to Libya to succeed Christopher Stevens, who was killed in
the
terrorist attack in Benghazi last September 11. Six months after that
attack—and two federal investigations later—we still have an alarmingly
small
amount of information about it.
The
Obama Administration made quite a mess in
the media with its conflicting accounts of the attack, originally
blaming a
controversial YouTube video for sparking protests abroad.
After
it came out that it was, in fact, a
terrorist attack with ties to al-Qaeda, then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton
shocked Americans with her statement, “What difference, at this point,
does it
make?”
As
Heritage expert James Phillips said,
Clinton’s brush-off “indicates that the Administration misunderstands
the
nature and scope of the Islamist terrorist threat.”
With
a new Secretary of State and a new Libya
team on the way, Benghazi can’t just be swept under the rug—because the
safety
of all of our diplomats is at stake.
Both
the State Department and the Senate have
tried to figure out what went wrong in hopes of ensuring that such a
tragedy
would not happen again. So far, they have failed.
Heritage
experts note in a detailed new paper
that “Fully understanding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on
the U.S.
facility in Benghazi is vital to preparing for future security threats
to
American embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions.” Lives depend
on what
the government learns from this attack.
Scott
G. Erickson, Jessica Zuckerman, and
Steven P. Bucci explain that four key questions remain unanswered:
Which
counterterrorism and early-warning measures
were in place to address security threats?
Which
risk assessments were performed and which
risk-mitigation measures were adopted before the attack?
What
kind of contingency planning was
undertaken and exercised to respond to armed assaults against U.S.
facilities
in Benghazi?
How
was the interagency response to the
incident organized and managed? …
Read
the rest of the article at Heritage
Foundation
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