Over the course of eight hours on September 11, 2012, a terrorist attack left four Americans dead at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, setting off a firestorm that would engulf the American political landscape for the next four years. Are we safer now than we were then?
Since that time, eight congressional investigations, seven million dollars in taxpayer money, and 3,194 questions asked in lengthy public hearing have been sucked beyond the event horizon of the biggest political black hole of the election cycle. From the GOP viewpoint, Benghazi hearings have been the gift that just keeps giving, serving as a talking point against President Obama as he ran for reelection in 2012, as well as an effective attack against Hillary Clinton’s campaign four years later. Doubts over the overtly-partisan nature of the hearings were laid to rest last year when Former House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy happily proclaimed on national television; “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, what are her numbers today?”
On Tuesday, the cycle of investigations that outlasted congressional investigations into the 9/11 terrorist attacks came to a relatively uneventful conclusion with the release of the GOP report, faulting President Obama’s administration for a security lapse but not bringing to light any news of scandal to jeopardize Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Four years after the attack, with the quest for truth after accusations of lies, cover-ups, and large-scale leadership failure finally being put to rest, one question remains.
What now?
Too often, politicians in both chambers of Congress (much like the sharks featured on Shark Week) viciously attack one another over issues of national significance, only to dip away in search of new prey when they’ve had their fill of the parts that serve them. Gun control, Zika funding, and the Benghazi hearings are all proof of issues that have been politicized well beyond national interest: one has to wonder; what good, if any, has come out of the expensive, divisive disputes of the last four years?
The 800 page GOP report contains just seven pages on “recommendations” — even though preventing future attacks was purportedly a key goal of the investigation. NBC News reports, “By contrast, the 9/11 report, which was a little over half the length, contained 62 pages of recommendations.” The report concludes that, despite immediate orders to deploy military forces from President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, U.S. forces in neighboring countries simply were not prepared to respond to the call, stating, “What was disturbing from the evidence the Committee found was that at the time of the final lethal attack at the Annex, no asset ordered deployed by the Secretary had even left the ground.”
The full list of recommendations made by the congressional committee can be found here. Among the most prominent ideas are requests to improve communication between ground forces and “operational military personnel” to “coordinate surveillance and [emergency] response;” to clearly designate “who is in charge” when such emergency situations arise in various parts of the globe, and to allocate funding to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Security Training Center to ensure that State Department employees never enter a war-zone or high-risk area without feeling confident in their ability to defend themselves. Ironically, while the committee made several funding recommendations, they made no note of future Congressional plans to create or approve such funds for the State Department and other resources. Where is the recommended funding supposed to come from?
Perhaps the most important recommendation made by the committee was that “relevant agencies” must be involved in “each agency’s emergency action plans to ensure situational awareness as well as that each agency’s facilities, capabilities and response role is known.” When the first hour of the terrorist attack in Libya was brought to the attention of government officials in the U.S., the existence of a CIA Annex located miles away from the consulate and its role in the region was known to precious few political leaders. The unprepared status of military units and bases in neighboring countries indicated a huge lack of communication between combatant commands and the State Department, who knew of great unrest in the area but lacked the “actionable intelligence” that would have triggered an alert response before the attack. From these mistakes, we learn that the best way to prepare for future unrest is to ensure better communication between agencies, military operatives, and State Department operatives oversees. In the months and years to follow, it’s up to us to hold elected officials accountable to following up on their recommendations, signing new laws and providing the funding necessary to prevent another Benghazi catastrophe.
