Why Benghazi Still Matters

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

Lincoln’s words are fitting for anyone’s life, and even more so for those who hold the office of President. In the months that will follow, as candidates soar to new heights only to fall to unbelievable lows, we the people will have to ask ourselves which candidate is not afraid of the immense responsibility that being the President holds – and which candidates are more worried about image than obligation.

If you’re a reader of the New York Times and watch a lot of televised news, what I am about to tell you might be somewhat shocking. Benghazi, and more generally Libya, never clamored for democratic revolution, despite the White House’s insistence of the contrary. Benghazi has long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya, in particular for violent uprising by Islamist organizations in the mid‐1990s. According to the CIA discovered Sinjar reports, nearly 80 percent of Libyans who fought against American forces in the Iraqi War came from Benghazi and its neighboring Darnah.

“I would say that I personally was not focused on talking points, I was focused on keeping our people safe,” Clinton said to Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the top Republican on the investigative Senate panel. “Keeping safe” meant relocating Special Envoy Chris Stevens and his team to Benghazi – where in 2006 at least ten people were killed at the Italian consulate during a demonstration over Muhammad cartoons. Months after arriving from Tripoli, after frequent requests for more security, Chris Stevens and members of his team were brutally murdered by al Qaeda affiliated agents.

“With specific security requests, they didn’t come to me; I had no knowledge of them,” said Clinton in the same Senate hearing. With the 2016 election only 4 years away from the 2012 murder of the four Americans, it’s easy to see why the single-minded Clinton ignored her most basic duties. If a Secretary of State can’t be bothered to read desperate pleas by their own ambassadors, how could the voters seriously consider that person for president?

According to a boastful, tragically premature 2013 New York Times article written by C. J Shivers, “Many of the same people who chased the colonel (Gaddafi) to his grave are busy shuttling his former arms stockpiles to rebels in Syria. The flow is an important source of weapons for the uprising and a case of bloody turnabout, as the inheritors of one strongman’s arsenal use them in the fight against another.” The article continues, “Evidence gathered in Syria, along with flight-control data and interviews with militia members, smugglers, analysts and officials in several countries, offers a profile of a complex and active multinational effort, financed largely by Qatar, to transport arms from Libya to Syrian opposition fighters. Libya’s own former fighters, who sympathize with Syria’s rebels, have been eager collaborators.” Once believed by the Obama administration to be “democracy-loving,” these rebels are now known as ISIS.

While accidentally contributing to the creation of the largest terrorist organization in history and ignoring American envoys who were pleading for their lives should be enough to disqualify a potential candidate from becoming president, many still cheer on the responsibility-skirting Hillary to run in the 2016 presidential elections. According to a recent MSNBC poll, 60 percent of people believe Hillary is the strongest Democratic candidate. Given the legacy of this former Secretary of State, the only people who should happily anticipate this potential candidacy live in Sharia ruled Swathes of Iraq and Syria.