Email Nov 9^th

In today’s paper we have a citizen who tells us that Lady Gaga had Secretary Clinton’s email address….and of course Ambassador Stevens did not. This information is, I suppose, to demonstrate Clinton’s priorities. What it demonstrates is that the right wing will politicize anything if they believe it will give them a political advantage. The Clinton email thing and the Benghazi killings are now in the area of overkill. As Bernie Sanders said, “Enough with the damned emails already!”

Overkill or not, some light needs to be shed on the deaths in Benghazi. I find it interesting that no one seems interested in the complete back story of why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi in the first place. The accepted version is that it was partly because Clinton wanted to make Benghazi into a more permanent facility. Even the Republicans claim that this was just one of the reasons and they stop there. Our Embassy, the normal home turf of our ambassadors, was in Tripoli, the largest city and the capital city of Libya.

Stevens was well liked by the Libyans but obviously not by all of them. He had been warned by the Libyan government that this trip was dangerous but he went to Benghazi anyway. Perhaps there was something in his makeup that required that he not concern himself with personal danger. Still, much is made of the frequent requests for more security at these facilities. It’s unfortunate that the funds for State Department requests to increase their security were denied.

Shaun Waterman of the Washington Times, not a notable liberal paper, writes in 2012 about Congress slashing funds to upgrade security at various State Department facilities. According to Waterman Congress cut nearly 300 million dollars for security, but Representative Gowdy’s investigating committee never mentions that. The committee seems uninterested in investigating Republican contributions to this disaster.

Here is a McClatchy Newspaper report about Stevens’ refusal of security assistance; another bit of information Gowdy’s committee hasn’t discussed:

“In the month before attackers stormed U.S. facilities in Benghazi and killed four Americans, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens twice turned down offers of security assistance made by the senior U.S. military official in the region in response to concerns that Stevens had raised in a still secret memorandum, two government officials told McClatchy.

Why Stevens, who died of smoke inhalation in the first of two attacks that took place late Sept. 11 and early Sept. 12, 2012, would turn down the offers remains unclear. The deteriorating security situation in Benghazi had been the subject of a meeting that embassy officials held Aug. 15, where they concluded they could not defend the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi. The next day, the embassy drafted a cable outlining the dire circumstances and saying it would spell out what it needed in a separate cable.”

Isn’t it obvious that this tragedy was all Hillary Clinton’s fault!