Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

  They were so confident in the success of their plan that they picked the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack to ever befall America to execute it.

  The Benghazi terrorist assault lasted throughout the night of September 11, 2012, and into the early morning hours the next day. It also had two targets: the diplomatic compound where Ambassador Stevens lived and conducted business, the security of which was broached at about 9:40 P.M., and an annex that the CIA ran a little over a mile away, which began taking fire after midnight.

  Almost as soon as it began, a diplomatic security officer led Ambassador Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith to a gated room called the “safe haven.” When the attackers overwhelmed security and breached the walls of the compound, they lit kerosene fires around the gate of the panic room. Both the ambassador and Smith died of smoke inhalation. In would be a full six hours later when mortar fire at the annex killed Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods, the former Navy SEALs who were attached to the CIA security detail.

  Six hours of deadly silence.

  The quiet of those hours has since been filled with much controversy.

  It was reported that a military unit, a counterassault team of Special Forces, was about to board a plane in Tripoli 600 miles away when they were told to stand down. The State Department and military leaders have denied the report. Although the ARB, the Accountability Review Board put in place by the State Department to assess the attack, also discounts the stand down order, it says that there was a great deal of confusion in how those series of events were reported.9 One response was that it was not a stand down order but a don’t go order. Try explaining that to the families of the victims.

  A story in Forbes magazine said that President Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and other high-ranking officials watched a live video feed of the attack from a drone that hovered overhead, and did nothing.

  The White House denied that gathering ever happened.

  Another report stated that the embassy made three urgent requests for military backup during those hours and were denied.

  The administration refuted that report also.

  Here’s what we know for sure: the Special Forces and other diplomatic security (DS) that were left in Tripoli couldn’t find a plane for hours. Had the DC-3 been on site they might have made it in time to help save Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, but the State Department pulled the funding for the plane. What makes this even harder to take is that three days after the State Department turned down the request for the DC-3, the agency authorized $100,000 for the embassy in Vienna to buy an electrical charging station. The charger was for ten Chevy Volts they’d previously purchased at a cost to the American people of over $200,000.

  “I still don’t quite understand why they couldn’t fly aircraft over to Benghazi,” said Ambassador Stevens’s deputy, Gregory Hicks. “When I was a kid, I grew up watching Western movies, the cavalry always came. I just thought that they would come.”

  The cavalry didn’t come. The State Department’s own Accountability Review Board headed by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen (appointed by the Secretary of State) gave Mrs. Clinton a scathing review of her State Department’s handling of Benghazi. One of the many blistering sections of the report reads: “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department (the “Department”) resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

  There is another historical example that I believe puts the Benghazi fiasco into perspective. Not too long after Mrs. Clinton’s husband started his first term as president, U.S. Delta Force soldiers, Navy SEALs, and Army Rangers staged a high-risk military operation in Somalia. The objective of the raid was to arrest two lieutenants of a local warlord who was stealing humanitarian supplies—the civil war in Somalia had caused a man-made famine.

  The military operation went terribly wrong. What was supposed to be a quick extraction became a two-day battle in which Somali fighters with rocket-propelled grenade launchers shot down two Army Black Hawk helicopters, killing eighteen Army Rangers and capturing one.

  The most lasting images of the event were the photographs and video that showed Somali militia dragging the bodies of U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. Those images filled America’s front pages and television screens.10

  The Battle of Mogadishu, more popularly known as Black Hawk Down after the bestselling book and Hollywood movie, was perhaps the biggest military blight on Bill Clinton’s presidential record.11 Most of the criticism he garnered was because of his response, or lack thereof, to the incident. There was no counterattack. Clinton pulled the army out of Somalia afterward, leaving the warlord and his gang of pirates to publicly celebrate their victory over the great United States Army. Soldiers from the Somalia militia involved in the attack did television interviews bragging of their conquest and showed a video that included a close-up of the battered face of the captured Black Hawk helicopter pilot.12

  But it was the events that preceded the attack that were perhaps Clinton’s biggest mistake. In the months leading up to the assault, commanders in Somalia repeatedly asked Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, for soldiers, tanks, and armor-plated vehicles to reinforce their mission. As was the case in Tehran and Benghazi, tensions in Somalia had risen markedly. The commanders’ requests were turned down.13

  Aspin was grilled by Congress but refused to take responsibility. It would be months before Bill Clinton forced the Secretary of Defense to resign (I’ve often wondered if he had been president during the Benghazi tragedy, would he have fired Hillary?).14

  Almost twenty years after Les Aspin’s resignation, Secretary of State Clinton faced similar questions.

  The day she testified in front of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mrs. Clinton seemed annoyed, tired, or both. In answering my questions, her voice had an affected ring to it. Some of her words, however, were nothing less than callous. There is the now famous exchange she had with Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, who pressed her about the reason behind the attack.

  “What difference, at this point, does it make?” she said to him dismissively.

  Our committee repeatedly asked Mrs. Clinton if she had read the cables from Ambassador Stevens asking for increased security. “I have made it very clear that the security cables did not come to my attention or above the assistant secretary level,” she said. She receives 1.43 million cables a year, she insisted.

  I wonder how many of those came from a war zone?

  I realize that the Secretary of State receives lots of cables from diplomats, that she might not need to personally read every cable from Switzerland or Bulgaria, but Libya was one of the most dangerous spots on the planet. It is inexcusable that while security was denied to our Libyan embassy, the State Department spent $100,000 for three comedians to travel to India on a promotional tour called Make Chai, Not War. The summer they brought home the last vestiges of security from Libya, the State Department spent $650,000 on Facebook ads. Hillary Clinton’s State Department found $5 million to buy crystal glassware that summer, but she repeatedly turned down requests for diplomatic security in Benghazi.

  After the fall of Gaddafi, Libya was unstable, to say the least. It was, and still is, filled with guns both from Western sources and from Gaddafi’s own arsenal, including Gaddafi’s stockpile of 15,000 or so man-portable air defense systems or MANPADS. Many of Gaddafi’s missiles are still missing. A terrorist attack on an American outpost in post-Gaddafi Libya shouldn’t have come as a surprise. According to a 2007 West Point Combating Terrorism Center report,15 Benghazi was a primary staging ground for al-Qaeda militia being sent into Iraq. In 2011, Gaddafi was going to invade Benghazi for the purpose of wiping out al-Qaeda headquarters there.

  “The security in Benghazi was a struggle and remained a struggle throughout my time ther
e,” Colonel Wood said in a statement to a congressional oversight committee. “The situation remained uncertain and reports from some Libyans indicated it was getting worse,” he wrote.

  How could Hillary Clinton ignore cables from her chief diplomat in such a situation?

  The State Department’s fault in the handling of Benghazi goes much further than just not reading cables.

  The State Department could send clowns to India, but they wouldn’t authorize a sixteen-person security team in Libya or provide the funds for an airplane to transport security teams around the country.

  Why, all of a sudden, was Mrs. Clinton so conscious of budgetary concerns?

  In 2009, her State Department signed a ten-year lease and spent some $80 million of American taxpayer money to renovate a hotel in northern Afghanistan, only to abandon the idea because of security concerns.16 So an empty building warrants attention, but one that houses American diplomats does not?

  “I am the Secretary of State,” she said defiantly in front of my committee, “and the ARB made it very clear that the level of responsibility for the failures that they outlined sat at the level of Assistant Secretary and below.”

  In spite of the fact that the investigation was headed up by people handpicked by Mrs. Clinton—who never interviewed her for the report—State Department negligence litters the ARB account of the Benghazi attack, and eyewitness accounts provide a narrative of blunders and indifference. Those mistakes began long before the attack.

  The Benghazi mission should have never been allowed to operate in the first place without a significant military guard. If the government wasn’t going to give it a military guard, they shouldn’t have opened it. And if they decided to open it, as they did, it should have been given adequate security, like the consulate in Baghdad, as if it were in a war zone, with a guard under Department of Defense command.

  Instead, Mrs. Clinton ran the Benghazi mission like it was the embassy in Paris.

  The question still remains: why?

  Well, there is the suggestion, a topic that I broached with Mrs. Clinton, that there was more to the relationship between the diplomatic compound and the CIA annex than what met the eye.

  News stories, including one written by Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, reported that the CIA ran an operation out of the annex that shipped guns through Turkey to Syria for the purpose of arming Syrian rebels, some of whom were al-Qaeda–aligned fighters.

  The details of the story read like something out of a Nelson DeMille novel and include front companies in Libya, secret funds, and retired American soldiers.

  According to these sources, the operation was huge, big enough to move a cargo ship filled with guns and other military equipment that once belonged to Gaddafi—including SA-7 surface-to-air missile systems that could bring down airliners.

  The operation was said to also include the British MI6, which allowed it to sidestep a U.S. law that would have required its disclosure to senior leadership of Congress. Instead, it operated under a blanket of secrecy, and with impunity. In his article,17 Hersh quotes a senior intelligence official with knowledge of documents that substantiate his claim: “The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms. It had no real political role,” the source told Hersh.18

  At the Senate hearing, I asked Mrs. Clinton about the CIA annex and reports that it was being used for a secret gunrunning operation. As I’ve mentioned, she seemed annoyed by the question and suggested I talk to the CIA, as if she hadn’t any knowledge of what I was talking about.

  It’s hard to imagine, should there be any legitimacy to the reports, that the Secretary of State would be kept out of such a loop. If the gunrunning operation in Benghazi existed, then Mrs. Clinton and the very upper reaches of our government had to be aware and perhaps even complicit.

  Even if the gunrunning theory can’t be proven, a very dark cloud still hangs over the Benghazi issue. American blood was unnecessarily spilled, and I for one won’t let it be forgotten.

  Mrs. Clinton denies any wrongdoing in her handling of Benghazi, and she boasts of her record as Secretary of State. It seems the bigger the mistake you make, the more outrageous your negligence, the better chance you have to get away with it.

  Let’s take for example the war in Iraq. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, had I been a senator at the time of the Iraq War, I would have never voted for it, and it troubles me that we were sold that war on false pretenses. It’s also bothersome that the mainstream media continues to invite the architects of the Iraq invasion to share their opinions on Sunday morning shows. History has already begun to harshly judge those who made this country’s decisions after 9/11.

  I believe judgment day for Benghazi is also at hand.

  When the Secretary of State answers a question concerning the murders of four Americans, including an American ambassador, by saying, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” I think that’s a pretty clear indication that it’s time for that person to go.

  It’s 3 A.M., Mrs. Clinton. The phone is ringing. The American people deserve to know why you never bothered to answer it.

  16

  Tree Hugger

  The fact is, big government, democratic and totalitarian alike, has often failed to protect the environment.

  When we moved into our house on a steep hillside in Bowling Green I began planting trees. That was nearly twenty years ago. I had the most success with native trees, which I’d dug up from various parts of the yard and transplanted. Some of the maple trees I transplanted are now forty feet tall. One of them has never been trimmed and drapes to the ground with a great forty-foot circumference of limbs.

  Hickory trees, too, grow everywhere on my property. I have red, white, and chestnut oaks, some of which are two hundred years old. I also have plenty of trees that are just getting started.

  I have a cherry tree that is grown from seeds of the Tidal Basin trees in Washington, D.C. Those cherry tree saplings were a gift to the United States from the emperor of Japan in 1912. The First Lady, Helen Herron Taft, and the wife of the Japanese ambassador, Viscountess Chinda, planted the first two of the 3,200 trees. After the planting, Mrs. Taft handed the viscountess a bouquet of American Beauty roses. From that simple gesture the Cherry Blossom Festival was born. In April, when the cherry trees blossom, tourists from across the nation gather near the Jefferson Memorial. The blossoms are so plentiful that they give the appearance of snow.

  Democrats think somehow they’re the only ones allowed to like the environment. I’m a crunchy conservative and tree hugger and proud of it, maybe because the streets in the town I grew up in, Lake Jackson, Texas, are named after trees and flowers. We lived on Blossom Street. I even have trouble letting my trees go when the time has come. A two-hundred-year-old beech tree guarded the entrance to my house for a decade. Like many beeches, it was mostly hollow and, more ominously, had a spiraling, twenty-foot-long crack that nearly dissected the trunk. By all rational calculation, I should have taken the tree down years before it fell, but I loved its stately charm. Fortunately, the storm blew it toward the street and not toward the house. My boys whooped it up and played in its fallen, hollow trunk for days.

  I grew a giant sequoia for about fifteen years. It was affected by a blight that allowed growth at its crown but caused persistent browning of the lower limbs. Finally, the tree succumbed to its disease. I announced to my mostly skeptical family that I would cut it down, bring it inside, and make furniture out of it.

  “Sure, Dad,” my kids said. They were right to be skeptical, because of course I had never actually made a piece of furniture, and with my crazy travel schedule it was unlikely I was going to acquire the skills to do so. The not so giant sequoia cluttered my workspace, straddling our bench press and poking into the ceiling for a year. Finally, after several months of pointed barbs from Kelley and the kids, I took my table saw, cut it up into “legs,” which is a generous description, then wedged them under my workbench. Voilà! Furniture.

/>   In my yard, I also have lilacs, peonies, hydrangeas, dwarf crab apples, nandinas, and ivy, some of which are poisonous and not planted but rather defended against.

  Maybe the most prized attraction in my yard isn’t growing but soaring over it: a mating pair of bald eagles built a nest near a neighborhood pond across from me and often alight in my old oaks. Our eagles have been here for three seasons now. This year my kids spotted the first baby bald eagle.

  Teddy Roosevelt once said, “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”

  Sometimes I think of that quote when I look out at the greenery and flowers of my backyard or the cherry tree whose roots reach back to the Tidal Basin that fronts the Jefferson Monument or the bald eagles that soar to heights this country can reach again.

  It boggles my mind to think that somehow Republicans have been branded as a party that doesn’t like the environment. It was Abraham Lincoln who laid the groundwork for the first national park in California’s Yosemite Valley; it was Teddy Roosevelt who protected 230 million acres of forests, and though his brainchild has become bloated and misguided, Republicans were instrumental in helping our country rise from the industrial mess that occurred in the first part of the past century.

  The New GOP, the GOP that I believe in, will fight for a clean environment. We believe that clean and prosperous are not mutually exclusive; in fact they can be, must be, mutually beneficial.

  To protect the environment, we must marry sustainability to the cause. To me that often means marrying profit with projects to preserve the environment. To have sustainable environmentalism it must be profitable. Just think of all the businesses that profitably recycle.