by David Brock
Chapter Eight
How Benghazi Became #Benghazi
One of Hillary’s goals in Hard Choices was to put the Benghazi pseudoscandal to bed. She wrote about the tragedy with candor and insight and emotion. Hillary made clear that as secretary of state, she took responsibility; she took action focused on how to prevent future attacks; and she was transparent with the public throughout the ensuing investigations of the attacks. For reasonable readers, that was the end of the story.
But Hard Choice’s passages on Benghazi only inflamed her critics, for they were given nothing new to work with. Thus the right’s shameless, macabre efforts to politicize the deaths of four Americans in the attack on our military compound in Benghazi will persist into the 2016 election and perhaps beyond.
The truth about Benghazi is that there’s plenty for Americans to mourn, some lessons for policy makers to learn, but absolutely nothing for Hillary Clinton to be ashamed of. And yet it remains a powerful campaign issue for Republicans. A solid 58 percent majority of voters are dissatisfied with the way Hillary handled the Benghazi issue. In order to understand how that happened—how the Republicans managed to create something out of nothing—it’s worth going back to the beginning and telling the whole true story, not just of the attack, but of the right-wing smear campaign that grew from its ashes.
Before Benghazi became #Benghazi—a symbol for racially tinged conservative suspicions that a man named Barack Hussein Obama somehow had to be a terrorist sympathizer; a stimulus package for dishonest right-wing journalists and politicians craving attention and financial support from the easily misled Republican base; and a phony scandal that Republicans desperately hope will keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House—it was simply a heartbreaking tragedy.
On September 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, seven Americans were working at a small American compound in Benghazi, Libya: J. Christopher Stevens (a well-regarded diplomat who was serving as our ambassador to Libya), Sean Smith (the compound’s thirty-four-year-old chief information officer), and five security personnel charged with protecting them. The larger American presence in the city was at a facility about a mile away known as the annex, which hosted a CIA operation and other American officials.
At around 9:30 p.m. local time (3:30 p.m. in Washington, DC), the smaller compound in Benghazi came under attack. As gunfire rang out, Stevens and Smith were quickly moved to a safe room. But the attackers poured cans of gasoline around the compound, setting two buildings ablaze—including the sanctuary in which Stevens and Smith were huddled. Five American security personnel didn’t stand a chance against waves of hostile fighters, and they were unable to extract the two men before the inferno of smoke and fire claimed their lives.
Sean Smith died on-site. Chris Stevens was eventually taken to a hospital by Libyans who knew and respected him, but he could not be resuscitated.
After 11:00 p.m., the fighting receded, and a security team from the CIA annex was able to evacuate the small compound, bringing the survivors back to the annex. Meanwhile, a security team was scrambled from the Libyan capital of Tripoli, chartering an aircraft as soon as they could in the middle of the night and arriving at the annex around 5:00 a.m. with the intention of evacuating the Americans. But within minutes of their arrival, the hostile forces turned their attention to the annex in a brief but furious attack. Three mortar rounds hit the roof of the building within a ninety-second span. Tyrone S. Woods, a member of the team who evacuated the small compound, and Glen Doherty, a member of the rescue team just arrived from Tripoli, were killed.
Twelve hours after the first attack began, the evacuation was complete. Some thirty surviving Americans had safely escaped from Benghazi—bringing with them the bodies of those who had perished.
That’s what happened in Benghazi. And if the right had never spun up the attack into a fake scandal, that’s exactly how we might remember it today: as a tragedy in which four patriots who had taken on difficult and dangerous assignments in service to their country lost their lives.
In addition to their sacrifice, we might remember the enormous courage displayed by the small group of operatives who somehow managed to save the lives of the five security personnel who had faced overwhelming fire at the compound, recover Sean Smith’s body in the midst of incredible chaos, and safely evacuate dozens of people from the annex.
And, yes, we might try to learn from the tragedy, asking important questions about whether our security protocols were sufficient to protect American diplomats in hot zones like Libya, and whether steps needed to be taken to help prevent something like this from happening again.
Perhaps such a clear-eyed assessment would never have been possible in a political environment in which the GOP turns even minor controversies—let alone complex and emotionally fraught episodes like the Benghazi attack—into partisan food fights. But what happened in the aftermath of that fateful night—the process by which tragedy was turned into scandal—was remarkable, even by modern American standards.
Today, Benghazi remains, in the eyes of the right, one of Hillary Clinton’s most damaging political liabilities—despite the absence of any evidence, from ten independent reviews and congressional inquiries, including those led by Republicans, that she did anything wrong before, during, or after the attack.
It’s a seemingly perfect attack against Hillary, because it ties together a series of conservative tropes about her: that she’s secretive and imperious, cold and uncaring, obsessed with her political standing, and calculating in everything she does. It offers the right wing the opportunity to reinforce decades-old stereotypes of liberals as limp on defense, weak in fighting terrorist enemies, always eager to cut and run. Republicans get the chance to launch fishing expeditions—backed by the power of Congress—that remain unaccountable to the public and wholly political in their intent. Conservative media can speculate wildly about What She’s Covering Up. And it offers countless opportunities for the mainstream media to get drawn into the scandal launderers’ game.
Benghazi was a tragedy. But “#Benghazi,” as conservatives tweeted over and over again in an attempt to keep the story alive, is a hoax: a series of false accusations, ridiculous conspiracy theories, and unsupported innuendoes, a partisan attack unmoored from facts.
But it’s no stretch to say that for conservatives, the facts of what happened that night are practically irrelevant, because the politicization of the Benghazi tragedy began well before those facts were even clear.
And it’s only a little bit of a stretch to suggest that it all started because Mitt Romney screwed up his nominating convention.
You remember that convention: Clint Eastwood yelling at an empty chair, Chris Christie’s speech that was mostly about Chris Christie (and not about his party’s nominee), the program that ran long and pushed Romney’s star turn out of the prime hour for live news coverage. But aside from the series of embarrassing missteps on the part of Romney’s team, the candidate himself made a serious mistake in crafting his acceptance speech: On the biggest stage of the campaign, with a general electorate audience tuning in to hear his case, Mitt Romney didn’t say one word about the American troops who were still fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
The media roundly criticized this glaring omission, and voters may have taken note, as well: Romney’s single-point lead in the ABC News/Washington Post poll had turned to a six-point deficit by the time the Democratic conventions ended a few weeks later.
September 11 offered Romney a chance to fix his error as he spoke before the National Guard Association convention in Reno. He and President Obama had agreed to hold off on any negative campaigning during the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; Romney would declare in his remarks that it was not “a time and a place” for criticizing the president. But he could still offer effusive praise for American troops, outline his foreign policy agenda, and suggest ways to improve veterans’ health care—in short, he could clean up the mess
he’d made by ignoring all these topics in his convention speech.
Word of an attack on the Benghazi compound reached the Romney campaign as the candidate flew from Reno, where his speech had been well received, to Florida, where he planned to campaign the next day. The initial information was muddled and contradictory. The attack had begun at night, and it wasn’t even clear then it was over.
It had been a tumultuous day across the Middle East. Outside the embassy in Cairo, some three thousand protestors had rallied to condemn an American-made YouTube video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. Could the day’s biggest news from Cairo be related to the breaking news from Libya? Nobody knew.
Tellingly, the Romney campaign decided to shoot first and ask questions later. Forget about the 9/11 political truce; the time and place to hit the president was right now. Indeed, just a couple of hours after Romney assured the crowd in Reno that he wouldn’t attack the president on September 11, his campaign issued a press release. Not satisfied with simply expressing sorrow over the loss of American life or resolve that the attackers should be brought to justice, Romney attempted a bank shot to turn the attack into a political football right away, excoriating the administration for a statement made by Embassy Cairo in the wake of the protests there that echoed condemnations of the YouTube video:
I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
The campaign first attempted to embargo the release until after midnight to avoid breaking the 9/11 truce, but that would have meant missing the late news and the deadlines at many newspapers, so at 10:24 p.m. Eastern time, the Romney release went live. That statement still rings out as shockingly disingenuous today for three reasons.
The first, of course, was that Romney was accusing a sitting president of sympathizing with terrorists on the eleventh anniversary of the most infamous terrorist attack in American history.
The second was that Obama himself, along with Secretary Clinton, shared the view that our embassy in Cairo’s statement had been too conciliatory; in fact, even before Romney’s release hit reporters’ in-boxes, the White House and the State Department had repudiated it. “Let me be clear,” said Secretary Clinton in her statement, released before Romney’s. “There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.” The White House concurred, adding: “The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government.”
The third would end up being perhaps the most ironic: Like the Obama administration and many other observers, Romney’s team was speculating that there might well be a link between the protests over the video in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi; when this was later found not to be the case, Republicans would savage the Obama administration for suggesting such a connection in the early days after the tragedy.
But that wouldn’t come to light for some time. As America woke up to the disastrous news from Libya on the morning of September 12, commentators were sharing their shock and even outrage that the Romney campaign had rushed to violate the 9/11 truce, attacking the administration for a statement it had already disavowed in order to make the outrageous claim that President Obama, always under conservative suspicion for being “un-American,” sympathized with terrorists.
Given such a backlash, a less desperate candidate might have retreated. But Romney, setting an example that the GOP would follow for months and years to come, felt he had no choice but to exploit the dead Americans for partisan gain. He called a press conference the next day and repeated his attack, even the part that had been proven wrong: “I also believe the administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt, instead of condemning their actions,” he said, ignoring the reality that the administration had not stood by that statement in any way whatsoever.
With just two months to go before the election and President Obama ahead in the polls, Romney and the Republicans knew that Benghazi might be their last chance to rally. They looked for anything that could turn the tragedy into an example of President Obama’s weakness, incompetency, corruption—anything that would stick.
The first story they told was that the administration was falsely attempting to cast the attack as something other than terrorism in order to minimize the terrorist threat and vindicate Obama’s “soft on terror” approach to the world so that it wouldn’t come back to bite him in November.
They focused on Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice’s appearances on five Sunday shows on September 16. Using talking points put together and signed off on by the intelligence community for congressional staff, Rice described the government’s preliminary assessment that the attacks were inspired by the protests—while making it very clear that the assessment was ongoing and the conclusion could change.
“We’ll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms,” she told Jake Tapper of ABC News, “but that’s the best information we have at present.”
In the following days and weeks, facts emerged that complicated this early assessment. The Benghazi attack hadn’t been spontaneous violence that emerged organically from the protests that rocked the Middle East that day, but rather a planned and premeditated assault on Americans.
The right grabbed on to this one thread with both hands and hoped to yank hard enough to unravel the entire Obama administration, which stood accused by conservatives of lying about the attack’s origins to cover up a weak antiterror policy.
Turning this into a scandal required conservatives to accuse the president of putting partisan politics ahead of national security (which probably came relatively easy for them). It required them to believe that the president who ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was afraid to talk about terrorism during a campaign. And, of course, it required them to forget not only that Rice had cautioned that her assessment was preliminary, but that the Romney campaign had made the exact same preliminary assessment in its press release.
But that didn’t stop conservatives from trying, as they took a page from the Bush-Cheney playbook to demagogue the issue and frighten Americans on the eve of an election. “It looks and smells and probably is a cover-up,” said Fox News host Eric Bolling, adding that the “White House is covering up for what is going to end up being a terrorist attack on American soil.”
Rice’s statements on those Sunday shows—and the provenance of the talking points she was speaking from—became the subject of plenty of congressional grandstanding during the investigations that would ensue. Ultimately, they gave Republican senators an excuse to block her nomination to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. But they didn’t end up factoring into the November election, because just a few weeks later, Mitt Romney took an even bigger swing at President Obama—and whiffed completely.
The talking point that Obama was so averse to confronting the threat of terrorism that he wouldn’t even utter the word was a staple of the conservative talk shows for years. It all began when the president spoke in Cairo in 2009, calling for a new era of relations between the West and the Islamic world, a speech that was widely praised just about everywhere but on Fox News. Fox managing editor Bill Sammon had noticed something, e-mailing his staff to say: “My cursory check of Obama’s 6,000-word speech to the Muslim world did not turn up the words ‘terror,’ ‘terrorist,’ or ‘terrorism.’” The president had, in fact, spent much time discussing the fight against “violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security,” but he hadn’t said the T-word, so Fox News ran with the story, airing Sammon’s argument multiple times over the next twenty-four hours.
So the idea that Obama was playing politics by covering up terrorism in Benghazi fit a preexisting conservative meme, one that Romney himself fell prey to onstage a
t the presidential debate on October 16.
Asked about what happened in the Benghazi tragedy, Obama discussed his administration’s response, outlined newly implemented increased security measures designed to protect diplomats, and defended Hillary Clinton’s performance as secretary of state. Then, he took on a claim Romney had just made about the president’s “apology tour” (a popular conservative falsehood suggesting that Obama had apologized to America’s adversaries, when in fact he never had) and his “strategy of leading from behind.”
“The day after the attack, Governor,” the president said, “I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.”
Rather than engage on the substance of the administration’s diplomatic security policies or counterterrorism record, Romney decided to take a cue from the conservative hive mind and attack the president on his rhetoric: “I think it’s interesting the president just said something which—which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.”
“That’s what I said,” the president replied.
Romney continued: “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?” Clearly, he thought he was moments away from a spectacular gotcha moment. And he was—just not the one he was expecting.
Obama, of course, knew what Romney was doing. “Please proceed, Governor,” he said.
Romney wheeled around to face the audience like a prosecutor eyeing up a jury. “I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”