Perhaps no security incident has been the subject of greater scrutiny in proportion to its geopolitical impact than the attack on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi that occurred on September 11, 2012, and which claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and four other Americans. And yet, despite all the attention paid, the volume of misinformation on the topic can make it incredibly difficult to separate truth from lie.
One common criticism of the event’s handling is the notion that then-President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton withheld resources that could have helped to save American lives out of hesitations over the political cost of activating those resources.
As Benghazi became and remained a lightning rod for right-wing furor, the public’s understanding of the basic facts actually worsened, with misinformation—both willful and not—clouding matters far more than is usual.
One thread of belief asserted that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of Defense Panetta, along with senior members of the national security team, were watching real-time video of developments from a drone circling over the site. Based on the debunking of this particular talking point provided by Snopes.com, however, that seems to have grown out of the real occurrence of diplomatic security official Charlene Lamb’s real-time monitoring, in Washington, D.C., of an audio feed, only.
Video feeds only were available after the fact. Recordings from the 10 security cameras at the Benghazi compound were taken in the attack, and returned to U.S. officials by local Libyans only weeks after the attack, sometime after October 1. Drone video was available only during the last hour of the several hour attack.
This basic misstatement has been used by Republican politicians to construct a false narrative, wherein Secretary Clinton and President Obama willfully held back potentially life-saving aid and support. Comments made by former State Department Site Security Team commander Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, to the effect that the security situation in Benghazi was poor and deteriorating during his time in Libya, spanning February to August, 2012, have been taken as proof that senior officials—presumably including President Obama and Secretary Clinton—were willfully allowing things to escalate for…reasons?
To be fair, security resources in Libya had been whittled down during Wood’s tenure, from three SST teams to just one, and with much of the day-to-day security operations turned over to Blue Mountain, a British security firm that relied on unarmed local Libyans. It is also important to note that the Benghazi compound itself had been hardened considerably, with the erecting of more substantial walls, the installation of barricades to control entry, guard booths and other emplacements to create defensive positions, and other efforts to make the building itself more secure and able to resist incursion.
Nevertheless, some on the right believe that assets were available—U.S. Special Forces and other operators—but intentionally withheld. No reason is given for why senior U.S. officials, up to and including the President, would have sought to withhold assistance, and no effort is made by those voicing concerns and accusations to explain how or why those assets would have or could have been deployed from their European bases to the theater in Benghazi in time to provide material assistance in the tragedy that cost Ambassador Stevens and others their lives.