New witnesses admit more could have been done in Benghazi
See the video here explaining how many people were ready on the flight line, engines hot…just waiting for the GO order. It never came.
NRO: In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists. Government lawyers provided no explanation for this decision. If you are wondering whether politics played a role in it, you have good reason to be suspicious.
On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas. In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising. Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment. We are talking about the Obama administration, though, so there are always political considerations. And when it comes to Benghazi, they always take precedence.
As pled in the Khatallah indictment, the Obama administration’s version of what happened in Benghazi is woefully incomplete and misleading. As I’ve previously explained: In the indictment against Khatallah, the Justice Department alleges that nothing of consequence happened until the day of the Benghazi attack, when [Khatallah] is said to have complained aloud that “something” had to be done about “an American facility in Benghazi” that he believed was an illegal intelligence operation masquerading as a diplomatic post. Suddenly, at 9:45 that night, “twenty armed men,” including “close associates of Khatallah” (not identified by prosecutors), “violently breached” the facility.
In the ensuing violence, the Americans were killed. Khatallah is alleged to have participated in the mayhem and to have prevented “emergency responders” from stopping it. Of course, there is far more to the story than the Justice Department has elected to tell. In the months preceding September 11, the “diplomatic facility” and other Western compounds in Benghazi were targeted in terrorist bombings and threats. September 11 would be the eleventh anniversary of the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans by al-Qaeda, which had every incentive to mark that occasion with a significant attack. American forces, moreover, had recently killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s top Libyan operative; that prompted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terror network’s leader, to call on fellow jihadists to avenge al-Libi — an incitement issued just a day before the Benghazi attack. So al-Qaeda was very much on the offensive. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail falsely assuring Americans that the terror network had been “decimated.” Obama’s decision to back Libyan “rebels” against Moammar Qaddafi had resulted in the arming of anti-American jihadists and the teetering of Libya on the brink of collapse. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail pronouncing his Libya policy a boon for regional stability.
As Obama next called for the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and reports surfaced of covert American support for the Syrian “rebels,” arms used by jihadists in Libya were shipped to jihadists in Syria by way of Turkey. Was that why we needed a “diplomatic facility” with a CIA annex in Benghazi, which was a transit point for some of these weapons? Was that why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi meeting with Turkey’s ambassador on September 11 despite the obvious peril? The Obama administration refuses to say. Throughout 2012, American personnel in Benghazi were under heightened terrorist threat. Despite their pleas for more protection, however, the State Department under Secretary Clinton actually reduced security. Finally, when the September 11 siege occurred, the Obama administration knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack of the sort that any competent assessment of the red-blinking intelligence would have predicted. Obama and Hillary Clinton, however, colluded in an elaborate scheme to convince the public that the atrocity was not an al-Qaeda-connected terrorist attack but a spontaneous protest run amok, provoked by an anti-Muslim video.
This last point is worth emphasizing. We now know, thanks to the belated disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, that even as she and the administration were fraudulently telling the American people that the attack was a video-inspired protest that spun out of control, she was frankly discussing with foreign government officials (and her daughter, Chelsea) that it was a terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists.
In a criminal trial — and especially in a death-penalty phase — there would be significant disclosure of communications between government officials during and after the attacks. In this case, it could become ever more embarrassingly clear that, for weeks, administration officials were knowingly telling the public things that were not true. By opting not to seek the death penalty, the Justice Department is in a stronger position to argue to the court that the only narrow issue for the jury is whether Khatallah’s conduct makes him guilty of the specific charges in the indictment. Prosecutors have a far better chance of preventing the trial from becoming a free-wheeling inquiry into what happened in Benghazi, and why. And now, if the administration could just get Khatallah to plead guilty to a count or two, maybe it could make the whole thing go away. — Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.
