Salon.com > chris stevens

White House releases trove of new Benghazi documents

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:47:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is releasing 100 pages of e-mails and notes related to the Obama administration's response to the attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, last September.

The White House had until now declined to make the documents public and had let congressional investigators review the documents without making copies.

The documents describe how the administration developed "talking points" to describe what the administration wanted to discuss publicly immediately after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Benghazi returning as big scandal

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:39:00 +0000

There's been a lot of smoke in the would-be scandal over the Benghazi attacks, but no real fire yet.

But that may change when three "whistle-blowers" give what Republicans expect to be explosive testimony this week before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee. The controversy over the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in the Libyan city has smoldered, mainly on the right, but the testimony will likely push it back into the mainstream and could be an enormous distraction for an already injured second-term Obama.

Unlike the vast majority of the new information brought forward by the conservative media since the attack, the three whistle-blowers seem credible. One, Gregory Hicks, was the No. 2 State Department official in Libya before the attack and has decades of experience in the Foreign Service. Another, Eric Nordstrom, was the regional security officer in country for State. And the third, Mark Thompson, is the deputy coordinator for operations in the department's counterterrorism bureau and was involved in Washington's response to the Libya attacks.

When Benghazi hijacked the election

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Who lost Libya? Indeed, who lost the entire Middle East? Those are the questions lurking behind the endless stream of headlines about “Benghazi-gate.” Here’s the question we should really ask, though: How did a tragic but isolated incident at a U.S. consulate, in a place few Americans had ever heard of, get blown up into a pivotal issue in a too-close-to-call presidential contest?

My short answer: the enduring power of a foreign policy myth that will not die, the decades-old idea that America has an inalienable right to “own” the world and control every place in it. I mean, you can’t lose what you never had.

This campaign season teaches us how little has changed since the early Cold War days when Republican stalwarts screamed, “Who lost China?” More than six decades later, it’s still surprisingly easy to fill the political air with anxiety by charging that we’ve “lost” a country or, worse yet, a whole region that we were somehow supposed to “have.”

Four things you haven’t heard about Libya

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:44:00 +0000

As the US campaigns clash over what President Barack Obama did and didn’t know about the attack on a US consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, there is real news happening in Libya that could have a real impact on the country, the region and the world.

Here are a few things the media should be writing about instead.

THE BENGHAZI KILLERS ‘BROUGHT TO JUSTICE’?

In a raid in Cairo on Wednesday, Egyptian security forces killed a Libyan man they say was involved in September’s attack on the US consulate.

Egyptian officials said the raid targeted a group of militants suspected of having connections to Al Qaeda, but did not offer any explanation as to why they thought the man, identified as Karim Ahmed Essam el-Azizi, might have been involved in the Benghazi assault.

Meanwhile, US officials are questioning a Tunisian man stopped by Turkish officials last month as he tried to enter the country under a false passport. While two Tunisian men were stopped at the time, officials say only one is under investigation.

Father of slain ambassador: Don’t exploit my son’s death

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Jan Stevens, father of Ambassador Chris Stevens who was killed in the September 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, told Bloomberg that “It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue.” He added that the campaigns should wait until the end of the formal investigation instead of making snap judgments.

On Sunday morning talk shows Obama campaign senior advisor Robert Gibbs and senior campaign strategist David Axelrod accused the Romney camp of exploiting the tragedy for political gain. Republicans have raised questions about whether the White House was aware of a request from a State Department official to extend a security force's time in Libya. In Thursday night's debate, Vice President Joe Biden said it was not. Republicans have also accused the White House of saying the attack was a response to the anti-Islamic film “Innocence of Muslims” rather than a pre-planned terrorist attack.

Bloomberg:

Humbled giant

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century. You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious. Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush. It was victory with a capital V. The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet. It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a “rogue state,” on the horizon. It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless. Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

Libyan president targets rogue militias

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:16:00 +0000

BENGHAZI, Libya (AP) — Libya's president has ordered the disbandment of "illegitimate" militias, a move designed to assert state authority amid violence by armed groups including an assault on the U.S. Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador.

In the late Saturday news conference, President Mohammed el-Megaref said a joint operations room in Benghazi will coordinate between the various authorized militia brigades and the army. He said others operating outside the "legitimacy of the state" are to be disbanded.

The decision came amid growing public anger at armed factions and Islamic extremists, resulting in the storming of some of their compounds by protesters.

But in the absence of strong security forces, the government relies on some militias to keep order.