The long-awaited 800-page Gowdy Panel congressional report into the killing of US ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi leaves the same tantalysing questions seven other investigations failed to nail: who launched the attack, why did they do it, and were US actions in the turmoil of post-revolutionary Libya a contributory factor?
Those questions remain unanswered in the final report of the House select committee on Benghazi, an investigation that has taken longer to than the 9/11 commission and the Warren commission on the assassination of president John F Kennedy.
The single new nugget highlighted in the panel’s $7m inquiry is information that committee chairman Trey Gowdy said shows Hilary Clinton had planned on visiting Benghazi in October of that year – the implication being that Ambassador Stevens had journeyed to the city marred by jihadi violence the previous month to smooth the way for the then secretary of state.
Gowdy accused Clinton and her staff of a “shameful” lack of cooperation with his investigators, claiming the Obama administration was still holding back vital clues. Clinton’s spokesman Brian Fallon fired back that: “The committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple, earlier investigations.”
But this investigation was always more about Clinton than the events in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 that left Stevens and three fellow Americans dead. An indication of the polarized nature of the investigation is that the Democratic and Republican panel members saw fit to issue separate versions of the report this week: Republicans blame Clinton for not paying attention to Benghazi’s dangers, while Democrats say she was not involved in day-to-day decisions on consulate security.
What the panel highlights in forensic detail is the compounding of errors and mistakes that led to Stevens’ death. By the time he came to Benghazi, a year after the end of the revolution that had deposed and killed Muammar Gaddafi, the city was wracked by militant violence. Several diplomatic missions had been attacked, and Britain had closed its nearby consulate after a rocket attack in June. Three times Stevens asked the state department for extra security, and three times he was rebuffed or ignored.
Also recorded are a catalogue of lapses that made what was a temporary consulate a potential death trap. Fortifications were only partially completed, security was dependent on five armed American guards, supplemented by unarmed Libyans and a local militia who ran away when a force of 20 to 30 militants attacked that night.
A question yet to receive a full answer was why, when a safe room was installed in the villa of the compound, was the door not made of solid steel but something akin to prison bars. When militants broke into the villa, they never got into the safe room but set the villa on fire. The smoke came through the bars, killing Stevens and fellow diplomat Sean Smith.
Why did Stevens visit the city at all, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, knowing he lacked sufficient security? An email found by the Guardian in the rubble records him setting out a routine progamme of meetings, all of which could have waited for a less febrile moment in the calendar.
More warnings came that day, when jihadists incensed by a film, Innocence of Muslims, stormed the US embassy in neighbouring Egypt. That morning, a suspect was spotted keeping watch on the Benghazi compound. By evening, the tension was enough for Smith to send a despairing email to a friend saying they might be attacked and he feared for his life. Unanswered is why Stevens did not move with Smith and the five guards to the relative safety of a CIA annex a mile down the road.
Previous congressional reports have been shy about mentioning the CIA presence in the city, but Gowdy highlights and praises their actions. It was those CIA men who formed a scratch reaction unit to battle their way to the compound, rescuing the five security staff. In Tripoli, the CIA chartered a plane at short notice and flew a volunteer team to Benghazi to reinforce the annex. Two of those volunteers, CIA contractors Tyrone S Woods and Glen Doherty, were killed when militants mortared the annex in the early hours of the morning.
The report rakes over old ground in accusing the Obama administration of trying to cover up the true nature of the attack. It notes that by the time America’s then UN ambassador Susan Rice hit the Sunday talk shows on 18 September to claim the attack was a protest against the Innocence of Muslims film, multiple sources showed there had been no protest, only a full-on attack.
But who carried out the attack, and why, remain out of reach. “The full truth is a big concept,” Gowdy acknowledges in his summary, urging readers to “demand answers from those in a position to provide them”.
But without the CIA giving a full and frank explanation of their presence in the city, those answers may be hard to find.
In Benghazi, some opine that the reason was an election due the next day in Libya’s newly elected parliament for its first prime minister, with fierce arguments between Islamists and their opponents. In her mammoth 11 hours of testimony to the committee, Clinton suggested the answer may be that local militants decided to attack on the spur of the moment: “Was it because of a protest, or guys out on a walk who decided to go and kill some Americans?” she said.
Those questions may be answered later this year in the Washington trial of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Libyan captured in Benghazi by US special forces in 2014 and accused of murdering Stevens as part of Ansar al-Sharia, the militia blamed for the attack.
They likely won’t be. The fuel propelling the inquiries has been the accusation that Clinton is guilty. No fact-based inquiry is going to provide a definitive answer to what remains a value judgement, one set to loom large ahead of the November election.
