The Benghazi hearings critique
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The Benghazi hearings critique is John Kiriakou's assessment of the congressional inquiry into the 2012 attack, which he says he watched in full, the whole thing, all day long.

Gun running

Asked what he made of rumours about gun running from the CIA compound, Kiriakou said he thinks there is actually some evidence of it.

He sets the problem in context. Gun running, he says, has been an issue since the very beginning of the uprising against Gaddafi. Libya is already a kind of no-man's-land: its borders are not clearly defined, the desert is constantly shifting, and it is an intensely tribally based society in which people never really trust their central government, and on top of that, vast numbers of weapons are changing hands.

As to who was involved, the CIA, the British, the Egyptians, Kiriakou says he is not sure anyone is ever going to really get to the bottom of that story.

The objection to the hearings

What troubles him is that the inquiry did not appear to be attempting it. It does not seem, he says, that these hearings are even trying to find out.

There are, in his view, many legitimate issues that could have been examined about Benghazi or about Libya more broadly. Instead the proceedings devolved into a political contest between Hillary Clinton and the Republicans on the committee, and Kiriakou's judgement is that nobody did the American people any service by allowing it to become political when there were important intelligence issues at play.

The comparison he draws

Kiriakou then offers a measure of the inconsistency. He says he saw a report that during George W. Bush's presidency there were something like sixty attacks around the world against American embassies and consulates, including, he estimates, half a dozen or a dozen deaths, and that none of those was ever investigated.

His proposed standard is uniform and non-partisan: perhaps every attack on an American embassy or consulate, and every occasion on which American personnel overseas are killed, should be investigated, not politically, not on a partisan basis, but so that the protection of American facilities and people can be improved.

See also

- The Libya policy reversal
- The Libyan constitution unveiling
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
