3 Questions They Should Have Asked Hillary About Benghazi, But Didn't (And Never Will)

The circus is back in town in Washington D.C. (actually, it’s part of a permanent residency), as a congressional panel spent Thursday peppering presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with questions about her role in the Benghazi consulate attack. The attack left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, and has been the subject of political scandal ever since, with Republicans claiming then-Secretary of State Clinton didn’t do enough to sufficiently fortify the security detail of the consulate.

It’s pure political theater, but sadly, no one on this congressional panel will ask the real questions to which Americans deserve answers. And this is because the real scandal presents questions that can’t be asked, because the answers indict the entire U.S. government.

What was our true geopolitical motive in Libya?

At its core, the 2011 NATO-backed rebels’ deposal of Libya’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, involved United States foreign policy interests. As with other recent military actions in the Middle East, it is part of a deep and blood-soaked history of coups that includes no less than35 countries.

Soon after 9/11, former General Wesley Clark was informed about a memo outlining how the U.S. government planned to “take out” seven countries in five years. Those countries included Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

According to many reports, this plan had been in the works since the 1990s, when the neoconservative think tank, Project For A New American Century —which was presided over by stalwart war profiteers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others— drew up plans for an all-out invasion of Iraq as early as 1998. This plan included comprehensive military actions throughout the Middle East, as described by General Clark.

The overthrow of Libya’ssecular-Arab nationalist regime was very much a part of this geopolitical coup, a predicate of which was protecting the petrodollar (which is a term used to describe the world’s dominant reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, which is based on petroleum exports) and establishing a permanent occupying force in the Middle East. WhenGaddafi announced in 2009 that he planned to nationalize the country’s oil reserves, he may have sealed his fate.

So, the question for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be something like this: do you still support the administration’s decision to arm the terrorist group Al Qaeda (remember them?) in order to topple Gaddafi, destabilize the government, and allow the U.S. to install a puppet regime amenable to economic imperialism? The answer would not be politically expedient.

What was the role of Ambassador Stevens in supplying arms to Syria?

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