Is the Whole Benghazi Thing Finally Over?

On September 11, 2012, al-Qaeda-linked militants in Libya stormed a United States diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, killing US Ambassador Chris Stevens and State Department staffer Sean Smith, along with CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Their deaths shocked the American public, rattled the US foreign service, and embarrassed US security officials and antiterror hawks.

In the years following, there were seven total investigations by Hillary Clinton's count including an inquiry by a State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) convened by Clinton herself. The board's recommendations, including millions of dollars in safety improvements at US diplomatic outposts, were implemented in 2013. But while most of the investigations found structural issues with the way the State Department handles diplomatic security, none found evidence of intentional wrongdoing—and concluded that even if the recommended defenses had been deployed, they still wouldn't have arrived in time to rescue the four Americans who died.

Unconvinced by the conclusions of the other Benghazi investigations, though, House Republicans launched their own inquiry in 2014, led by South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy, the head of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. That investigation stretched out for over two years, attempting to discern what the US government knew in advance about the attack, what could have done to prevent or mitigate the bloodshed, and which Obama administration officials, if any, were to blame.

The spotlight primarily fell on Hillary Clinton, who was Obama's secretary of state at the time of the attack, and who, as the investigation unfolded, announced she was running for president. The committee conducted interviews with 107 witnesses—including a famously grueling 11-hour interrogation of Clinton herself, demanding that the State Department and its then-leader answer for the mismanaged security apparatus that they claimed led to unnecessary American deaths.

On Tuesday, the committee finally released its final 800-page report on the attacks. It faults the Obama administration, and specifically the State Department, for failing to protect American lives. But while the report, like previous Benghazi investigations, spotlights deeply troubling inadequacies at the State Department, most of those revelations aren't new. Significantly, the House Committee did find fault with the role of former Clinton staffer Cheryl Mills for working supposed bias in favor of her boss into the ARB's findings. But there's not much else—if anything—in terms of new evidence of wrongdoing.

For the moment at least, the report seems unlikely to do much harm to Clinton's presidential campaign.

So to find out if the whole Benghazi thing is finally about to lose what little news momentum it had left, we got in touch with Fred Burton, chief security officer at the Texas-based military intelligence firm Stratfor and author of the book Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: In compiling this report, did the House Benghazi Committee do its job well?
Fred Burton: I think that unfortunately, the events on 9/11 of 2012 have turned so political that it's hard to separate fact from fiction. I do applaud the Benghazi committee for doing things that, I think, were over and above what the State Department Accountability Review Board could do. They were very successful in hunting down individuals, and first-person witnesses that for whatever reason, the ARB did not get a chance to interview.

Did the report have any new insights about the terror-plot narrative as opposed to the sudden-anger-from-an-offensive-movie narrative?
[It seems] to me, that the agents on the ground the night this unfolded knew this was a terrorist attack from the get-go. [I found] it very fascinating that they had in their report that four hours prior to the attack, the Transitional National Council there in Libya, seemed to have threat info [about] the pending attack, and was trying to reach out to some mysterious Libyan intelligence service. Allegedly they could never reach them.

What does that mean?
The threat information had surfaced four hours prior [saying] perhaps there was a plan in the works. I find that very interesting now. In fairness, it was uncorroborated by the CIA, [but when assembling a narrative] that would be my first window of time to indicate, this is probably when the various terrorist groups started to get together to carry out this mission.

If it's uncorroborated, doesn't it just raise more questions?
For me, it's "What is the source of that information?" If it is a human source, one would argue that person was either part of or close to the planners.

Does any new information in the report come from Clinton's recently-released emails? Is there anything about whether Clinton knew the attack wasn't caused an anti-Muslim video?
In one chapter of the report they have former Secretary Clinton's email to her daughter, Chelsea, saying that this was a terrorist attack carried out by al-Qaeda. [Then] right below it, you have comments to the Prime Minister of Egypt, on the 12th, saying that this has nothing to do with the film, that this was a terrorist attack.

House Democrats issued their own report on Benghazi Monday, which accuses Republicans of buying into conspiracies around the attack. Did we learn anything from that report?
I think both reports fill in gaps, and I think the reader needs to reach their own conclusion as to what more could have been done, if anything. In reality, Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were overcome by smoke inhalation early on, and there was probably very little that could have been done to help them short of smoke hoods and sprinkler systems and adequate fire suppression, but it wasn't there.

You're a security specialist. What do you think are the takeaways from this whole incident?
Smoke hoods would certainly help. Those are hoods you put over your head to help you get out of a smoke-filled environment. Smoke hoods in the safe haven of the ambassador's villa probably would have bought the agents, Chris Stevens, and Sean Smith enough time to survive the initial 15 minutes, until the CIA response team would have gotten there. Smoke hoods help.

Does the State Department know about those measures?
What happens with the State Department historically [is that] the agents are buried in a flow chart that reports up to the "management cone" inside the State Department. Therefore, they never get to articulate these kinds of issues. And that still hasn't been fixed.

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