Libyan Government Commemorates September 11 by Refusing to Arrest Benghazi Killers

Daniel Greenfield


This isn’t particularly shocking news as…

1. The Libyan government abandoned its own capital after attacks by Muslim Brotherhood militias. The New York Times article never mentions which Libyan government it’s even talking about. It may be the rump Muslim Brotherhood coup one still in Tripoli.
2. The Libyan government doesn’t really control any of the cities. Militias do. The militias are Islamist and many are allied with our attackers.
3. There was never any serious prospects of arrests. The only way we were going to get them was through the use of armed force. Obama chose not to allow armed force to be used to save diplomats under attack. He certainly wasn’t going to use it to hunt down their killers.

A year after the attacks in Benghazi that killed the United States ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, the Justice Department has indicted suspects. Intelligence officials have a general idea of where they are hiding. And the military has a contingency plan to snatch them if that becomes necessary.
But the fledgling Libyan government, which has little to no control over significant parts of the country, like Benghazi and eastern Libya, has rebuffed the Obama administration’s efforts to arrest the suspects.

That is why you send in the military. Not the FBI.


President Obama promised the day after the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks to bring the killers to justice, and the fact that this has not happened has led Congressional Republicans to renew their criticism of the administration for its handling of the Benghazi episode as officials have made the case that Congress should authorize a military strike against Syria.

“You cannot have an attack on the mission, 12 months later identified a good number of the participants, and have absolutely no consequences for the taking of American lives,” Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.

Can we get one of those “unbelievably small” strikes on Libya?

 Several senior F.B.I. officials and members of the F.B.I. team based in Tripoli, Libya, who have been building the investigation for the past year believe the White House should be pressing harder for arrests. Among the decisions that the new F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, will be confronted with in the coming weeks will be how hard to lobby the White House to exert more pressure on the Libyans.
“Whether he likes it or not, he is going to have to deal with this issue,” said a former senior American official, referring to Mr. Comey. “There’s a huge frustration on the issue among the agents about why nothing has happened to these guys who have killed Americans.”

Or he’ll go on ignoring it.

“The Libyan government has to wrestle with this idea: ‘What would that mean to us if we apprehended some of these people, if we tried them, if we handed them over?’ ” Gen. Carter F. Ham, a former head of the military’s Africa Command, told a conference in Aspen, Colo., in July. “It’s a very, very complex issue.”

No it’s actually very simple.
1. The Libyan government has no enforcement abilities
2. Neither apparently do we