Hillary Clinton's serial fiascoes as Secretary of State

Frank Gafney:

Hillary Clinton is coming under scrutiny for serial fiascoes that occurred while she was Secretary of State. It’s about time.

These are among the decisions that Hillary made, or at least presided over, that are emerging as real liabilities – for the country, as well as for her future presidential prospects:

• Mrs. Clinton refused to designate Nigeria’s Boko Haram as a terrorist group when various other government agencies urged to do so, long before it grabbed international headlines by kidnapping hundreds of schoolgirls.
• She personally engineered the opening of formal relations with the Muslim Brotherhood before it came to power in Egypt. The latter was a strategic setback of the first order for U.S. interests, one that was facilitated by the Obama administration’s recognition and empowering of this jihadist group and by its undermining of our ally, Hosni Mubarak.
• The Clinton State Department insisted that nothing be done to challenge the narrative that everything was going swimmingly in Libya after its “liberation” by jihadists backed by U.S.-enabled NATO air strikes. This folly, in turn, led to State’s refusal at the highest levels to authorize requested security upgrades for our special mission compound and CIA facility in Benghazi.
• Hillary Clinton co-founded the so-called “Istanbul Process,” a multi-meeting “dialogue” with the European Union and the Islamists’ international front, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). This initiative has been used to advance the OIC’s agenda of curbing free speech in America and elsewhere in the West that might “offend” Muslims – something Mrs. Clinton said she would use “old-fashioned techniques of peer-pressure and shaming” to ensure.
• Such techniques, and worse, were evident in September 2012 when then-Secretary of State Clinton lied that a video that gave such offense was responsible for the attacks on U.S. missions and personnel in Egypt and Benghazi. She actually achieved her stated goal to have the person who made the almost-entirely-unseen internet film, “Innocence of Muslims,” arrested and prosecuted. In fact, to this day, that filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is the only individual punished in connection with the Benghazi attacks.

Such policy malpractice – or outright malfeasance – has already cost four Americans their lives and may lead to the loss of many more.

For that reason, the new House Select Committee on Benghazi must focus on the nature and consequences of Hillary Clinton’s conduct with respect to the policies that led up to the attacks of September 11, 2012; what transpired that evening; and the cover-up that followed. To really get to the bottom of these matters, however, Chairman Trey Gowdy and his colleagues must also examine with care the role played by a top Clinton lieutenant who has, to date, been almost completely unmentioned in the reporting, leaking, and congressional inquiries about Benghazigate: Huma Abedin.
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I am not sure they will get that deeply into examining her record, but I suspect Republican candidates for President will bring it up if she runs.   It is worth noting that the problems with Libya go well beyond what happened in Benghazi.  The leading from behind policy resulted in arming jihadist all across Africa from Boko Harem to Egypt as well as arming fighters in Syria.  It was a mistake of grand proportions that still reverberates and has resulted in the deaths of hundreds beyond the Americans who have lost their lives.