What Difference, at this Point, Does It Make? A Lot

Hillary Clinton testifies before the Benghazi committee tomorrow, and John Bolton explains why, at this point, it makes a difference. There will likely not be a Perry Mason-style moment during Mrs. Clinton's testimony or a repeat of her famous outburst at her previous Benghazi appearance:

Nonetheless, the committee’s work is utterly serious, its preparations extensive (and extensively stonewalled by Mrs. Clinton’s team) and its mission vital to our fight against still-metastasizing Islamist terrorism. Much is at stake. The hearing’s focus must be on the key policy and leadership implications of the mistakes made before, during and after the murders of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11 three years ago.

Do you realize that we still don't know what Hillary Clinton was doing while the Benghazi terror attack was unfolding? Did she delegate or was she in contact with her office the whole time? What decisions were made–and by whom? Ditto President Obama, but he is not being questioned tomorrow before a congressional hearing that could ask him these questions.

Let us hope that the GOP members of the committee will try to get answers rather than camera time for themselves.  Questions that elicit information, not statements of moral indignation by GOP House members,  are what is needed.  The Democrats will try to protect their presidential hopeful. That's a given. What else is new?

A former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Bolton points out some of what we still need to know:

Given her self-proclaimed central role in deposing dictator Moammar Gadhafi, why was Mrs. Clinton so detached from the deteriorating situation in Libya? She has so far dodged the issue, pawning off such “technical” matters on her subordinates. Working in the State Department in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I saw firsthand how Secretary of State James Baker dived into every detail of safeguarding U.S. diplomats stranded in Kuwait City. If earlier secretaries of state have been perfectly prepared to get their fingernails dirty in operational details when those under their responsibility were threatened, why wasn’t Mrs. Clinton?  

. . .

As the crisis unfolded that day in Benghazi, with violence also erupting in Tunis, Cairo and potentially elsewhere, Mrs. Clinton disappeared. Instead of staying at her desk, “on the bridge” of the State Department’s seventh floor, Mrs. Clinton literally left the building. Why?

Imagine the effect on morale when, with colleagues in Libya in mortal peril, State Department personnel learned that their leader had gone home for the evening. There is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton or President Obama did anything other than passively monitor events. Instead, Mrs. Clinton should have been continuously demanding assistance for her beleaguered diplomats: hectoring, pleading, whatever it took.

Mrs. Clinton protests that she was still fully connected from home. But she reportedly spoke exactly once, at 10 p.m., with the president when he called her to discuss the State Department news release that first floated the fantasy that Muslim outrage over a blasphemous video about Muhammad sparked the attack. Incredibly, Mrs. Clinton never spoke at all to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta or Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey, according to their congressional testimony.

Was Mrs. Clinton using her private email server while her State Department desk stood vacant? If so, where are those emails? With Americans in peril across the Middle East, were others listening to Mrs. Clinton communicating from home rather than from fully secure facilities at the State Department?

We need to know who concocted the anti-Mohammad video explanation for the attack and why Mrs. Clinton used that explanation, surely highly suspect by then, if not from the start, in talking to the parents of a Benghazi casualty when the coffins arrived.

And what about our response? The one person arrested by the U.S. for the attack is in a U.S. federal jail in Virginia. Why did we not respond vigorously?

This is no response at all, as terrorists, their state sponsors and America’s international adversaries all understand. The American people have a right to know the following: What was Mrs. Clinton’s role in formulating the U.S. response to the Benghazi attack? Did she ever advocate retaliation for the coldblooded killing of four Americans?

Policy, leadership and management failures at the administration’s highest levels brought us both Benghazi and the continuing fecklessness of, in effect, granting impunity to all but one of the terrorist attackers who killed American citizens, including a U.S. ambassador. Politics has no place in the committee hearing on Thursday, save for a question that many Americans may be asking: Is this how we want our country led?

Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Benghazi committee, is a seasoned prosecutor. Let's hope he has prepared his committee with an eye to getting information. Speechify later, guys.