Hillary ticks boxes, but can she be trusted?

US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is one tough cookie. I watched every second of her testimony before a grueling eleven-hour-long Congressional hearing on Benghazi in awe of her composure and self-control. Towards the end, she wilted slightly and briefly snapped against one of her Republican ‘interrogators’—but who wouldn’t in the kind of hot seat she had to endure.

Her personality, grasp of issues and commanding demeanour ticks all presidential boxes and no smoking gun as to criminality or dereliction of duty emerged from the session. Overall, the US media acknowledged her triumph and her campaign coffers have since grown exponentially.

No doubt, Clinton has learned lessons from her stint as First Lady and her years as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. However, her vibe doesn’t come across as genuine. Her wide smile was too easily turned on. Her charm somehow too carefully contrived; her answers too rehearsed.

That said anyone who suspected the bi-partisan inquiry into the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the US mission in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 was proven right.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats on the panel appeared interested in the truth. Republicans bared their teeth. Democrats rarely asked a question but sought to denigrate the commission on which they sat as a waste of taxpayers’ money and were solely interested in coming to her defence.

The Democrats persistently harked back to the seven previous probes which had turned-up nothing of interest, but as the Committee Chairman said, those did not have sight of her personal emails and had not sought testimony from then CIA head General Petraeus.

One of those earlier inquiries was conducted by the Accountability Review Board. Clinton as secretary of state had the right to appoint four members of that Board. One of her picks was Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, whom the Committee’s Chairman Representative Trey Gowdy accused of phoning Clinton’s Chief of Staff, saying, “Please don’t send that witness to Congress; they won’t show up well,” adding, “Have you ever heard of a judge calling the D.A. or the defence attorney to say, ‘Don’t, don’t call that witness’?”

However, the marathon session wasn’t a complete waste of time. We learned that although Clinton has always contended that Stevens was a close friend, he didn’t have her personal telephone numbers or email—and, moreover, she was unable to recall whether she had spoken to him since his Libyan appointment.

That does sound odd given her own admission that the Libyan interim government was in no position to protect the mission and up until his death the facility had been threatened by 18 security breaches, including two that were judged serious.

Separate CIA annex

She further maintained that none of the hundreds of requests for increased security received from the ambassador had ever reached her desk on the grounds that the responsibility for approving such requests was the province of security experts answering to the State Department. Some of those requests were granted; most were not due to budget restrictions.

Since she was aware of the dangers her “friend” Stevens and the others faced in a country where armed militias ruled, why didn’t it occur to her to pick up the phone to ask what her people needed?

We learned, too, that the CIA had a separate annex within the mission. She was asked whether within that annex were weapons for Libyan rebels. She answered “Not to my knowledge.” When asked whether there were weapons destined for Syrian rebels, she answered a hesitant ‘No.’ Her certainty as to one aspect and her uncertainty to the other gives the impression that she knew more than she cares to admit. She was caught out concerning one point, which few have picked-up on. She said that she had instructed an armed team from Tripoli to fly to Benghazi immediately following the incident when it was unsure that Stevens had survived or had been killed. She half-heartedly conceded she had misspoken when her questioner pointed out that the Tripoli team had flown there by helicopter off their own bat hoping to rescue their colleagues.

Confusion still exists over discrepancies between her emails to her family members and phone calls to the Libyan and Egyptian prime ministers in the aftermath as to what caused the onslaught on the mission. In a public tweet, she gave the impression that an anti-American demonstration in response to the release of the anti-Islamic movie The Innocence of Islam was to blame.

Yet she didn’t hesitate to reveal to her family and the two prime ministers that it was a terrorist attack launched by Ansar Al Sharia that initially claimed responsibility. A Republican senator accused her of deliberately hiding the terrorist connection at a time when the administration was crowing over its part in liberating Libya from the “evil dictator” Muammar Gaddafi before an upcoming presidential election.

Naturally, Clinton’s private email server, for which she has apologised, was again dredged up, but little was said about the thousands of work-related emails her lawyers had trawled to be handed-over, except those that painted the lady as someone with overvaulting ambition for political glory even at Obama’s expense.

Ultimately, what went down on the fateful day in Benghazi is likely to remain a mystery forever, but with Clinton’s surging poll numbers and an even fatter war chest, barring unforeseen scandals, the Clintons’ return to their old home on Pennsylvania Avenue is within their grasp.

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.