RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just three weeks ago, gloating ISIS terrorists beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach. The Catholic Church proclaimed them “martyrs.” Former Virginia Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, now at Baylor University, called for the creation of a safe haven for Middle East Christians.

And then, the world moved on. The body of yet another beheaded Coptic Christian was found in Libya on Wednesday. But by then the media had turned their gaze elsewhere so the outrage was gone.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the national media are counting on our short memories to allow them to tout her “successes” as Secretary of State as they gild her chariot for a ride to the White House in 2016.

And therein lies reason #1 why Mrs. Clinton will do everything in her power to keep the public from seeing her email — at least, an unsanitized version that would provide the full record of her tenure as Secretary of state.

“We came, we saw, he died.”

Anyone remember that one? That was Hillary Clinton, joking with a reporter just days after visiting Libya on October 18, 2011 when she was told that Qaddafi had just been killed. She immediately burst out into the famous cackle. But since she was not a Republican, Mrs. Clinton did not have to declare, “I am not a witch.”

She learned of Qaddafi’s demise when her aide, Muslim Brotherhood royal Huma Abedin, passed what appeared to be her personal Blackberry to her boss. One can only wonder who sent that message to Ms. Abedin. Was it a government official who used an official email account? Or was it some nebulous “informant” – perhaps the same one who convinced Mrs. Clinton on the night of the Benghazi attacks that a shadowy video they wrongly claimed was made by American right-wingers was at fault, when there was nary a trace of that “information” in the official reporting channels from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the defense attaché in Tripoli, the CIA station chief, the CIA sub-station in Benghazi, or the State Department Operations Center.

Why can I say that? Because we have been told repeatedly that all the official reporting on the night of the Benghazi attacks has already been produced to multiple congressional committees. That’s why Media Matters and the Hillary Media Brigades continue to insist there is no story. It’s all a hoax. Move on.

I believe the question of where the YouTube video-is-the-culprit story originated lies at the core of the Benghazi scandal. I have called it the original “sin,” which led to the original “spin” by Susan Rice and others, including President Obama and of course Mrs. Clinton herself.

What prompted Mrs. Clinton to advance a story she knew was a fiction and to think she could get away with it? What real story was the fiction papering over?

Until now, although the State Department has said repeatedly they have produced every document and communication Congress has requested in a timely manner, we still don’t have any record of why Mrs. Clinton gave the stand down order to the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an inter-agency rapid reaction force, with a substantial special operations component, that was created precisely to respond to the type of emergency that was taking place in Benghazi and is on call 24/7.

We still don’t know what instructions Mrs. Clinton gave her subordinates in preparing the infamous talking points for Susan Rice that blamed the attacks on a YouTube video and claimed preposterously that they were a demonstration gone wild. Nor do we have any inkling of the communications between Mrs. Clinton and her ambassador, Chris Stevens – although Steven’s #2, Gregory Hicks, has testified that they communicated directly. (Indeed, it would have been extraordinary if they had not).

We don’t know if she instructed him to head to Benghazi to circle the wagons with the CIA and the Turkish Consul General, to tamp down the growing scandal over the Entisar, a Libyan fishing boat carrying 400 tons of weapons sent by jihadi groups in Benghazi to the Syrian rebels whose presence in the Turkish port of Iskenderun had attracted the attention of Western reporters.

We should have had answers to all of those questions within three months of the attacks, when the Hillary-appointed Accountability Review Board delivered its “definitive” report.

But as the co-chairmen later testified, they never interviewed Mrs. Clinton during their “definitive” investigation, nor did they cite a single email from Mrs. Clinton. And no one understood enough to call the foul.

What about those pictures of Mrs. Clinton posing with jihadi fighters in Tripoli, who had come to welcome her U.S. Air Force C-17 in October 2011? How many of them have since joined up with al Qaeda or ISIS? How many of them took part in the murder of Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi?

For with our short memories, we forget that Libya was Hillary’s war.

In separate tell-all accounts, former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta agreed that Mrs. Clinton dragged President Obama into this war kicking and screaming. She saw the fight against Qaddafi as a perfect opportunity to illustrate the wisdom of her new national security dogma, Responsibilty To Protect.

The Obama White House eventually bought into it hook, line and sinker, even touting their version of Hillary’s war by saying they had defeated Qaddafi by “leading from behind.”

Where has Hillary’s War left us?

Libya is a disaster. Jihadi militias who took part in the U.S.-backed rebellion against Qaddafi seized control of Tripoli this past summer, turning the international airport into a sand heap, forcing the evacuation of the remaining U.S. diplomats in Tripoli, shutting down much of Libya’s oil production, and driving the elected government into internal exile.

Today, two rival governments continue to jockey for power, while groups who have pledged loyalty to ISIS have taken over much of the eastern part of the country, including Derna and Benghazi.

Hillary’s War not only ended any attempts at mediation between Qaddafi and his opponents, which we have since learned were favored by the U.S. military and had a reasonable chance of success. It also ushered into power a jihadi state that has pledged its support to ISIS with the goals of launching terrorist attacks against the United States and of establishing a world-wide Islamic caliphate. And it sent a terrible message to dictators the United States might try to woo into giving up their weapons of mass destruction willingly, as Qaddafi did.

With successes like these on her account, who knows what failures those secret emails might reveal?