Chris Stevens' Family:
Don't Blame Benghazi on Clinton
By Robin Wright
Don't Blame Benghazi on Clinton
By Robin Wright
Dr. Anne Stevens, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens,
has served as a family spokesperson since his death. She is the chief of
pediatric rheumatology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. We spoke twice in the
past three days, including shortly after the House Select Committee report was
issued. Dr. Stevens recalled that her brother had been fascinated by the Middle
East since childhood, when he dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, with a towel
and a pot atop his head. He served in the Peace Corps, in Morocco, before
joining the Foreign Service, and he served twice in Libya before his final
posting there, as well as in Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. My
interview with Dr. Stevens has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Whom do you fault for the lack of security that resulted
in the death of your brother, in Benghazi?
It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not
sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But
what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to
increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests
for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State
Department is under-budgeted.
I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were
balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And
their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the
resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now.
But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the
risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took
on himself.
What did you learn from the two new reports by House
Republicans and Democrats?
It doesn’t look like anything new. They concluded that the
U.S. compound in Benghazi was not secure. We knew that.
Read on....
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