The family of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the 2012 attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, says former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be blamed.
“I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta,” Anne Stevens, the ambassador’s sister and family spokesperson, said in an interview published Tuesday with The New Yorker’s Robin Wright, referring also to President Obama’s former secretary of defense.
“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.”
Instead, Stevens suggested Congress could be to blame for reducing the State Department’s budget.
“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 underbudgeted,” she explained to Wright.
Wright also asked Stevens if she had learned anything from the two new reports by House Republicans and Democrats on the circumstances surrounding the attack.
Stevens said she learned nothing new from the reports because it was already known that the consulate in Benghazi “was not secure.” She also lamented that after the past two years of congressional investigations, her brother’s death has been politicized in Washington.
“Definitely politicized. Every report I read that mentions him specifically has a political bent, an accusatory bent,” Stevens said. “One point that seems to be brought up again and again is the accusation that the attack was a response to the video. I could understand why that conclusion would be made, because it was right after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt.
“But, frankly, it doesn’t matter that that was the thinking, that night, about why the attack occurred,” she said. “It’s irrelevant to bring that up again and again. It is done purely for political reasons.”
