Hank: Good morning, John. In 2012, on September 11th, a group of militants
attacked the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Now, three years later, if you live in America,
the word "Benghazi" is either one of those words that gets you real riled up, or it's
a word that if you hear it, you're gotta get ready to run away from whatever nearby person
is about to get real riled up. It's one of those topics that you either know
a whole lot about or you know pretty much nothing about. And the trouble is, learning about Benghazi
is, no matter what, going to expose you to a great deal of partisan anger. Figuring out why this is, what actually happened,
what it means, and hopefully, removing it a little bit from that crazy, angry partisan
grandstanding is what we're gonna try to do in the next seven minutes. Let's start out with Benghazi, which despite
the fact that every American has heard of it as, at minimum, a site of a tragedy, at
maximum, a site of a massive conspiracy, is actually a city in Libya. It's big. It's about 600,000 people, roughly the size
of Denver, Colorado. In 2009, a pro-democracy protest broke out
in Benghazi, which then spread across the entire country, and eventually resulted in
the first Libyan Civil War. Revolutions are very exciting. They promise the possibility of rapid change
for good, and that's exactly what we were all hoping for after Muammar Qaddafi, generally
accepted to be a pretty bad dude, was killed and his government toppled. Unfortunately, the usual immediate outcome
of a revolution is a power vacuum, followed by groups of people who want very badly to
control the future of their country with guns. There was a great deal of hope that Libya,
and especially Benghazi, where the protests first began, would find a quick path to stability,
and depending on who you ask, the Obama Administration was either too optimistic about this or criminally
negligent in pretending that it was all okay when it really wasn't and they just wanted
to pretend it was for political reasons. Let's get this straight: in this story, there
will be two sides to absolutely everything, and both of those sides want very badly to
control the future of their country. You know, with incessant yammering on cable
news and 85 different congressional committees, but thankfully without guns! Now, there isn't much controversy about what
actually happened on September 11th, 2012. A group of armed militants easily breached
the Consulate, security experts attempted to gather all of the personnel and move them
to the safety of a nearby CIA compound that was much more easily defensible. Two people, Ambassador Chris Stevens and diplomat
Sean Smith, were in a safe room. After the compound was lit on fire, both of
them died of smoke inhalation. The rest of the Consulate staff was taken
to the CIA compound, which was then later attacked as well. There, two security officers, both former
Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were killed by mortar fire. It was believed that Ambassador Stevens might
still be alive; his body wasn't found at the consulate, but it turned out that a group
of Libyans had tried to rescue him, pulled him out of the building, and taken him to
a nearby hospital where doctors were unable to resuscitate him. Some people saw pictures of the local Libyans
trying to help Ambassador Stevens and put text on those images saying that he was being
attacked or tortured by those Libyans, just to give you an idea of the kind of constant
and deep misinformation we're dealing with here. So this was an awful thing that happened. It was a terrorist attack, it was a tragedy,
and what you think about it depends largely on how you feel about President Obama and
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was, at the time, head of the State Department. People predisposed to distrusting the Democratic
leadership tend to believe that they made grave mistakes and were criminally negligent
and have so far successfully covered up their criminal negligence, while people who find
it easier to trust Clinton and Obama tend to accept the State Department's version of
events. And that version indeed says that grave mistakes
were made in not preparing the Consulate for the instability of the situation and that
they could have been more responsive and that they were not. But it doesn't go any deeper than that, and
it doesn't go any further up the food chain than that. Those who distrust the Democratic leadership
say that Clinton and Obama had a vested interest in down-playing the severity of the attack,
and yeah, maybe they did. Nobody wants to have a terrorist attack on
their record. This viewpoint is upheld by the fact that
immediately after the attack, the CIA indicated and the Administration repeated that the attack
was just sort of a natural outgrowth of protests that were happening because of an anti-Islam
film, when in fact it was definitely a planned and organized terrorist attack. This was all very close to the 2012 election. Obama didn't want to be talking about how
he'd let a terrorist attack happen and it was weeks before he even used the word "terrorist". But downplaying a crisis after it's happened
is, at least to me, very far away from criminal negligence. Other accusations like the then-Secretary
Clinton called off troops that could have helped have been proved over and over again
to just be made up. But the State Department did make mistakes. They could have and should have done more
to protect the Consulate, but those shortcomings have been acknowledged and indeed they were
acknowledged in the State Department's own internal report. Since then there have been seven more investigations
that have found nothing new. At a certain point, it very clearly went beyond
simple partisan distrust and a desire to get to whatever truth is down there and morphed
into an actual active taxpayer-funded campaign against the presumptive Democratic nominee
for President. Of course, left-wing pundits have been saying
this the whole time, but right-wing pundits would then say, "No, we're just trying to
get to the bottom of it" and left-wing pundits would be like, "You're at the bottom, there's
nothing there." And they would just yell at each other, and
that's how it went for a pretty long time. But then, somewhat disturbingly, one of the
staunchest proponents for Benghazi investigations came forward on national TV and said this: Kevin McCarthy: Everybody thought Hillary
Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. What are her numbers today? Hank: Now a lot of people on both sides were
like "Yeah, of course. Of course this is what this is about, it IS
partisan. It IS an opportunity for one party to gain
advantage over the other." But coming out and proudly saying on national
TV that you're running a series of taxpayer funded investigations to advance your political
party, that's bad. That's wrong. I mean it's wrong to do it in the first place
but, like, you can't say it, and indeed that guy who was probably going to become Speaker
of the House, is no longer going to become Speaker of the House, 'cause that was dumb. Today in America, the controversy surrounding
the Benghazi attack has become so entrenched that there are a lot of people whose minds
will never be changed, a lot of people who will believe forever that Obama and Clinton
were criminally negligent, and a lot of people who will believe forever that it was never
anything more than an opportunity for the Republicans to attack the Democrats. Now some people absolutely do believe that
there's a prize at the bottom of this Cracker Jack box, that the President and Hillary Clinton
are evil and that this is the best chance they have of uncovering that evil. But eight congressional investigations later,
that's six more than we had after September 11th 2001, it's seeming pretty unlikely that
we're gonna find out anything, and it's seeming more likely that this was a series of unfortunate
circumstances and significant, but not criminal, mistakes. For most people in politics, though, Benghazi
is now just a talking point. It's a way to raise money from increasingly
polarized constituencies and also a way to polarize those constituencies more. But even as it occasionally takes over U.S.
politics, the attack on the Consulate was a much bigger deal for Libya. After the attack, aid organizations, investors,
business people, and businesses all left the city crushing the economy. Other armies and militias saw the attack on
the consulate as brazen and inexcusable and they took up arms and fighting increased. This led to the eventual second Libyan Civil
War which began in 2014. Benghazi now has large areas that are completely
in ruins, and the future of the city, and the future of Libya is fearfully in question. So that is what's happening in actual Benghazi. As we here in America continue to talk about
Benghazi as if it's just a twelve hour period of time in 2012 that was, of course, tragic
but ultimately part of a much larger and longer series of tragedies. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Since it's only two o'clock in the morning
and I just finished editing this video, I figured I would talk a little more. We've done other videos like this in the past. If you want to check those out I'll put a
link to a playlist. We've been doing it pretty much since the
beginning of Vlogbrothers, and I like that we get to do videos like this, especially
because we get to go past the time limit. But it's hard and it's stressful and it's
two o'clock in the morning, and I still have to edit this bit, and I don't, I haven't found
many examples of people who are trying to do this. It seems a little bit like you're not going
to get a ton of views if you're not all about outrage and you're not all about what the
other side is doing wrong and how evil they are, and so there aren't a lot of people doing
it. If I saw someone doing it, I would either
hire them or I would just talk about them all the time. The question is am I, is it just my own bias
that makes me think that all these other people are biased? I don't think it is, mostly because the way
to talk about it is from a little bit outside of the political system, and nobody seems
interested in doing that because that detachment doesn't get people that interested. But if you know of people who are writing
about complicated issues in a way that gives context, is a more full picture of something
and doesn't, you know, very particularly have a goal of promoting the ideology or the agenda
of one party or another, let me know in the comments. I'd love to read that, 'cause it would be
nice just to help me research these, 'cause it's really not fun to read two angry positions
and then try and figure out which parts of their anger are real and which parts are just
them being angry, which is the majority of it. Another nice thing about this being an educational
video, is I just can keep talking, but I'm gonna stop now. Thank you for watching and I hope that it
was useful. And not awful.
I really appreciate that Hank and John- moreso Hank recently, I suppose- have been and are willing to take such principled stances.
There's this video, which tries to cut through partisan rhetoric (and I think mostly succeeds) and give as fair a take on Benghazi as possible-- acknowledging the administration's mistakes and the possible political maneuvering done as Obama tried to handle the crisis while also trying to win an election, while also calling out the GOP's endless investigation as taxpayer-funded gamesmanship. This stance shouldn't be controversial, but it absolutely will be (as the comments are already showing).
This, of course, coming on the heels of a very public gesture in offering Feminist Frequency merch on DFTBA.com.
On the one hand, I worry about both Hank and John as they're opening themselves up to some of the most unsavory characters on the internet (Benghazi Truthers, GamerGate). John in particular, given the death threats he's had to deal with in recent years. On the other hand, their courage in standing up for their convictions makes me so, so proud to be a Nerdfighter.
Everyone here is talking about American views on Benghazi, but I feel like the most important part of the video came right at the end, that while Americans got into the politics of that tiny (yet tragic) event, the tragedy didn't end for Benghazi on that night, it got worse and worse and became a second civil war.
I feel like that's a really important thing to realize, while Americans were rightfully outraged and pushing paper to uncover something or accusing everyone of using the event every which way for political gain, people still living in Benghazi were preparing and descending into something far more destructive.
The attack on the consulate didn't take away the homes of anyone in the United States, it tragically cost several lives, but nowhere near the amount of lives it has cost Libya. And the war is still going, it hasn't ended, but everyone will talk about what has happened because the event they care about ended even though it's embedded inseparably in the events that are still going on today.
But yeah, let's all talk about what Obama and Clinton were up to.
An (unfinished) list of things I read that give context:
1.) The Upshot
2.) FiveThirtyEight
3.) The Incidental Economist
4.) Wikipedia...
I feel a bit sad when I see Hank or John try and work through a politically charged issue like this. I’m not American or life in America, and therefore I don’t have much interest in the way tragedies like the Libyan civil wars impact American politics. But watching Hank and John, and indeed any American, that is just tired of all the politics and inflammatory rhetoric, I feel like this: It’s like America is this family that lives down the street from me. They have this really nice house filled with pictures and mementos from their honeymoon and from the time they moved in. And I really like playing with their kids. They’re super nice and always have the coolest toys. Also, the parents have done a lot of things to improve the neighborhood since they moved in. But lately, all you see the parents do is argue with each other and fight in public. And at night you hear them shouting at each other and the breaking of glassware. So now, whenever you see their kids, they have this sad and tired look in their eyes. And that’s how it feels looking at Hank and John in videos like this.
This is an excellent video and I'm really glad Hank made it.
I also think the stuff he talks about at the end is important - if I could be part of like, a dream project, it would be some sort of vlogbrothers-esque group of PS/hist/general social sciences nerds making videos like this one. It's something we need more of but don't have much of - pretty much everything is either the stuff Hank doesn't like, or simplified/inaccurate to the point of being misleading/very.... inconsistant in terms of quality (a lot of pop-but-semi-technical-news-ish sites that get shared commonly on FB)
I fucking love how much he painstakingly tried to be unbiased, and even at the end, posed a question i pose myself.
Where can we find the full story on hot topics, that aren't biased and mislesd by omitting or heavily focusing a few facts in a way that is advantageous to the personal viewpoints of the writer.
My anseer is to just use multiple established newspapers websites and use reddit, however that requires an effort from me to gather information and go bullshit detecting on it. Which i have to admit I'm too lazy to do a lot of times.
However this video stands in contrast to John's migrant crisis video, which infuriated me. Not that it was offensive (though quite condescending and mischaractarising and omitting of key facts), it was that the video was so heavily biased towards 1 interpretation and yet he called it an "explained" video, as if it was supposed to give an unbiased contextual explanation like Hanks recent video.