To the editor:
Regarding recent news reports about U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the Benghazi tragedy, our focus should not be on who will be the next Secretary of State; that is not the point. Our focus should instead be squarely on what happened on Sept. 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya and how we can better protect Americans serving overseas to help ensure it doesn’t happen again.
As a leader of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Susan Collins is conducting a bipartisan investigation into the attacks that killed four Americans, including our Ambassador. Sen. Collins is not blaming Susan Rice for what happened in Benghazi or what happened at our embassies in Africa in 1998. What she is doing is trying to figure out if we have learned any lessons from the ‘98 attacks? If we haven’t, shouldn’t we want to?
The 2012 attacks and the ’98 attacks were similar. What went wrong? How do we fix it? No one expects Susan Rice to have all the answers, but she did agree to appear on five different Sunday morning talk shows, five days after the attack, and read the President’s talking points. Ambassador Rice now admits that government officials knew shortly after the attack that this was an act of terrorism, but she never even mentioned it as a possibility on that Sunday morning, instead she intentionally chose to wrongly blame it on a spontaneous outbreak of violence spurred by an anti-Islam video.
This is the problem when governing is confused with politics. From my perspective, Sen. Collins is not playing politics; she’s leading an investigation to get to the bottom of what happened. I commend Sen. Collins for staying focused on finding the truth.
In this important matter of national security, Sen. Collins is doing a good job representing this constituent.
Hayes Gahagan
Castle Hill
