Benghazi: Episode 1 - The Dictator

Fiasco

This episode of Fiasco explores the roots of the 2012 Benghazi attack by examining Libya's history under dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the U.S.

Key takeaways

• The U.S. had normalized relations with Gaddafi in the early 2000s, lifting sanctions and opening an embassy in Tripoli.
• Benghazi became a focal point of resistance due to a prison massacre that killed hundreds of political prisoners under Gaddafi's regime.

Main topics

• Muammar Gaddafi's rule in Libya
• U.S.-Libya diplomatic reconciliation under Bush

Notable quotes

We read that you are mad. You know that those things have been printed.

Muammar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight.

Conclusion

To fully grasp the significance of the Benghazi attack, one must look beyond the

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 7 (0:02) Guaranteed human. In Speaker 5 (0:04) February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Speaker 4 (0:15) Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Speaker 5 (0:24) Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (0:41) Pushkin. Speaker 5 (0:45) Hey, Leon here. Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the entire season of Fiasco Benghazi right now, ad-free, by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcast show page or visit pushkin.fm slash plus. Now, on to the show. Speaker 5 (1:12) On the night of September 11, 2012, four Americans were killed in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea. Speaker 6 (1:21) What potentially happened in Libya, in the city of Benghazi, not only did the attackers storm the building in Benghazi... The Speaker 5 (1:29) attack began when a group of armed assailants broke into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. It ended nearly eight hours later with the bombing of a secret CIA base nearby. First Speaker 6 (1:40) they attacked it with RPG rifles, then they opened fire on it with machine guns. Speaker 5 (1:45) Among the victims was the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. Speaker 6 (1:49) And again, his name is John Christopher Stevens, and he was born in Northern California in 1960. Speaker 5 (1:54) Stevens had been posted in Libya on and off for the better part of five years. On the night of the attack, He died of smoke inhalation after the assailants set fire to the villa where he was hiding from them. Afterwards, it seemed like all anyone in the United States wanted to talk about was whose fault it was. The Speaker 6 (2:13) Obama administration resisting responsibility. There's Speaker 2 (2:16) a lot of dispute when the administration knew how dangerous the situation was in Benghazi. Who Speaker 5 (2:22) had let it happen? Who had failed to stop it once it started? whose lack of vigilance had allowed the attackers to do as much damage as they did. Speaker 6 (2:31) Should they have had more advanced warning? Should they have set more security? A Speaker 5 (2:34) question that usually got skipped over, as if the answer were self-evident, was what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi to begin with. All anyone seemed interested in was that the American mission in Libya had failed, not what the mission had actually been. Speaker 6 (2:52) My name is Chris Stevens and I'm excited to continue the great work we've started building a solid partnership between the United States and Libya to help you, the Libyan people, achieve your goals. Speaker 5 (3:10) For more than 40 years, Libya had been ruled by a violent and eccentric dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. We Speaker 1 (3:17) read that you are mad. Speaker 5 (3:19) You Speaker 1 (3:20) know that those things have been printed. Speaker 5 (3:22) Gaddafi had long been regarded in the West as an unparalleled menace. Before bin Laden, Gaddafi was the face of international terrorism. Speaker 6 (3:30) He's been called the world's number one terrorist, a madman who exports terrorism around the world. Speaker 5 (3:36) Ronald Reagan once memorably called Gaddafi the mad dog of the Middle East. What I had forgotten, or never really absorbed in the first place, was that during the early 2000s, under the Bush administration, the United States had reconciled with Gaddafi. We lifted sanctions. We established diplomatic relations. We even accepted his help in pursuing suspected terrorists. The Speaker 6 (4:00) United States may have a new ally in the war on terror. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi says... Speaker 5 (4:05) American oil companies were doing business with Libya for the first time in decades. In Tripoli, Libya's capital city, the State Department opened a new American embassy. As you'll hear, that was why Chris Stevens first came to Libya back in 2007. Speaker 6 (4:22) Muammar Gaddafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and dismantled its nuclear Speaker 5 (4:29) weapons. Back then, I wasn't paying much attention to international news. And I certainly wasn't paying attention to Libya. I was just graduating from college in 2007. I had heard of Gaddafi, but that was about it. I was only slightly more tuned in in 2011, when the Arab Spring swept into Libya and forced Gaddafi out of power as part of a U.S.-backed revolution. Speaker 6 (4:51) The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in mid-February, and anti-regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert country of six million people. But Speaker 5 (4:59) even then, I just wasn't that invested or informed. So when I saw reports in September of 2012 about an attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, I had no context for it. To be honest, I didn't even really think of Benghazi as a place. Instead, I experienced it as an American political scandal. I associated the word Benghazi with a drawn-out controversy that had spawned endless conspiracy theories and captivated the Republican Party. Speaker 6 (5:27) Benghazi gate. A political cover-up of some kind. The regime keeps lying about it. I Speaker 4 (5:31) think it could be as bad as Watergate, but nobody died in Watergate. The Speaker 6 (5:34) White House consigned those people to death. We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. You put two and two together. Speaker 5 (5:41) I wanted to make this podcast because I had a strong suspicion that I was missing something. That by not knowing what really happened in Benghazi, or who it had happened to, I was checked out on something really important. Because in retrospect, the Benghazi attack looks incredibly consequential. For Libya, certainly, but also for the United States. Even though the scandal has a reputation, especially among liberals, as a nuisance and a distraction, it really changed history. Among other things, it led directly to Hillary Clinton's email scandal. So if you're someone who thinks Clinton's emails cost her the 2016 election, you could make the case that Benghazi took down a presidency no less than Watergate did. Speaker 5 (6:27) What I've realized after dozens of interviews with people who watched the Benghazi story unfold from up close is that there are very specific reasons why the scandal had such longevity. Together, they tell a story about political warfare in America, how it was waged in the pre-Trump era through the media and the justice system and Congress, and how it laid the groundwork for the politics we live with today. But Benghazi is not just an American story. It's also about America's place in the world and how, after eight years of George W. Bush and the War on Terror, the Obama administration set out to change the country's image abroad. Speaker 5 (7:08) At the height of the scandal, a lot of people were asking, sometimes earnestly, often performatively, why did Ambassador Chris Stevens die that night in Benghazi? And what I've learned is there is an answer to that question. But all the noise around the scandal made it incredibly hard to see it clearly in real time. It turns out, to understand the truth about Benghazi, you have to understand what America was trying to achieve there. You have to know what was supposed to happen in Benghazi in a perfect world instead of what did. Speaker 5 (7:45) I'm Leon Nafok. From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. Speaker 6 (7:52) Obama left four Americans to die in Benghazi. There is a certain self-fulfilling prophecy to outrage. Wild conspiracy theories. Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong. It was Speaker 5 (8:03) a fucking mess. It was really hard Speaker 7 (8:05) to figure out what was going on. Speaker 8 (8:06) They're shooting through the door. I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow the locks, I'm going to start shooting. And when I die, I want you to keep on fighting. Speaker 3 (8:15) You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't know what's Speaker 5 (8:20) going on in Benghazi. Speaker 6 (8:21) Muammar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight. Speaker 5 (8:25) Episode 1, The Dictator. In which Muammar Gaddafi and the United States, after decades of hostility, discover they have a common enemy. We'll be right back. Speaker 5 (8:42) In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Speaker 4 (8:53) Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Speaker 5 (9:02) Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (9:15) Hussein El Shafi was 20 years old when he was arrested in 1989 for criticizing Muammar Gaddafi. Speaker 2 (9:22) I was in the fourth semester, like a second year at that time. And they just knocked on my door. They put my hands in handcuffs. Speaker 5 (9:31) El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a local university. Speaker 2 (9:39) They took me to one of those, they call it like Muarabba Emni, which means the security district for the area. Speaker 5 (9:46) El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Gaddafi's rambling manifesto. He has compiled his Speaker 6 (9:55) thinking into a Green Book, a blending of the Koran and Gaddafi's Speaker 5 (9:58) own brooding thoughts. Speaker 2 (10:00) He calls it the third solution for the world, you know. As capitalism is dying and the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world. Speaker 5 (10:13) El Shafi was required to attend the Green Book Forum in order to receive his degree. But he was tired of having to pretend to take Gaddafi seriously as a thinker. And he was tired of the regime having control over his mind. Speaker 2 (10:26) There is no library in none of our Libyan cities. If you want to read, the only books was brought by... Speaker 2 (10:41) And Speaker 5 (10:41) so al-Shafi stood up in front of his classmates and denounced Gaddafi for closing Libya off from the rest of the world. Even the Soviet Union was starting to open up, he said. It was time for Libya to change too. Speaker 5 (10:56) Al-Shafi was arrested at his home a few days later. He was taken, first by bus, then by plane, to Tripoli, about 400 miles west of Benghazi. Al-Shafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey, so when he was led into a prison cell, he didn't know where he was. Speaker 2 (11:14) There are small holes in the walls between cells, so I was able to talk to one of those people. He was before us, and the way we are, he said, you're in a Muslim body, welcome to Muslim. Speaker 5 (11:27) Abu Salim was an infamous detention facility known for housing political prisoners. Speaker 3 (11:32) The dark heart of Gaddafi's oppression, Abu Salim Prison, the name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it. Speaker 5 (11:39) Abu Salim was full of people the Gaddafi regime considered enemies. Historically, opposition to Gaddafi in Libya had been tied up with religion. Although Gaddafi identified as Muslim, many Libyans came to see him as an apostate advancing a secular ideology. These critics included hardline Islamists who belonged to groups like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which supported the violent overthrow of the regime. But there were also people like Hussein al-Shafi, who opposed political violence and were unaffiliated with any