Getting to the Bottom of Benghazi

On Wednesday, Representative Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee convened the ninth round of hearings on the lethal September 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a number of iterations made necessary by the administration’s manifold efforts to stall, stymie, and deflect the investigation. Testifying were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for operations, counterterrorism bureau; Eric Nordstrom, former State Department regional security officer for Libya; and Gregory Hicks, a foreign-service officer and former deputy chief of mission in Libya, who, after Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death that night, became America’s senior diplomat in the country. Rightly identified as “whistleblowers,” the three men came forward at considerable professional risk because, as a choked-up Nordstrom testified in his opening remarks, “it matters” that we find out what happened before, during, and after the attacks that left four Americans dead.