Hillary Clinton’s State Department Considered Sending Marines to Libya “Sometime in Next 5 Years”

Photo Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Creative Commons

Prior to the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the State Department and the Marines Corps had been discussing deploying Marines to guard the U.S. Embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli “sometime in the next five years,” according to the Marine Corps.

The issue of security at U.S. diplomatic outposts in Libya has been front and center as Congress and others begin to investigate whether or not those facilities were sufficiently protected before the attacks that killed Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The State Department won’t discuss the specifics of its security posture in Libya before the attack, but the Marine Corps has briefed congressional staffers on the issue, for example in a Sept. 13 email obtained by The Cable.

“Typically, when a new embassy is established, it takes time to grow a new [Marine Corps Embassy Security Group] detachment,” wrote Col. Harold Van Opdorp, director of the Marine Senate Liaison office, in the e-mail. “[In conjunction with] the State Department, there is discussion about establishing a detachment in Tripoli sometime in the next five years.”

The State Department did not respond to questions about how high the discussion of deploying Marines to Libya reached, whether that discussion amounted to a recognition that Marines were needed there, or why it might take five years to set it up. A Marine Corps FAST team was deployed to protect the embassy on Sept. 12 after the attack and could stay there indefinitely.

Read more from this story HERE.