Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Introducing Fiasco: Benghazi — The Dictator About this episode Here’s a preview from a podcast we think you’ll enjoy, Fiasco. Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh transports listeners into the reality of America’s most pivotal historical events, bringing life to the forgotten twists and turns of the past while shedding light on the present. In his new season, Leon looks at the 2012 Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead—and the ensuing political storm, which raised questions about America’s role in the world, established a playbook to weaponize attention in the social media age, and ultimately changed the course of U. S. history. Find Fiasco: Benghazi wherever you get podcasts and binge the entire season with a Pushkin+ subscription – sign up on the Fiasco Apple Podcasts show page https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcasts.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ffiasco%2Fid1534780078&data=05%7C02%7Cjosemanuel%40iheartmedia.com%7Ca2e555bd65fc4f8082e308ddea651923%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C638924442128480732%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=gMahgVhT8EeehqbD5K%2FIIKqAYeTdz0sYKWu7g%2BQovSM%3D&reserved=0 or at pushkin.fm/plus https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpushkin.fm%2Fplus&data=05%7C02%7Cjosemanuel%40iheartmedia.com%7Ca2e555bd65fc4f8082e308ddea651923%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C638924442128525105%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=oc2uEeZYNTFqWE70w2I2oIm1paNxlwndbnb2Hd7c0ho%3D&reserved=0.
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Transcript 8,730 words · 30 speakers
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2:07 Speaker 03 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/plus. Now, on to the show.
2:34 Speaker 03 On the night of September 11, 2012, four Americans were killed in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea.
2:43 Speaker 04 What potentially happened in Libya, in the city of Benghazi, not only did the attackers storm the building in Benghazi--
2:51 Speaker 03 The 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.
3:02 Speaker 04 First, they attacked it with RPG rifles. Then they opened fire on it with machine guns.
3:07 Speaker 03 Among the victims was the American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
3:11 Speaker 05 And again, his name is John Christopher Stevens, and he was born in Northern California in 1960.
3:16 Speaker 03 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.
3:29 Speaker 03 Afterwards, it seemed like all anyone in the United States wanted to talk about was whose fault it was.
3:35 Speaker 06 The Obama administration resisting responsibility--
3:38 Speaker 07 There's a lot of dispute when the administration knew how dangerous the situation was in Benghazi--
3:44 Speaker 03 Who 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?
3:52 Speaker 06 Should they have had a more advanced warning? Should they have set more security?
3:56 Speaker 03 A 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.
4:14 Speaker 08 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.
4:32 Speaker 03 From more than 40 years, Libya had been ruled by a violent and eccentric dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
4:39 Speaker 09 We read that you are mad. You know that those things have been printed.
4:44 Speaker 03 Gaddafi had long been regarded in the West as an unparalleled menace. Before Bin Laden, Gaddafi was the face of international terrorism.
4:52 Speaker 06 He's been called the world's number one terrorist, a madman who exports terrorism around the world.
4:58 Speaker 03 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.
5:22 Speaker 06 The United States may have a new ally in the war on terror. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi says-
5:27 Speaker 03 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.
5:43 Speaker 06 Muammar Gaddafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and dismantled its nuclear weapons-
5:52 Speaker 03 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 US-backed revolution.
6:13 Speaker 10 The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in mid-February, and anti-regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert country of 6 million people.
6:21 Speaker 03 But even then, I just wasn't that invested or informed.
6:26 Speaker 11 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.
6:49 Speaker 06 Benghazi Gate. A political cover-up of some kind. The regime keeps lying about it.
6:53 Speaker 12 I think it could be as bad as Watergate, but nobody died in Watergate.
6:56 Speaker 06 The White House can sign those people to death. We kill the ambassador just to cover something up? You put two and two together.
7:03 Speaker 11 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
7:46 Speaker 11 Watergate did. 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, 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.
8:30 Speaker 11 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. I'm Leon Napak. From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco: Benghazi.
9:14 Speaker 11 Obama left four Americans to die in Benghazi.
9:17 Speaker 13 There is a certain self fulfilling prophecy to outrage.
9:20 Speaker 06 Wild conspiracy theories.
9:22 Speaker 13 Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong.
9:25 Speaker 03 It was a fucking mess. It was really hard to figure out what was going on.
9:28 Speaker 14 They're shooting through the door. I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow the locks, I'm gonna start shooting. And when I die, I want you to keep on fighting.
9:37 Speaker 01 You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't know what's going on in Benghazi.
9:43 Speaker 04 Muammar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight.
9:47 Speaker 11 Episode one, 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.
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11:26 Speaker 15 Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
11:39 Speaker 03 Hussein El Shafi was 20 years old when he was arrested in 1989 for criticizing Muammar Gaddafi.
11:47 Speaker 16 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 a handcuff.
11:56 Speaker 03 El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a local university.
12:03 Speaker 16 They took me to one of those. They call it like Muhabbah Emni, which means the security district for the area.
12:11 Speaker 03 El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Gaddafi's rambling manifesto.
12:18 Speaker 06 He has compiled his thinking into a Green Book, a blending of the Quran and Gaddafi's own brooding thoughts.
12:25 Speaker 16 He calls Anazaria Tarita, means the third solution for the world, you know? As a capitalism is dying and the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world.
12:39 Speaker 03 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.
12:51 Speaker 16 There is no library in none of our Libyan cities. If you want to read, the only books was brought by Gaddafi's authority and put on the shelves. No voice above Gaddafi's voice, you know?
13:06 Speaker 03 And so El 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. El 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. El Shafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey, so when he was led into a prison cell, he didn't know where he was.
13:38 Speaker 16 There are small holes in the walls between cells. So I was able to talk to one of those people who was before us, said where we are, he said, "You in Buslim, buddy? Welcome to Buslim."
13:52 Speaker 03 Abu Salim was an infamous detention facility, known for housing political prisoners.
13:57 Speaker 17 The dark heart of Gaddafi's oppression, Abu Salim Prison. The name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it.
14:04 Speaker 03 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 hard-line 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 organization.
14:38 Speaker 16 He claims those are Islamists. But I was, yeah, I was going to the mosque. I was very conservative at that time. But I did not belong to any group, like an armed group or anything like this.
14:53 Speaker 03 Al-Shafi says the Gaddafi regime branded anyone they didn't like a radical Islamist, and that many ordinary devout Muslims like him were swept up in the dragnet.
15:02 Speaker 16 He doesn't say "I'm against Muslim" because he claims too that he is a Muslim. But he claims that his problem with the Islamic parties, that was a pretext, means that he taken as a reason to kill or to demolish his opponents.
15:24 Speaker 03 It's worth saying here that the meaning of the term Islamist depends on who you're talking to. At its most basic, it refers to someone who subscribes to a political ideology based on Islamic principles. And under that umbrella, you can find both avowed hardliners and moderates. The word Islamism was introduced to English back in the 1980s as a less pejorative alternative to Islamic fundamentalism. Some people still use it that way, as a neutral word that imagines Islamism as just another political orientation. Others associate Islamism with violence and intolerance. For them, an Islamist government based on any form of Sharia or Islamic law is inherently undemocratic.
16:10 Speaker 03 At Abu Salim, Hussein al-Shafi was lucky to be classified as a low-risk inmate and kept separate from those suspected of being violent extremists. Still, he was beaten and tortured, and never given any indication of when he would be released. Other former inmates from Abu Salim have reported being attacked by dogs, subjected to deafening nightly broadcasts of Gaddafi's speeches, and prodded with electric cables. When I interviewed al-Shafi, he had to take a break because the phone was hurting his ear. It had been mutilated at Abu Salim.
16:44 Speaker 16 I'll try use this ear, not that ear, because this one cut in the jail.
16:48 Speaker 03 Oh my god.
16:48 Speaker 16 Have, you see my ear?
16:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:50 Speaker 16 Yeah, yeah. It's touching the thing, the ear, you know? Sorry about that.
16:56 Speaker 03 In 1995, about six years into El Shafi's imprisonment, life at Abu Salim became more cruel and more isolating. It happened following a jailbreak, after which inmates were forbidden from going outside and medical care was withheld from those who needed it.
17:13 Speaker 16 Things getting worse and worse and worse. Some people die, some people has cancers. You name it, heart pressure. And some people has like stomach issues. Some of them, they said, "We dying slowly, guys."
17:33 Speaker 03 As conditions worsened, a group of inmates planned to protest. And on June 28, 1996, they overpowered a guard, took his keys, and started letting people out of their cells.
17:46 Speaker 03 In the ensuing chaos, the prison guards reportedly killed seven inmates. Later that day, Gaddafi's intelligence chief arrived at the prison to survey the situation. Before leaving, he promised a delegation of inmates that conditions at Abu Salim would improve and that those who needed medical attention would receive it. Instead, the following morning, the prisoners of Abu Salim, more than 1,000 of them, were marched into the courtyards adjacent to their cell blocks. El Shafi remembers being taken outside and being ordered to lie face down on the ground.
18:22 Speaker 16 They came in the morning. They said, "Okay, room by room." They take them out. They tie their hands and they turn around facing the wall in the yard.
18:34 Speaker 03 El Shafi estimates that there were about 1,300 men lined up in the prison yards when he started to hear shooting.
18:41 Speaker 16 My friend, he's a cardiologist now in Ireland. His name is Sabre. He was holding my hand tight. I said, "No, I said, they scare us, that's all. They're not gonna kill them all. They wanna scare us. They try to teach us a lesson, you know." He said, "No, no. Pray for our friends. Their souls raising up the gun."
19:01 Speaker 03 El Shafi and his friend, whom I also interviewed, didn't know if they were next. But from the sound of the gunfire, they could tell the guards were moving from one section of the prison to another.
19:15 Speaker 16 The shootings continued for at least three and a half hours.
19:23 Speaker 16 The last shots was individual, like, they finishing up, you know?
19:29 Speaker 03 El Shafi thinks he and the other men in his cell block were spared because of their low-risk classification. He says there were only about 300 survivors. After the shooting ended, prison guards enlisted some of them to help clean the watches and rings they were taking off the bodies.
19:47 Speaker 16 And they have blood everywhere on them. And I said, "Oh, my gosh, they're stealing their rings and their watches. Oh, my gosh."
19:57 Speaker 03 For years, the massacre at Abu Salim was kept secret from the world. Even in Libya, it was nothing more than a rumor.
20:06 Speaker 16 No one knows nothing. All what they know, people heard shooting. And they heard sirens that night. And some of them, they said, "They kill him." Some of them, they said, "No, he just killed some of them." No one knows anything.
20:23 Speaker 03 The families of those who had been killed were not informed that their loved ones were dead. Instead, they were merely told that they could no longer visit them. In many cases, family members continued bringing letters and food to the prison and leaving them with the guards, who said nothing. According to El Shafi, new inmates who arrived at Abu Salim in the years after the massacre would find bullets lodged in the prison yard walls.
20:55 Speaker 18 There is a figure emerging in the Middle East. He is Colonel Muammar El Qaddafi, and he wants to unify the Arabs and restore the Arab crescent of nations to their ancient prestige and power.
21:07 Speaker 03 Before Muammar Gaddafi built prisons for his domestic enemies, he made a name for himself by standing up to his foreign ones.
21:15 Speaker 03 Gaddafi came to power in 1969, replacing the Western-backed King Idris by staging a military coup in Benghazi. Gaddafi was just 27 years old, a handsome young army officer who projected strength and vigor, and who was embraced by many Libyans.
21:31 Speaker 19 Libya was an obscure desert kingdom. Today, it is on the center stage of Middle East politics, and the man responsible is under 30.
21:39 Speaker 06 A strong and asymmetric handsomeness, like the anti-hero movie stars of the 60s.
21:45 Speaker 03 Gaddafi, who was born in a Bedouin tent off the Mediterranean coast, positioned himself as a representative of the Arab world and a challenger to Western imperialism.
21:54 Speaker 06 A revolutionary who believes people should rule themselves, not be ruled by government.
21:59 Speaker 18 If those ambitions seem grandiose for the young leader of a desert land of a mere 2 million people, it should be quickly pointed out that Gaddafi has one powerful asset: money.
22:10 Speaker 20 Oil money makes Libya's young leftist strongman a power in the Arab world.
22:17 Speaker 03 In a move that defined his early years in power, Gaddafi forced Western oil companies to renegotiate their export agreements with Libya.
22:24 Speaker 20 In March, Gaddafi's deputy prime minister negotiated a new agreement with Western oil companies. Libya is now making twice as much money from oil as when Gaddafi and his young officers overthrew King Idris two years ago.
22:37 Speaker 03 The standoff ended up shifting the balance of power towards Arab countries like Libya that possessed huge amounts of oil, and away from Western countries that depended on it.
22:46 Speaker 20 Now Libya is the world's sixth-largest producer of oil, the fourth-largest exporter. Enough oil will be shipped this year to earn Libya more than $2 billion.
22:58 Speaker 03 Starting in the 1970s, Gaddafi put his oil money to work, providing training and weapons for rebel groups around the world. He supported Latin American leftists like the Sandinistas, the PLO, South African anti-apartheid movement, and the IRA in Northern Ireland.
23:14 Speaker 18 Each year, the IRA collects a check for $2 million from one of Gaddafi's money managers in Tripoli. Round the globe, dozens of scenes like this are being enacted for the benefit of Gaddafi's crusade.
23:27 Speaker 03 According to one estimate, more than 30 different organizations sent fighters to train in Libya at various points.
23:33 Speaker 06 Libya's strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi spends an estimated $200 million a year arming and training terrorists and insurgents.
23:42 Speaker 03 Gaddafi also spent a lot of money building up his own arsenal.
23:46 Speaker 21 Per capita, Libya, under Gaddafi in the 70s, was the biggest purchaser of weapons in the world. He was like a compulsive shopper.
23:54 Speaker 03 This is Lindsay Hilsom, a reporter for Channel 4 News in the UK who has covered Libya extensively. In her book Sandstorm, Hilsom describes how Muammar Gaddafi came to loom over the American imagination as a symbol of violence and chaos.
24:09 Speaker 06 He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism, a one-dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced, two-bit dictator. The central character in real-world acts of terror, as well as the star of a number of bestselling thrillers based on the premise that one day he would get the bomb. He's very volatile and opportunistic.
24:29 Speaker 03 In 1981, Newsweek put Gaddafi on its cover under the headline "The Most Dangerous Man in the World." Technically, there was a question mark in the headline, and if you read the article, the answer was "maybe." But the cover accurately captured Gaddafi's reputation in America.
24:48 Speaker 06 He has three obsessions: hatred of Israel, hatred of the United States for supporting Israel, and a dream of a united Arab world.
24:56 Speaker 03 Libya became synonymous with terrorism. If you remember Back to the Future, which came out in 1985, Doc Brown is pursued by crazed terrorists from Libya who want to kill him for selling them a phony nuclear bomb.
25:10 Speaker 22 Oh my God, they found me. I don't know how, but they found me. Who? Who? Who do you think? The Libyans?
25:19 Speaker 03 Gaddafi became even more closely associated with terrorism in 1986, when his regime was implicated in a bombing in Berlin. Reporter Lindsay Hilsum again.
25:29 Speaker 21 In 1986, he provided the weapons and the training, and his agents attacked the Bell Discoteque in Berlin.
25:39 Speaker 23 For the second time this week, Americans have been the victims of a terrorist attack in Europe. This time, the target was a nightclub in West Berlin, a favorite of American soldiers.
25:48 Speaker 06 Little was left of the West Berlin disco. Over 150 were injured, about 70 of them American servicemen.
25:55 Speaker 21 And it was quite clear from very early on that it was the Libyans behind that attack.
26:01 Speaker 06 Police are looking for a pattern to support their belief that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sponsored the attack.
26:07 Speaker 03 Two Americans were killed and 79 were injured in the Berlin attack. Ronald Reagan responded with airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi.
26:16 Speaker 12 At 7 o'clock this evening Eastern Time, Air and Naval Forces of the United States launched a series of strikes against the headquarters, terrorist facilities, and military assets that support Muammar Gaddafi's subversive activities.
26:32 Speaker 03 The bombs were not enough to convince Gaddafi to retreat. Neither were the economic sanctions that Reagan had imposed on him. In 1988, Gaddafi was accused of another major terrorist attack, this one targeting a passenger jet flying from London to New York. As Pan Am Flight 103 passed over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, a bomb exploded and the plane went down.
26:55 Speaker 24 In a few short, violent moments, 270 people died. People from 21 countries filled these coffins. 189 of them were American.
27:07 Speaker 03 Gaddafi denied having anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing. But when evidence of Libyan involvement was uncovered, the attack came to define him in the eyes of the West.
27:17 Speaker 06 He's an egomaniac who would trigger World War III to make the headlines. He's the world's principal terrorist and trainer of terrorists. He's dangerous to peace.
27:33 Speaker 03 As Gaddafi's profile rose around the world, the violence he perpetrated against foreign targets overshadowed his brutal repression of the Libyan people.
27:42 Speaker 21 The violence was very visible to ordinary Libyans because they did see people hanging in the streets. And everybody knew somebody who had a relative who had been hanged or who had been imprisoned. But it didn't seem to be very obvious to people outside Libya because Libya was a closed country and very few people were allowed into Libya from the outside.
28:10 Speaker 03 The regime's secrecy makes it difficult to know exactly how common public executions were. But there are documented instances of dissidents in Libya being hanged or executed by firing squad in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Hussein al-Shafi told me he remembers hearing about hangings before he was sent to Abu Salim.
28:30 Speaker 16 I remember in 1984, Gaddafi used to hang any opposition groups, you know, on the like a basketball stadium, you know, like arena we have here, like Spectrum Center, you know. Can you imagine? You wake up in the morning, your governor taking people, hanging them in the stadium in front of everybody. He did this before, many times, in the college, in university, Libyan university, like in Trimby or Benghazi. He takes them and he hangs them. And he kills the students because they are a part of the opposition group.
29:04 Speaker 03 Al-Shafi never attended an execution in person, but he did see it happen on TV.
29:09 Speaker 16 I see this once and then I go cry, you know, go hide in some inner room, cry. I see like he's hanging people and the crowd, the crowd supporting this. Oh, Gaddafi, yeah, you kill them, kill them.
29:24 Speaker 03 The 1996 massacre at Abu Salim is now considered Gaddafi's most brutal act, the pinnacle of his campaign of violence against the Libyan people. But when it first happened, there was so little information about it that few took notice. Reuters did report that some kind of deadly clash between inmates and guards had taken place at the prison. And Amnesty International called on Gaddafi to order an investigation. But that effort didn't go anywhere. Gaddafi did not even acknowledge the massacre. And the bodies of the dead were reportedly dumped in a mass grave that has never been found. It wasn't until four years later that El Shafi was released from Abu Salim.
30:08 Speaker 03 It happened on June 1, 2000, more than a decade after his arrest. He was never told why, just as he was never formally charged or convicted of anything in the first place. El Shafi went home to Benghazi and started trying to get a passport. He wanted to leave Libya and escape the Gaddafi regime for good. The passports still hadn't come when El Shafi started seeing reports that world leaders, including from the United States, were changing their stance on Gaddafi and inviting him in from the cold.
30:40 Speaker 06 The orchestrated announcements of the deal in Britain and Washington portrayed Gaddafi's change of heart as the result of President Bush's "get them before they get you" doctrine.
30:51 Speaker 03 The man who had imprisoned El Shafi and killed so many of his fellow inmates was being officially rehabilitated. After decades of railing against the imperialist powers of Europe and the United States, Gaddafi was finding common cause with the West.
31:06 Speaker 06 American oil companies and the Libyan government could benefit from Libya's newly announced plan to give up trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
31:14 Speaker 03 El Shafi remembers being enraged when he heard that one of Gaddafi's sons was coming to the United States for meetings at the State Department. El Shafi assumed that it meant the US was going to start selling Gaddafi weapons.
31:27 Speaker 16 I said, "Fuck politics, fuck the money, people first." If you invite Gaddafi's sons and you give them weapons, the US administration is a color same freaking Gaddafi.
31:46 Speaker 03 The process of normalizing relations between Gaddafi's Libya and the United States began towards the end of the Clinton administration. Gaddafi was desperate to have sanctions against Libya lifted. And as a first step, he agreed in 1999 to surrender to Libyans who were suspected of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing. But it wasn't until the Bush years and the start of the War on Terror that the relationship between the US and Libya really started to improve. In the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi was spooked. He became convinced that if he didn't make certain concessions, he would be next.
32:27 Speaker 03 And so, after months of secret talks with the Bush White House, Gaddafi agreed to give up his nascent nuclear program and to allow weapons inspectors into Libya.
32:36 Speaker 25 Libya's surprise announcement that it will give up its weapons of mass destruction is reverberating worldwide.
32:42 Speaker 03 The Bush administration hailed it as a diplomatic triumph.
32:45 Speaker 12 Today in Tripoli, Libya has begun the process of rejoining the community of nations. Its good faith will be returned.
32:55 Speaker 26 Without the Iraq War, the trajectory of the US-Libya relationship would have been much, much different.
33:01 Speaker 03 This is Ethan Chorin. He was sent to Tripoli by the State Department in 2004, who was his first posting as a member of the Foreign Service.
33:09 Speaker 26 I had a great privilege of being one of the few diplomats who was sent to Libya to help open up what would eventually become the embassy.
33:19 Speaker 03 Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit the Colonel, explained to me that making a deal with Gaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House as a follow-up to the invasion of Iraq.
33:30 Speaker 26 You had the neoconservative cabal in Washington looking for the next move, essentially, and they really weren't interested in Gaddafi until, essentially, it dawned on a few people that their relationship with Gaddafi could actually solve several of the problems that the Iraq War was not solving. As in, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, but Gaddafi ostensibly had something that you could call such a program, and he was willing to give it up.
33:57 Speaker 03 Chorin's point here was that Gaddafi's weapons program was extremely rudimentary, and that sacrificing it was mostly a symbolic gesture. For the Bush White House, the more practical benefits of reconciling with Gaddafi were, one, that American companies could start doing business in Libya, and, two, that the Gaddafi regime could be helpful in the war on terror.
34:20 Speaker 27 Gaddafi says intelligence agencies in Libya and the US are exchanging information.
34:26 Speaker 03 The terrorists America was now hunting in the Middle East and North Africa were Gaddafi's longtime enemies, too.
34:34 Speaker 03 All through the 90s, he had been at war with Islamist groups suspected of having connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, in 1998, the Gaddafi regime had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on the basis that Al Qaeda had been working with radicals in Libya. Reporter Lindsay Hilsom again.
34:52 Speaker 21 Gaddafi became afraid of the Islamists, and a lot of Islamists went to Afghanistan, and they joined Al Qaeda, and they became very senior in Al Qaeda. Their aim was to overthrow Gaddafi, but they were part of this international jihad. And, of course, that was the international jihad which, you know, on 9/11, flew into the Twin Towers and murdered all the Americans.
35:20 Speaker 03 It was a convenient alliance. The United States got access to intelligence from a government operating in close proximity to many extremist groups, and Gaddafi got an ally in his quest to eliminate one of the only major threats to his power.
35:33 Speaker 13 Caliban leader Muammar al-Gaddafi is now being called an enemy of Islam by Al Qaeda.
35:40 Speaker 03 Between all that and the oil contracts, it was enough to convince the White House that Gaddafi was worth the baggage.
35:47 Speaker 27 The first time in almost a quarter century, the US has diplomatic ties with Libya.
35:53 Speaker 03 The US mission in Tripoli had been abandoned in 1980, shortly after a crowd of demonstrators set the embassy on fire. Now, American diplomats would be returning to Libya to build a new one.
36:14 Speaker 03 We'll be right back.
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37:55 Speaker 03 For a certain kind of diplomat, Libya was a dream assignment, a country everyone knew had been warped by decades of dictatorship, but which remained a black box. Ethan Chorin arrived in Libya in 2004, and he was excited.
38:10 Speaker 26 I was very eager. This was like, you know, exactly what I had joined the Foreign Service to do, to have a crazy experience where I felt like I could make an impact.
38:18 Speaker 03 It was up to Chorin and his State Department colleagues to figure out what was going on in Libya, how the Gaddafi regime was running things, and what they wanted from their new relationship with America.
38:30 Speaker 03 Chorin was also tasked with briefing American companies on the Libyan market and writing an official State Department guide to doing business in the country.
38:38 Speaker 26 And effectively, we were sent out there and told just to, you know, go find what you can find. We don't know much about this place, so see what you can do.
38:47 Speaker 03 As Chorin was finding his feet in Tripoli, he was introduced over email to another diplomat who was also interested in Libya. Chris Stevens was working out of Washington DC at the time, but he had made it known to his superiors at the State Department that he wanted to be posted in Libya at the next available opportunity.
39:04 Speaker 26 He was bidding on a position after me in Libya, and he had just had this sort of enthusiasm. This is like one of the last places in the Middle East that's sort of completely off limits to Americans and unknown, and that clearly excited him. And it's excited me.
39:21 Speaker 03 Stevens had been in the Foreign Service for about 20 years after starting and abandoning a career as an international trade lawyer.
39:28 Speaker 22 He could have led a comfortable life in Washington DC, making a lot of money as a trade lawyer, but it wasn't enough for him.
39:35 Speaker 03 This is journalist Paul Richter. He's the author of the book The Ambassadors, in which he details Chris Stevens's tenure at the State Department.
39:42 Speaker 22 So at a rather old age, he went into the Foreign Service. It was basically kind of a second career for him.
39:49 Speaker 03 From the start, Stevens was particularly interested in the Middle East and North Africa. Before he put in his bid for a post in Libya, he had worked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jerusalem. He told friends he possessed a gene that drew him to the Arab world, a trait he apparently shared with a long line of Western diplomats.
40:08 Speaker 22 There's been a certain romance about the Middle East that goes back to T. E. Lawrence and other British and Europeans who saw some mystery, some fascination, that they didn't see in other parts of the world.
40:25 Speaker 03 One of Stevens's chief influences was a book called The Arabists, which traces the history of American diplomacy in the Middle East from its roots in missionary work in British imperialism. This earlier generation of Middle East specialists was part of a long colonial history of Westerners romanticizing the Arab world. Starting in the 19th century, these diplomats and adventurers often wrote about the region as ancient, otherworldly, and almost mystical.
40:52 Speaker 22 There is probably colonialist dimension to it. Their attitude had some of that. There's something about the serenity. There's something about the harshness of the atmosphere and the beauty of the environment that draws them. And there's something about the exotic nature of the Arab world that they just can't find in other places, and they keep going back to it.
41:16 Speaker 03 As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he found there.
41:23 Speaker 22 He liked going out and enjoying goat meat cooked over a Beedouin campfire in the desert. He enjoyed talking to these Arabs who could tell you the history of their families going back many generations. These Arabs would talk about their distant relatives as if they died only a few years ago. And then later, Stevens would discover that they were talking about people who died centuries ago.
41:51 Speaker 03 For Stevens, the US opening to Gaddafi was an opportunity to discover a place that had been closed off from the West for decades. In emails to Ethan Chorin, Stevens made clear how excited he was at the prospect of being posted there.
42:05 Speaker 26 Chris would write and ask something along lines of, "Is this as interesting as I think it is?" I would describe what I was experiencing there and the positives and negatives, and I had just had a sense that he understood. And he too was willing to take some risks to have that kind of an experience.
42:22 Speaker 03 In many ways, Stevens's defining feature as a diplomat was his openness to risk and his willingness to sit down and talk to people whom others might have considered enemies. In 2006, when he was posted in Jerusalem, Stephens served as a liaison to the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
42:41 Speaker 06 The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome, a landslide victory for Hamas. Official results today showed the Islamic
42:48 Speaker 03 That same year, when the militant group Hamas was elected to a majority in the Palestinian legislature, Stephens expressed hope that the United States would engage with them instead of writing them off as terrorists.
42:59 Speaker 22 After Hamas had won that election, Stephens wrote his closest friends and family and said, "I hope the American side doesn't misinterpret this. I hope they understand that Islamists are not always villainous and maybe we can work, maybe we can find a way to deal with them."
43:19 Speaker 03 In this respect, Stephens represented one side of a longstanding debate in the world of American foreign policy about whether the United States should give the benefit of the doubt to Islamist political leaders in the Arab world. Stephens believed there were different kinds of Islamists. He once wrote that Islamist doesn't necessarily translate to extremist.
43:39 Speaker 22 I think he was always willing to open a conversation with people from pretty scary Islamist backgrounds. I tell a story about his meetings with one militia leader where he stayed up way into the night to debate East German political theory with this guy who'd been fighting as a jihadist in Afghanistan a couple of years before.
44:03 Speaker 03 Stephens's friendly posture towards Islamist groups distinguished him from some of his colleagues, including Ethan Chorin. Chorin believed, then as now, that America must be supremely careful when dealing with Islamists, whether they're hardliners or moderates. When I spoke to Chorin, it was clear he was troubled by Stephens's outlook on the Arab world, and more specifically, his approach to diplomacy in Libya. For Chorin, the tragedy of the Benghazi attack is that it might have been prevented if Stevens and his State Department colleagues back in Washington had taken the Islamist threat more seriously.
44:37 Speaker 26 But this is at the heart of the Libya problem is that there was this sort of long disjointed or absent period of, you know, many decades where the US-Libya relationship was either nonexistent or very stressed. We didn't know who all the parties were. There were certainly clues, but we didn't know whom to trust. And there were people in Libya at the time, you know, before the attack who were basically saying, "Look, you Americans need to watch out because the people who you're dealing with are not your friends."
45:10 Speaker 03 Knowing the difference between friends and enemies had always been a problem for the American mission in Libya. Two weeks after Chris Stevens first arrived in Tripoli in the summer of 2007, he was invited to Muammar Gaddafi's fortress for a banquet in honor of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Stevens was introduced to Gaddafi briefly on a receiving line. Journalist Paul Richter again.
45:32 Speaker 22 And he saw at this event Gaddafi's ambivalence toward the US. Gaddafi was hoping for a new relationship and he was hoping for trade deals, for weapons deals, for a new opening with the world provided by his new friends, the Americans. And yet his antipathy for the Americans still remained.
45:54 Speaker 03 Gaddafi did not try to hide this antipathy. As Stevens observed in letters to his family, the dinner for Sarkozy was staged directly in view of a building that had been destroyed by American airstrikes in 1986. Gaddafi had commemorated it with a plaque recalling "The Failed American Aggression." Near where Gaddafi and Sarkozy were sitting was a massive gold sculpture of a fist crushing an American fighter jet.
46:19 Speaker 22 And there was music played at the event, a patriotic song about fighting off the enemies of Libya. And this old anti-American feeling that had sustained his regime for so many decades was still there.
46:36 Speaker 03 Despite this apparent tension, Chris Stevens and his colleagues in Tripoli tried to build relationships with Gaddafi's inner circle. Most importantly, his sons, who were widely regarded as the future of the country. Muammar Gaddafi has been married twice and has eight biological children and two adopted. In particular, Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam emerged as his father's heir apparent and made great efforts to present himself to the West as a reasonable, moderating influence on the regime. Saif al-Islam may be the most recognized and outspoken of those offspring. He attended the London School of Economics, seen as an advocate of reform. By this point, Hussein al-Shafi, the former prisoner at Abu Salim, had finally
47:20 Speaker 03 gotten his passport. At one point during the three-year process, he had to submit a letter addressing Gaddafi personally. In it, al-Shafi said he needed to get to Egypt or Tunisia to seek medical help for his wife.
47:33 Speaker 16 I wrote a big petition, man. You'll be laughing if you see it, like this. Muammar Gaddafi, my president, my leader, my god. I am the former prisoner with no charge. Apply for this. I promise I will defend Libya revolution. I will defend Muammar Gaddafi. I love you, Gaddafi. I will be a good person, a good citizen. I will protect the Green Book in my heart. I love Green Book. Please, your follower, your lover, Hussein al-Shafi.
48:08 Speaker 03 For all that, al-Shafi finally got his passport. Once he did, he and his wife were able to fly to Switzerland, and from there, they boarded a flight to the United States. When I interviewed al-Shafi in 2021, he was living in Charlotte, North Carolina with his family and operating a luxury car service. By this point, he was used to telling the story of the Abu Salim massacre. One of the first things he did when he arrived in the US was recount what he had witnessed to a group of activists working with Human Rights Watch. Back in Libya, El Shafi had kept his story to himself out of fear that the regime would kill him for spreading it. Remember, Gaddafi had barely acknowledged the massacre, and the government had not even informed the victims' families that their loved ones
48:53 Speaker 03 were dead. Lindsay Hilsom again.
48:56 Speaker 21 Bit by bit, some people were released, and so they went to see the families of the men who'd been killed and gave them the bad news. And then the government started to issue some death certificates, which didn't say what had happened. They just said, you know, "Your relative, your husband, your son, your father died." And so they had some kind of official word of it. And then the families began to join together, because it became clear that these weren't just deaths, these were murders.
49:30 Speaker 19 Nobody knew anything about that fateful day for many years, until the relatives of the victims began to protest the killings and demand an explanation.
49:40 Speaker 03 Human rights lawyers in Benghazi took on the family members as clients and filed a legal claim demanding information from the government. In 2007, the lawsuit gave rise to the first public protest movement in modern Libyan history.
49:55 Speaker 19 The relatives held protest rallies outside the Justice Department in Benghazi after they heard about what came to be known as Bloody Saturday at Abu Salim Prison.
50:07 Speaker 21 Now, this was a very bold move. Nobody demonstrated or protested in Gaddafi's Libya, but they didn't really care anymore. They'd lost everything. And so they started to do this, demanding justice, demanding compensation. And they were really a new group of opponents to the regime with an emotional power. And it was quite hard for the authorities just to lock them up and kill them, because most of them were old ladies.
50:35 Speaker 03 The regime found the protesters impossible to ignore. And at the urging of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's ostensibly moderate son, the government started sending out death notices to hundreds of families, finally confirming, after more than 20 years, that their loved ones had been killed. Still, the protests continued. Every Saturday, the families would gather at the Benghazi courthouse, holding up photos of the people they had lost and praying.
51:03 Speaker 19 Demanding the bodies of their loved ones from the Gaddafi regime.
51:07 Speaker 03 For a while, it was just about the only visible form of dissent in Gaddafi's Libya. But that was about to change. And for the second time in less than a decade, the United States government would be reevaluating its relationship with Muammar Gaddafi.
51:34 Speaker 03 On the next episode of Fiasco, Libya erupts in revolution, Gaddafi threatens to destroy Benghazi, and America decides to get involved. Did you feel relieved when you heard that the intervention had happened? Did it lift the pressure?
51:48 Speaker 00 Yes, yes, all of us. You know, he would have destroyed Benghazi. He didn't want Benghazi anymore.
51:59 Speaker 03 For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in our show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show was produced by Andrew Parsons, Ula Kulpah, Sam Lee, and me, Leon Mayfok, with editorial support from Sam Graham-Felsen and Madeline Catlin. Our researcher was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Valli, and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Celester and Joel St. Julien. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfield, and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks and Chips NY.
52:44 Speaker 03 Copyright Council provided by Peter Yasi at Yasi Butler, P L L C. Thanks to archive.org, Murad Idris, Nina Ernest, Tay Glass, Carrie Baker, Ismail Swaya, Ellen Horn, Ben Ryder, James Brant, and Rachel Ward. Special thanks to Lubinari, and thank you for listening.
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