According to an employment contract recovered at the Benghazi compound by the Washington Post shortly after the September attacks, those unarmed Libyan contractors were making roughly $4 dollars an hour.
If that was indeed the case, the State Department, using the funds provided to the U.S. embassy in Austria for an electric vehicle charger, could have provided Ambassador Stevens with three additional guards, 24 hours a day, for 365 days, with some money left over.
This is not to argue that having more guards, extending the SST presence, or authorizing the continued use of the DC-3 plane would have prevented Ambassador Stevens’ death, which marked the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador since the 1970s. It does, however, raise a question about the State Department’s spending priorities.
Should the money directed toward other State Department initiatives, such as the “Energy Efficiency Sweep of Europe,” have gone toward efforts to secure highly vulnerable State Department personnel in areas like Libya?
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