Ambassador Chris Stevens' Family: We Do Not Blame Hillary Clinton For Benghazi

In the aftermath of the 800 page report by the Republican-led panel which investigated the attack on Benghazi, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens — one of the four American casualties from the September 11, 2012 attack on a compound in Benghazi, Libya — says that the fault does not lie with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Dr. Anne Stevens spoke to the New Yorker, and said, in part:

It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State Department is underbudgeted.

I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself.

Dr. Stevens went on to say about Hillary Clinton, “She has taken full responsibility, being head of the State Department, for what occurred. She took measures to respond to the review board’s recommendations. She established programs for a better security system.

"But it is never going to be perfect,” she admitted to The New Yorker. “I don’t see any usefulness in continuing to criticize her. It is very unjust.”