Who’s investigating Benghazi?

And why hasn’t there been a more forceful call for accountability on what happened there?

Ambassador Christopher Stevens should still be alive. He should have been protected, along with the others around him assasinated on 9/11. There have been jokes on Facebook about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for Big Bird to be taken to a safe house after presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he would cut off federal funding of NPR in his administration with loans from China.

It would have been cute, if not for the deadly serious fact that Ambassador Stevens couldn’t make it to the safe house in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi and was killed somewhere in between. While the State Department and Secretary Clinton have yet to account for the lack of security.

Just two days before the 9/11 anniversary attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, two leaders of the Libyan militias responsible for keeping order in the city threatened to withdraw their men. 

The brinksmanship is detailed in a cable approved by Ambassador Chris Stevens and sent on the day he died in the attack, the worst assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission since the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran. The dispatch, which was marked “sensitive” but not “classified,” contained a number of other updates on the chaotic situation on the ground in post-Gaddafi Libya.

There has been much revelation of pleas for help from Stevens and the Libyan contingent, but not much transparency on where those pleas went in this nearly month since the assassinations.

Jason Chaffetz, the Republican lawmaker who has led the House Oversight and Government Reform committee’s investigation into the 9/11 attack, says the State Department actually decreased U.S. diplomatic security personnel in the months leading up to the attack…

Chaffetz, who visited Tripoli on Saturday, told The Daily Beast he has obtained documents and conducted interviews with whistle blowers that show the U.S. mission Libya did request more security from Washington in the run-up to the attack, but was denied. “Regional security officers were denied requests for more personnel and security upgrades to the four buildings and the perimeter security of the U.S. mission in Benghazi,” he told The Daily Beast on Sunday. More details on that negotiation will likely come out on Wednesday, when Chaffetz will hold his committee’s first hearing on the Benghazi attack.

It’s about time.