What Benghazi reveals about our nation ...

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” —Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar” (Act I, Scene ii.)

The ambiguity of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy about the end of the Roman republic and the onset of dictatorship teaches us that no matter how much we yearn for clarity, there is always an element of uncertainty in the fate of nations.

Motive is subjective. Intention is debatable. Facts are elusive.

That is where we must begin our discussion of Benghazi, and it is why ultimately Congress must appoint a select committee in order to pin down motives, intentions and facts.

Just like a jury, the select committee must hear all the evidence and draw conclusions about why the full story about the terrorist attack in Benghazi has still not been told to the American people. Someone must be held responsible. It is not enough to just say mistakes were made.

It has been plain almost since the beginning that the United States government has been dissembling about what happened on Sept. 11, 2012, when the U.S. mission in Benghazi was attacked and four people, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, were killed.

It has also been plain that most of the mainstream media has intentionally chosen to ignore, to downplay or to actively distort the possibility that the White House lied about Benghazi.

But when you get right down to it, the fault for the nation’s general ignorance about the Benghazi coverup does not belong to the media; it belongs to ourselves.

If any American doesn’t know by now that UN ambassador Susan Rice misled the world when she went on five Sunday morning talk shows and claimed that the Benghazi mission was attacked as the result of anger about a YouTube video, then they simply haven’t been doing their job as citizens. This information has been readily available to anyone who wanted it, and it’s no one else’s responsibility to make sure you are well-informed. Blaming the big media outlets only goes so far. “The fault ... is ... in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

But now even the mainstream media are starting to wake up. Perhaps thanks to the congressional hearings this week that featured the riveting testimony of Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 man at the Embassy in Tripoli, the first cracks have appeared in the wall of indifference that has greeted this story for months. Hicks established once and for all that it was known from the beginning that Islamic terror group Ansar al-Sharia, an affiliate of al-Qaida, was responsible for the attack and that there was no “demonstration” outside the mission which “got out of hand.”

Following up on that hearing, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl revealed that the “talking points” used by Ambassador Rice had been methodically scrubbed of references to terrorism and Ansar al-Sharia and reduced to a saccharine, misleading and politically correct version of events that barely resembled what really happened. In the 12 e-mails Karl obtained, he saw that the State Department’s spokesperson Victoria Nuland intentionally re-shaped the talking points because she was concerned that the truth “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department.”

Moreover, after one revision took out some of the CIA’s original talking points, Nuland said they didn’t go far enough, and damningly added: “These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings [sic] leadership.”

We don’t yet know who she meant by that, but ultimately the leader in the State Department is none other than the secretary of state. Do you think Hillary Clinton is still sticking with her, “What difference does it make?” response to questions being asked about what she knew and when she knew it?

The fact that the president and the secretary of state and the defense department and the CIA and the national security adviser and the ambassador to the UN have still not been held accountable for both what happened on Sept. 11, 2012, and for the lies that were told about it later, must give us concern that like Rome in the first century B.C., we are poised to lose our beloved republic.

The words of Thomas Jefferson stand as a warning to us all:

“...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.”

The opposite goes without saying as well. When the people are not well-informed, they cannot be relied upon to notice when things go wrong, nor can they set them right, nor —ultimately — can they be trusted with their own government.

Let us hope we have not reached that point. Otherwise, like Rome and Julius Caesar, we may ultimately meet a tragic end.