We started out today hoping that Clinton might shed light on the US strategy in North Africa. We come away not entirely empty-handed. Here's a summary of what happened:

• Clinton called for broad US intervention in North and West Africa, seemingly without caveat. She said the United States should train troops to fight in Mali. She grouped the Islamist militants who control northern Mali and who carry out attacks on Nigerian oil fields and on Algerian gas plants as part of "the same global jihadist movement." The US should fight them all, she said. Just because al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb hasn't attacked the United States doesn't mean the US is safe from them, she said.

• Clinton said a "Pandora's Box" of weapons had been opened in North Africa, starting with Libya. She said militants who had fought for Gadhafi raided his "warehouses" and took weapons to Algeria, Mali, Syria and elsewhere.

• Clinton grew testy before the Senate, in reply to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who insisted that she explain how "Americans were misled." She replied: "With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?"

• There was an anticlimactic feel to the hearings, after four months of heated demands that Clinton testify on Benghazi. Where were these impassioned Republicans so hungry to get at the truth of what they portrayed as one of the greatest foreign policy fiascos in American history? The case against the administration, so steel-clad on cable news, seemed to disappear in the light of the hearing room.