Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,

The circus is back in town in Washington D.C. (actually, it’s part of a permanent residency), as a congressional panel spent Thursday peppering presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with questions about her role in the Benghazi consulate attack. The attack left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, and has been the subject of political scandal ever since, with Republicans claiming then-Secretary of State Clinton didn’t do enough to sufficiently fortify the security detail of the consulate.

It’s pure political theater, but sadly, no one on this congressional panel will ask the real questions to which Americans deserve answers. And this is because the real scandal presents questions that can’t be asked, because the answers indict the entire U.S. government.

What was our true geopolitical motive in Libya?

At its core, the 2011 NATO-backed rebels’ deposal of Libya’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, involved United States foreign policy interests. As with other recent military actions in the Middle East, it is part of a deep and blood-soaked history of coups that includes no less than 35 countries.

Soon after 9/11, former General Wesley Clark was informed about a memo outlining how the U.S. government planned to “take out” seven countries in five years. Those countries included Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

According to many reports, this plan had been in the works since the 1990s, when the neoconservative think tank, Project For A New American Century — which was presided over by stalwart war profiteers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others — drew up plans for an all-out invasion of Iraq as early as 1998. This plan included comprehensive military actions throughout the Middle East, as described by General Clark.

The overthrow of Libya’s secular-Arab nationalist regime was very much a part of this geopolitical coup, a predicate of which was protecting the petrodollar (which is a term used to describe the world’s dominant reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, which is based on petroleum exports) and establishing a permanent occupying force in the Middle East. When Gaddafi announced in 2009 that he planned to nationalize the country’s oil reserves, he may have sealed his fate.

So, the question for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be something like this: do you still support the administration’s decision to arm the terrorist group Al Qaeda (remember them?) in order to topple Gaddafi, destabilize the government, and allow the U.S. to install a puppet regime amenable to economic imperialism? The answer would not be politically expedient.

What was the role of Ambassador Stevens in supplying arms to Syria?

A wide variety of news sources have now confirmed the CIA was indeed running an arms smuggling team in Benghazi at the time the consulate was attacked. Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, among others, dug up more of the facts about what was really going on Libya and why the matter is controversial for all the wrong reasons:

“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdo?an administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

So our question to Clinton would be: how would you characterize Ambassador Steven’s role in the rat line that was running guns to Syrian rebels through Libya?

Did we topple Gaddafi because he was rejecting the petrodollar and threatening to adopt a gold-based currency?

As mentioned above, the toppling of Libya’s dictator was directly related to protecting the power of the petrodollar in the Middle East. According to Anthony Wile, prior to his ousting, Gaddafi had made no secrets about introducing a gold dinar, “a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth.”

Gaddafi possessed about 144 tons of gold and believed this gold dinar would prove to be a major financial asset as a national currency. In an interview with RT, Wile said:

“If Gaddafi had an intent to try to re-price his oil or whatever else the country was selling on the global market and accept something else as a currency or maybe launch a gold dinar currency, any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world’s central banks. … So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward from moving him from power. “The central banking Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing base of demand and the immediate silencing of those who would threaten its existence. Perhaps that is what the hurry is in removing Gaddafi in particular and those who might have been sympathetic to his monetary idea.”

There is plenty of precedence for such a military-backed silencing. Many analysts believe Saddam Hussein’s intent to trade Iraqi oil in Euros instead of the dollar was the final straw before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In Gaddafi’s case, his overthrow may have protected our petroleum-based currency from a gold dinar alternative, but it has plunged North Africa into chaos and allowed Islamist militias to gain control over Tripoli.