Benghazi: Episode 1 - The Dictator

Summary

Fiasco: Benghazi – Episode 1: The Dictator

Host: Leon Neyfakh
Date: September 8, 2025
Podcast: Fiasco (Pushkin Industries)

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Main Theme & Purpose

In the first episode of “Fiasco: Benghazi,” host Leon Neyfakh sets the stage for an in-depth examination of the 2012 Benghazi attack, which claimed the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Neyfakh begins not with the scandal or the political firestorm that followed, but with the history and day-to-day reality of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi—an eccentric and violent dictator. This episode explores the roots of Libya's isolation, Gaddafi’s reign, U.S.-Libya relations, and the personal stakes through survivor testimony. The goal is to illuminate how the forgotten twists of Libyan-American relations laid the groundwork for the catastrophic events in Benghazi and their profound consequences for U.S. politics.

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Episode Breakdown & Key Discussion Points

1. Setting the Stage: The 2012 Benghazi Attack

• Opening Summary: Leon Neyfakh introduces the September 11, 2012 events in Benghazi, where an attack on a diplomatic compound and a secret CIA base left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
  • (03:57–04:25)
  • "The attack began when a group of armed assailants broke into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. It ended nearly eight hours later with the bombing of a secret CIA base nearby." – Leon Neyfakh
  • The American public and media quickly focused on blame and responsibility, not the mission’s purpose or the context that led the U.S. to be in Benghazi.
• Questions around advanced warning, security failures, and the Obama administration’s responsibility are highlighted, with little attention to what Stevens was doing in Benghazi.
  • (04:48–05:09)

2. Who Was Chris Stevens?

• Brief background on Ambassador Stevens—California-born, dedicated diplomat, enthused about building partnerships with Libya.
  • (05:28–05:46)
  • Stevens’ death becomes a political flashpoint—overshadowing his aims and America’s broader objectives.

3. Gaddafi’s Libya: Origins and Isolation

• Muammar Gaddafi’s Rule: For over 40 years, Gaddafi led Libya with brutality, eccentricity, and isolationism.
  • (05:46–07:05)
  • "Before Bin Laden, Gaddafi was the face of international terrorism. Ronald Reagan once memorably called Gaddafi the mad dog of the Middle East." – Leon Neyfakh (06:12)
• The episode traces Gaddafi's transformation from revolutionary hero to international pariah.
• Libya’s closed-off status: "No voice above Gaddafi’s voice." – Hussein Al Shafi (15:15)

4. Survivor Testimony: Hussein Al Shafi and the Abu Saleem Massacre

• Personal Narrative: Neyfakh interviews Hussein Al Shafi—a Benghazi native, arrested for criticizing Gaddafi as a student, who spent 11 years in the infamous Abu Saleem prison.
  • Detailed account of his arrest, torture, and experience inside the prison. (14:04–19:20)
  • "He calls it Navariya Talita, means the third solution for the world..." – Hussein Al Shafi on Gaddafi’s Green Book (14:50)
  • Al Shafi describes dire prison conditions, culminating in the 1996 massacre of over 1,000 inmates after a protest. (20:46–22:21)
  • "They said, pray for our friends, their souls. Raising up the gun." (21:26)
  • Survivors were forced to help collect the dead’s belongings; the event was hushed up for decades.

5. Gaddafi’s Rise: Oil, Terrorism, and the West

• Gaddafi seized power at 27 in a coup—initially hailed, then feared.
  • He renegotiated oil contracts, used oil wealth to arm militants, and persecuted domestic dissent. (23:38–25:56)
• Libya became synonymous with state terrorism in the 1970s and '80s (support for global terror, Lockerbie bombing, U.S. reprisals).
  • "In 1981, Newsweek put Gaddafi on its cover under the headline 'the Most Dangerous Man in the World.'" – Leon Neyfakh (26:55)
  • The West focused on Gaddafi’s international crimes; the suffering of Libyans at home went largely unnoticed.

6. Glimpses Inside: Life Under Oppression

• Executions, repression, and culture of fear under Gaddafi.
  • Public hangings, torture, and the omnipresence of secret police described by Al Shafi and reporters like Lindsay Hilsam. (30:07–31:48)

7. A Regime Rebranded: Gaddafi’s Rehabilitation

• Diplomatic Opening: After years of sanctions and isolation, Gaddafi seeks legitimacy in the late 1990s and 2000s.
  • Gives up WMD programs after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, seeking new diplomatic and economic ties. (34:10–35:19)
  • The U.S. seizes a diplomatic victory, reestablishes relations, and opens the embassy Chris Stevens would later lead. (35:25–38:17)

8. The American Presence: Chris Stevens and the Diplomatic Mission

• Diplomats on the Ground: Ethan Chorin, an early State Department envoy, describes the mystery and opportunity for Americans in Libya. (41:30–42:21)
• Chris Stevens is portrayed as an idealist, eager to engage both with Libyans and Islamist political elements.
  • "He once wrote that Islamist doesn’t necessarily translate to extremist." – Paul Richter (47:14)
  • Stevens' openness to risk and dialogue contrasted with more cautious colleagues.

9. Seeds of Revolution: Abu Saleem and Public Protest

• Legacy of Massacre: The Abu Saleem killings eventually spark rare protests in Libya led by victims’ families. (53:10–54:10)
• The demand for accountability becomes a catalyst for broader dissent, setting the stage for the Arab Spring and the eventual U.S. intervention in 2011.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the nature of the scandal:

  • "In retrospect, the Benghazi attack looks incredibly consequential for Libya certainly, but also for the United States... it led directly to Hillary Clinton's email scandal... you could make the case that Benghazi took down a presidency no less than Watergate did."
    — Leon Neyfakh (08:40–09:03)

• Eyewitness to massacre:

  • "Some people, they said, we dying slowly, guys."
    — Hussein Al Shafi (19:38)

  • "The shootings continued for at least three and a half hours. The last shot was individual, like they finishing up, you know."
    — Hussein Al Shafi (21:40)

• On American engagement:

  • "Chris Stevens' defining feature as a diplomat was his openness to risk and his willingness to sit down and talk to people whom others might have considered enemies."
    — Leon Neyfakh (45:57)

  • "I hope the American side doesn't misinterpret this. I hope they understand that Islamists are not always villainous and maybe we can find a way to deal with them."
    — Quoting Chris Stevens via Paul Richter (46:34)

• On Gaddafi’s image:

  • "He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism. A one dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced, two bit dictator."
    — Narrator (26:34)

• On public executions:

  • "Can you imagine, you wake up in the morning, your governor taking people, hang them in the stadium in front of everybody? ... He kills the students because they are a part of the opposition group."
    — Hussein Al Shafi (31:28)

• On returning to society:

  • "I wrote a big petition, man, you'll be laughing if you see it ... I will protect the green book in my heart. I love green book. Please, your follower, your lover, Hussein Al Shafi."
    — Hussein Al Shafi (51:08)

• On familial protest:

  • "This was a very bold move. Nobody demonstrated or protested in Gaddafi's Libya, but they didn't really care anymore. They'd lost everything."
    — Lindsay Hilsam (53:41)

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Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------| | 03:32–07:05 | Overview of 2012 attack and America’s focus on blame | | 14:04–22:21 | Testimony from Hussein Al Shafi about imprisonment and massacre | | 23:31–27:12 | History of Gaddafi’s rise, oil politics, and turn towards terrorism | | 30:07–31:48 | Life under Gaddafi's rule—repression, public executions | | 34:10–38:17 | Diplomatic normalization: U.S.-Libya relations in the 2000s | | 41:30–47:38 | Ethos and ambitions of American diplomats in Libya | | 53:10–54:10 | Impact and spread of protests following the Abu Saleem revelation |

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Tone and Style

• Narrative & Immersive: Neyfakh’s signature style—blending first-person curiosity, thorough research, and vivid anecdote—grounds the reporting in personal stakes and institutional context.
• Reflective & Unsparing: The episode never shies away from brutality — torture, massacre, repression — making the political consequences feel urgent and real.
• Humanizing: Through survivor accounts and diplomats' motivations, listeners are invited to empathize with people on all sides of the story.

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Conclusion

“The Dictator” expertly reframes the Benghazi episode, moving it beyond scandal into a meditation on how regimes fall and policies shift, and how American engagement abroad is shaped by both history and individuals. By opening with survivor voices and a wide-angle lens on Gaddafi’s Libya, the podcast sets up the complexities that led to tragedy and turmoil, promising a season of deep reporting and real narrative payoff.

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Next episode preview:
Libya’s revolution, Gaddafi’s last stand, and America’s fateful decision to intervene.

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For a complete list of books, articles, and documentaries used in research, follow the link in the show notes.

Transcript

[Leon Neyfakh]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Leon Neyfakh]

Pushkin hey Leon here. Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the entire season of Fiasco Benghazi right now ad free by becoming a Pushkin plus subscriber.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

Sign up for Pushkin plus on the.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Fiasco Apple Podcast show page or visit Pushkin FM plus now onto the show. On the night of September 11, 2012, four Americans were killed in Benghazi, a city in Libya on the Mediterranean Sea.

[Narrator / Historian]

What potentially happened in Libya?

[Leon Neyfakh]

In the city of Benghazi, not only.

[Narrator / Historian]

Did the attackers storm the building in.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Benghazi, the attack began when a group of armed assailants broke into a diplomatic compound operated by the State Department. It ended nearly eight hours later with the bombing of a secret CIA base nearby.

[Narrator / Historian]

First they attacked it with RPG rifles.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Then they opened fire on it with machine guns. Among the victims was the American Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

[Narrator / Historian]

And again, his name is John Christopher.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Stevens and he was born in northern California in 1960. Stevens had been posted in Libya on and off for the better part of five years. On the night of the attack, he died of smoke inhalation after the assailants set fire to the villa where he was hiding from them. Afterwards, it seemed like all anyone in the United States wanted to talk about was whose fault.

[Narrator / Historian]

It was the Obama administration resisting responsibility. There's a lot of dispute when the.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Administration knew how dangerous the situation was in Benghazi, the situation, who had let it happen? Who had failed to stop it once it started? Whose lack of vigilance had allowed the attackers to do as much damage as they did?

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

Should they have had more advanced warning?

[Leon Neyfakh]

Should they have sent more security?

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

A question that usually got skipped over as if the answer were self evident was what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi to begin with? All anyone seemed interested in was that the American mission in Libya had failed, not what the mission had actually been.

[Narrator / Historian]

My name is Chris Stevens and I'm excited to continue the great work we've started building a solid partnership between the United States and Libya to help you, the Libyan people, achieve your goals.

[Leon Neyfakh]

For more than 40 years, Libya had been ruled by a violent and eccentric dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

[Narrator / Historian]

We read that you are mad.

[Leon Neyfakh]

You know that those things have been printed. Gaddafi had long been regarded in the west as an unparalleled menace. Before Bin Laden, Gaddafi was the face of international terrorism.

[Narrator / Historian]

He's been called the world's number one terrorist, a madman who exports terrorism around the world.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Ronald Reagan once memorably called Gaddafi the mad dog of the Middle East. What I had forgotten, or never really absorbed in the first place, was that during the early 2000s under the Bush administration, the United States had reconciled with Gaddafi. We lifted sanctions, we established diplomatic relations, we even accepted his help in pursuing suspected terrorists.

[Narrator / Historian]

The United States may have a new ally in the war on terror. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi says American oil companies.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Were doing business with Libya. Libya for the first time in decades. In Tripoli, Libya's capital city, the State Department opened a new American embassy. As you'll hear, that was why Chris Stevens first came to Libya back in 2007.

[Narrator / Historian]

Muammar Gaddafi's regime has shown excellent cooperation against terrorism and dismantled its nuclear weapons.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Back then I wasn't paying much attention to international news and I certainly wasn't paying attention to Libya. I was just graduating from college in 2007. I had heard of Gaddafi, but that was about it. I was only slightly more tuned in in 2011 when the Arab Spring swept into Libya and forced Gaddafi out of power as part of a US backed revolution.

[Narrator / Historian]

The uprising against Gaddafi broke out in.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Mid February and anti regime protests quickly spread across the vast desert country of 6 million people. But even then, I just wasn't that invested or informed. So when I saw reports in September of 2012 about an attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, I had no context for it. To be honest, I didn't even really think of Benghazi as a place. Instead, I experienced it as an American political scandal. I associated the word Benghazi with a drawn out controversy that had spawned endless conspiracy theories and captivated the Republican Party.

[Narrator / Historian]

Benghazi gate, the political cover up of some kind.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The regime keeps lying about it.

[Narrator / Historian]

I think it could be as bad as Watergate, but nobody died in Watergate. The White House consigned those people to death. We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. You put two and two together.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

I wanted to make this podcast because I had a strong suspicion that I was missing something. That by not knowing what really happened in Benghazi or who it had happened to, I was checked out on something really important. Because in retrospect, the Benghazi attack looks incredibly consequential for Libya certainly, but also for the United States.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Even though the scandal has a reputation, especially among liberals, as a nuisance and a distraction, it really changed history. Among other things, it led directly to Hillary Clinton's email scandal. So if you're someone who thinks Clinton's emails cost her the 2016 election, you could make the case that Benghazi took down a presidency no less than Watergate did.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

What I've realized after dozens of interviews with people who watched the Benghazi story unfold from up close, is that there are very specific reasons why the scandal had such longevity. Together, they tell a story about political warfare in Americahow it was waged in the pre Trump era through the media and the justice system and Congress, and how it laid the groundwork for the politics we live with today. But Benghazi is not just an American story. It's also about America's place in the world and how after eight years of George W. Bush and the war on terror, the Obama administration set out to change the country's image abroad. At the height of the scandal, a lot of people were asking, sometimes earnestly, often performatively, why did Ambassador Chris Stevens die that night in Benghazi? And what I've learned is there is an answer to that question. But all the noise around the scandal made it incredibly hard to see it clearly in real time. It turns out to understand the truth about Benghazi, you have to understand what America was trying to achieve there. You have to know what was supposed to happen in Benghazi in a perfect world instead of what did. I'm Leon Naifak from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Benghazi.

[Narrator / Historian]

Obama left four Americans to die in Benghazi.

[Leon Neyfakh]

There is a certain self fulfilling prophecy to outrage.

[Ethan Chorin]

Wild conspiracy theories.

[Narrator / Historian]

Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong.

[Leon Neyfakh]

It was a fucking mess. It was really hard to figure out.

[Ethan Chorin]

What was going on.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

They're shooting through the door.

[Chris Grimes]

I turned to the ambassador and said, if they blow the locks, I'm going to start shooting.

[Leon Neyfakh]

And when I die, I want you to keep on fighting.

[Chris Grimes]

You can't understand the story of Libya if you don't know what's going on in Benghazi.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Omar Gaddafi is not leaving without a fight.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

Episode 1 the Dictator in which Muammar Gaddafi and the United States, after decades of hostility, discover they have a common enemy. We'll be right back.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

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[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

2025 imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

[Leon Neyfakh]

And they're saying like, okay, pull this.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Until this, pull that, turn this. It's just I can do my eyes closed. I'm Manny.

[Leon Neyfakh]

I'm Noah.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

This is Devin.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

And on our new show, no Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence.

[Ethan Chorin]

Those who lack expertise, lack the expertise.

[Chris Grimes]

They need to recognize that they lack expertise.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run, right? I'm looking at this thing. See, listen to no Such thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chris Grimes]

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[Leon Neyfakh]

Hussein El Shafi was 20 years old when he was arrested in 1989 for criticizing Muammar Gaddafi.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I was in the fourth semester, like a second year that time, and they just knocked on my door. They put my hands in a handcuff.

[Leon Neyfakh]

El Shafi was born and raised in Benghazi. At the time of his arrest, he was studying engineering at a local university.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

They took me to one of those. They call it like Murabba Emni, which means the security district for the area.

[Leon Neyfakh]

El Shafi's crime was that he spoke up against the regime during a student forum on the Green Book, Gaddafi's rambling manifesto.

[Narrator / Historian]

He has compiled his thinking into a green book, a blending of the Koran and Gaddafi's own brooding thoughts.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

He calls it Navariya Talita, means the third solution for the world. You know, as capitalism is dying and the socialism is dying, I am the solution for the world.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Al Shafi was required to attend the Green Book forum in order to receive his degree. But he was tired of having to pretend to take Gaddafi seriously as a thinker. And he was tired of the regime having control over his mind.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

There is no library in none of our Libyan cities if you want to read. The only books was brought by Gaddafi's authority and put on the shelves. No voice above Gaddafi's voice, you know.

[Leon Neyfakh]

And so Al Shafi stood up in front of his classmates and denounced Gaddafi for closing Libya off from the rest of the world. Even the Soviet Union was starting to open up. He said it was time for Libya to change, too. El Shafi was arrested at his home a few days later. He was taken first by bus, then by plane to Tripoli, about 400 miles west of Benghazi. El Shafi was blindfolded and handcuffed throughout the journey. So when he was led into a prison cell, he didn't know where he was.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

There are small holes in the walls between cells, so I was able to talk to one of those people. He was before us, said where we are? He said, you're in Muslim body. Welcome to Muslim.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Abu Saleem was an infamous detention facility known for housing political prisoners, the dark.

[Narrator / Historian]

Heart of Gaddafi's oppression.

[Paul Richter]

Abu Saleem Prison.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The name itself so frightening that Libyans avoid saying it. Abu Saleem was full of people the Gaddafi regime considered enemies. Historically, opposition to Gaddafi in Libya had been tied up with religion. Although Gaddafi identified as Muslim, many Libyans came to see him as an apostate advancing a secular ideology. These critics included hardline Islamists who belonged to groups like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which supported the violent overthrow of the regime. But there were also people like Hussein Al Shafi who opposed political violence and were unaffiliated with any organization.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

He claims those are Islamists, but I was, yeah, I was going to the mosque. I was very conservative that time, but I did not believe belong to any group, like an armed group or anything like this.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Al Shafi says the Gaddafi regime branded anyone they didn't like a radical Islamist and that many ordinary devout Muslims like him were swept up in the dragnet.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

He doesn't say I'm against Muslim because he claims too that he is a Muslim. But he claims that his problem with the Islamic parties that was a pretext, means that he taken as a reason to kill or to demolish his opponents.

[Leon Neyfakh]

It's worth saying here that the meaning of the term Islamist depends on who you're talking to. At its most basic, it refers to someone who subscribes to a political ideology based on Islamic principles. And under that umbrella you can find both avowed hardliners and moderates. The word Islamism was introduced to English back in the 1980s as a less pejorative alternative to Islamic fundamentalism. Some people still use it that way, as a neutral word that imagines Islamism as just another political orientation. Others associate Islamism with violence and intolerance. For them, an Islamist government based on any form of Sharia or Islamic law is inherently undemocratic. At Abu Saleem, Hussein Al Shafi was lucky to be classified as a low risk inmate and kept separate from those suspected of being violent extremists. Still, he was beaten and tortured and never given any indication of when he would be released. Other former inmates from Abu Saleem have reported being attacked by dogs, subjected to deafening nightly broadcasts of Gaddafi's speeches and and prodded with electric cables. When I interviewed Al Shafi, he had to take a break because the phone was hurting his ear. It had been mutilated at Abu Saleem.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I try to use this ear, not that ear, because this one cut in the jail.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Oh my God.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

You see my ear? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's touching the thing, the AB, you know. Sorry about that.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In 1995, about six years into Al Shafi's imprisonment, life at Abu Saleem became more cruel and more isolating. It happened following a jailbreak, after which inmates were forbidden from going outside and medical care was withheld from those who needed it.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

Things getting worse and worse and worse. Some people die, some people have cancers, you name it. Heart pressure, and some people has, like, stomach issues. Some of them, they said, we dying slowly, guys.

[Leon Neyfakh]

As conditions worsened, a group of inmates planned a protest. And on June 28, 1996, they overpowered a guard, took his keys and started letting people out of their cells. In the ensuing chaos, the prison guards reportedly killed seven inmates. Later that day, Gaddafi's intelligence Chief arrived at the prison to survey the situation. Before leaving, he promised a delegation of inmates that conditions at Abu Salim would improve and that those who needed medical attention would receive it instead. The following morning, the prisoners of Abu Selim, more than a thousand of them, were marched into the courtyards adjacent to their cell blocks. Al Shafi remembers being taken outside and being ordered to lie face down on the ground.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

They came in the morning, they said, okay, room by room, they take them out. They tie their hands and they turn around facing the wall in the yard.

[Leon Neyfakh]

El Shafi estimates that there were about 1,300 men lined up in the prison yards when he started to hear shooting.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

My friend, he's a cardiologist now in Ireland. His name, Savar. He was holding my hand tight. I said, no. I said, they scare us, that's all. They're not going to kill them all. They want to scare us. They try and teach us a lesson, you know? He said, pray for our friends, their souls. Raising up the gun.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Al Shafi and his friend, whom I also interviewed, didn't know if they were next, but from the sound of the gunfire, they could tell the guards were moving from one section of the prison to another.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

The shootings continued for at least three and a half hours. The last shot was individual, like they finishing up, you know.

[Leon Neyfakh]

El Shafi thinks he and the other men in his cell block were spared because of their low risk classification. He says there were only about 300 survivors. After the shooting ended, prison guards enlisted some of them to help clean the watches and rings. They were taking off the bodies and.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

They have blood everywhere on them. And I said, oh, my gosh. They're stealing their rings and their watches. Oh, my gosh.

[Leon Neyfakh]

For years, the massacre at Abu Saleem was kept secret from the world. Even in Libya, it was nothing more than a rumor.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

No one knows nothing. All what they know. People heard shooting and they heard sirens that night. And some of them, they said, they kill him. Some of them, they said, no, he just killed some of them. No one knows anything.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The families of those who had been killed were not informed that their loved ones were dead. Instead, they were merely told that they could no longer visit them. In many cases, family members continued bringing letters and food to the prison and leaving them with the guards, who said nothing. According to Al Shafi, new inmates who arrived at Abu Saleem in the years after the massacre would find bullets lodged in the prison yard walls.

[Narrator / Historian]

There is a figure emerging in the Middle East. He is Colonel Muammar Al Gaddafi, and he wants to Unify the Arabs and restore the Arab crescent of nations to their ancient prestige and power.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Before Muammar Gaddafi built prisons for his domestic enemies, he made a name for himself by standing up to his foreign ones. Gaddafi came to power in 1969, replacing the Western backed King Idris by staging a military coup in Benghazi. Gaddafi was just 27 years old, a handsome young army officer who projected strength and vigor and who was embraced by many Libyans.

[Narrator / Historian]

Libya was an obscure desert kingdom. Today it is on the center stage of Middle east politics and the man responsible is under 30. A strong and asymmetric handsomeness. Like the antihero movie stars of the.

[Leon Neyfakh]

60S, Gaddafi, who was born in a Bedouin tent off the Mediterranean coast, positioned himself as a representative of the Arab world and a challenger to Western imperialism.

[Narrator / Historian]

A revolutionary who believes people should rule themselves, not be ruled by government. If those ambitions seem grandiose for the young leader of a desert land of a mere 2 million people, it should be quickly pointed out that Gaddafi has one powerful asset. Money. Oil money makes Libya's young leftist strongman a power in the Arab world.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In a move that defends his early years in power, Gaddafi forced Western oil companies to renegotiate their export agreements with Libya.

[Narrator / Historian]

In March, Gaddafi's deputy Prime minister negotiated a new agreement with Western oil companies. Libya is now making twice as much money from oil as when Gaddafi and his young officers overthrew King Idris two years ago.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The standoff ended up shifting the balance of power towards Arab countries like Libya that possessed huge amounts of oil and away from Western countries that depended on it.

[Narrator / Historian]

Now Libya is the world's sixth largest producer of oil, the fourth largest exporter. Enough oil will be shipped this year to earn Libya more than $2 billion.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Starting in the 1970s, Gaddafi put his oil money to work providing training and weapons for rebel groups around the world. He supported Latin American leftists like the Sandinistas, the PLO, the South African Anti Apartheid Movement and the IRA in Northern Ireland.

[Narrator / Historian]

Each year, the IRA collects a cheque for $2 million from one of Gaddafi's.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Money managers in Tripoli.

[Narrator / Historian]

Round the globe, dozens of scenes like this are being enacted for the benefit of Gaddafi's crusade.

[Leon Neyfakh]

According to one estimate, more than 30 different organizations sent fighters to train in Libya.

[Narrator / Historian]

At various points, Libya's strongman leader, Mumar Gaddafi spends an estimated $200 million a year year arming and training terrorists and insurgents.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Gaddafi also spent a lot of money building up his own arsenal.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

Per capita, Libya under Gaddafi in the 70s was the biggest Purchaser of weapons in the world. He was like a compulsive shopper.

[Leon Neyfakh]

This is Lindsay Hilsam, a reporter for Channel 4 news in the UK who has covered Libya extensively. In her book Sandstorm, Hilsam describes how Muammar Gaddafi came to loom over the American imagination as a symbol of violence and chaos.

[Narrator / Historian]

He's the ultimate villain, the godfather of international terrorism. A one dimensional, erratic, irrational, unbalanced, two bit dictator. A central character in real world acts of terror as well as the star of a number of best selling thrillers based on the premise that one day he would get the bomb. He's very volatile and opportunistic.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In 1981, Newsweek put Gaddafi on its cover under the headline the Most Dangerous man in the World. Technically there was a question mark in the headline and if you read the article the answer was maybe. But the COVID accurately captured Gaddafi's reputation in America.

[Narrator / Historian]

He has three hatred of Israel, hatred of the United States for supporting Israel, and a dream of a united Arab world.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Libya became synonymous with terrorism. If you remember Back to the Future, which came out in 1985, Doc Brown is pursued by crazed terrorists from Libya who want to kill him for selling them a phony nuclear bomb.

[Narrator / Historian]

Oh my God, they found me. I don't know how, but they found me. Who? Who?

[Hussein Al Shafi]

Who do you think?

[Ethan Chorin]

The Libyans.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Gaddafi became even more closely associated with terrorism in 1986 when his regime was implicated in a bombing in Berlin.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

Reporter Lindsay Hilsam again in 1986, he provided the weapons and the training and his agents attacked La Belle Discotheque in Berlin.

[Narrator / Historian]

For the second time this week, Americans.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Have been the victims of a terrorist attack in Europe. This time the target was a nightclub in West Berlin, a favorite of American soldiers.

[Narrator / Historian]

Little was left of the west berlin disco. Over 150 were injured, about 70 of them American servicemen.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

And it was quite clear from very early on that it was the Libyans behind that attack.

[Narrator / Historian]

Police are looking for a pattern to support their belief that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi sponsored the attack.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Two Americans were killed and 79 were injured in the Berlin attack. Ronald Reagan responded with airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi.

[Narrator / Historian]

At 7 o' clock this evening, Eastern time, air and naval forces of the the United States launched a series of strikes against the headquarters, terrorist facilities and military assets that support Muammar Gaddafi's subversive activities.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The bombs were not enough to convince Gaddafi to retreat. Neither were the economic sanctions that Reagan had imposed on him in 1988. Gaddafi was accused of another major terrorist attack, this one targeting a passenger jet floor flying from London to New York. As pan AM Flight 103 passed over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, a bomb exploded and the plane went down. In a few short, violent moments, 270 people died. People from 21 countries filled these coffins. 189 of them were American. Gaddafi denied having anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing. But when evidence of Libyan involvement was uncovered, the attack came to define him in the eyes of the West.

[Narrator / Historian]

He's an egomaniac who would trigger World War three to make the headlines. He's the world's principal terrorist and trainer of terrorists.

[Leon Neyfakh]

He's dangerous to peace. As Gaddafi's profile rose around the world, the violence he perpetrated against foreign targets overshadowed his brutal repression of the Libyan people.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

The violence was very visible to ordinary Libyans because they did see people hanging in the streets. And everybody knew somebody who had a relative who had been hanged or who had been imprisoned. But it didn't seem to be very obvious to people outside Libya because Libya was a closed country and very few people were allowed into Libya from the outside.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The regime's secrecy makes it difficult to know exactly how common public executions were, but there are documented instances of dissidents in Libya being hanged or executed by firing squad. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, Hussein Al Shafi told me he remembers hearing about hangings before he was sent to Abu Saleem.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I remember in 1984, Gaddafiwah used to hang any opposition groups, you know, on the. Like a basketball stadium, you know, like arena we have here, like Spectrum center, you know, can you imagine, you wake up in the morning, your governor taking people, hang them in the stadium in front of everybody. He did this before many times in the college, in University, Libya University, like in TR or Benghazi. He takes them and he hang them and he kills the students because they are a part of the opposition group.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Al Shafi never attended an execution in person, but he did see it happen on tv.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I see this once and then I go cry, you know, I go hide in some, in a room, cry. I see, like, he's hanging people. And the crowd, the crowd supporting this. Oh, Gaddafi. Yeah, kill them. Kill them.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The 1996 massacre at Abu Saleem is now considered Gaddafi's most brutal act, the pinnacle of his campaign of violence against the Libyan people. But when it first happened, there was so little information about it that few took notice. Reuters did report that some kind of deadly clash between inmates and guards had taken place at the prison and Amnesty International called on Gaddafi to order an investigation. But that effort didn't go anywhere. Gaddafi did not even acknowledge the massacre, and the bodies of the dead were reportedly dumped in a mass grave that has never been found. It wasn't until four years later that Al Shafi was released from Abu Saleem. It happened on June 1, 2000, more than a decade after his arrest. He was never told why, just as he was never formally charged or convicted of anything in the first place. Al Shafi went home to Benghazi and started trying to get a passport. He wanted to leave Libya and escape the Qaddafi regime for good. The passport still hadn't come when Al Shafi started seeing reports that world leaders, including from the United States, were changing their stance on Gaddafi and inviting him in from the cold.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

The orchestrated announcements of the deal in.

[Narrator / Historian]

Britain and Washington portrayed Gaddafi's change of.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

Heart as the result of President Bush's.

[Narrator / Historian]

Get them before they get you doctrines.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The man who had imprisoned Al Shafi and killed so many of his fellow inmates was being officially rehabilitated. After decades of railing against the imperialist powers of Europe and the United States, Gaddafi was finding common cause with the West.

[Narrator / Historian]

American oil companies and the Libyan government could benefit from Libya's newly announced plan to give up trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Al Shafi remembers being enraged when he heard that one of Gaddafi's sons was coming to the United States for military meetings at the State Department. Al Shafi assumed that it meant the US was going to start selling Gaddafi weapons.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I said, politics, the money, people first. If you invite Gaddafi sons and you give him weapons, US administration is a killer. Same freaking Gaddafi.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

The process of normalizing relations between Gaddafi's Libya and the United States began towards the end of the Clinton administration. Gaddafi was desperate to have sanctions against Libya lifted. And as a first step, he agreed in 1999 to surrender two Libyans who were suspected of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing. But it wasn't until the Bush years and the start of the war on terror that the relationship between the US and Libya really started to improve.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi was spooked. He became convinced that if he didn't make certain concessions, he would be next. And so, after months of secret talks with the Bush White House, Qaddafi agreed to give up his nascent nuclear program and to allow weapons inspectors into Libya.

[Narrator / Historian]

Libya's surprise announcement that it will give up its weapons of mass destruction is reverberated Liberating worldwide.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The Bush administration hailed it as a diplomatic triumph.

[Narrator / Historian]

Today in Tripoli, Libya has begun the process of rejoining the community of nations. Its good faith will be returned.

[Ethan Chorin]

Without the Iraq war, the trajectory of the US Libya relationship would have been much, much different.

[Leon Neyfakh]

This is Ethan Chorin. He was sent to Tripoli by the State Department in 2004. It was his first posting as a member of the Foreign Service.

[Ethan Chorin]

I had a great privilege of being one of the few diplomats who was sent to Libya to help open up what would eventually become the embassy.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit the Colonel, explained to me that making a deal with Gaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House. As a follow up to the invasion of Iraq.

[Ethan Chorin]

You had the neoconservative cabal in Washington looking for the next move, essentially, and they weren't interested in Gaddafi until essentially it dawned on a few people that the relationship with Qaddafi could actually solve several of the problems that the Iraq war was not solving. As in, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, but Gaddafi ostensibly had something that you could call such a program, and he was willing to give it up.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Chorin's point here was that Gaddafi's weapons program was extremely rudimentary and that sacrificing it was mostly a symbolic gesture for the Bush White House. The more practical benefits of reconciling with Gaddafi were one, that American companies could start doing business in Libya, and two, that the Gaddafi regime could be helpful in the war on terror.

[Narrator / Historian]

Gaddafi says intelligence agencies in Libya and the US are exchanging information.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The terrorists America was now hunting in the Middle east and North Africa were Gaddafi's longtime enemies too. All through the 90s, he had been at war with Islamist groups suspected of having connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, in 1998, the Gaddafi regime had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on the basis that Al Qaeda had been working with radicals in Libya. Reporter Lindsay Hilsam.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

Again, Gaddafi became afraid of the Islamists, and a lot of Islamists went to Afghanistan and they joined Al Qaeda and they became very senior in Al Qaeda. Their aim was to overthrow Gaddafi, but they were part of this international jihad. And of course, that was the international jihad which, you know, on 911 flew into the Twin Towers and murdered all the Americans.

[Leon Neyfakh]

It was a convenient alliance. The United States got access to intelligence from a government operating in close proximity to many extremist groups. And Gaddafi got an ally in his quest to eliminate one of the only major threats to his power.

[Narrator / Historian]

Coliban leader Muammar al Gaddafi is now being called an enemy of Islam by Al Qaeda.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Between all that and the oil contracts, it was enough to convince the White House that Gaddafi was worth the baggage.

[Narrator / Historian]

The first time in almost a quarter century the US has diplomatic ties with Libya.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The US mission and Tripoli have been been abandoned. In 1980, shortly after a crowd of demonstrators set the embassy on fire. Now American diplomats would be returning to Libya to build a new one.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

We'll be right back.

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[Leon Neyfakh]

Attention passengers. The the pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this. Until this, pull that, turn this. It's just I can do my eyes closed. I'm Manny.

[Leon Neyfakh]

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[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

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[Ethan Chorin]

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[Leon Neyfakh]

For a certain kind of diplomat, Libya was a dream assignment. A country everyone knew had been warped by decades of dictatorship, but which remained a black box. Ethan Chorin arrived in Libya in 2004 and he was excited.

[Ethan Chorin]

I was very eager. This was like, you know, exactly what I had joined the Foreign Service to do, to have a crazy experience where I felt like I could make an impact.

[Leon Neyfakh]

It was up to Chorin and his State Department colleagues to figure out what was going on in Libya, how the Gaddafi regime was running things, and what they wanted from their new relationship with America. Chorin was also tasked with briefing American companies on the Libyan market and writing an official State Department guide to doing business in the country.

[Ethan Chorin]

And effectively we were sent out there and told just to, you know, go find what you can find. We don't know much about this place, so see what you can do.

[Leon Neyfakh]

As Chorin was finding his feet in Tripoli, he was introduced over email to another diplomat who was also interested in Libya. Chris Stevens was working out of Washington, D.C. at the time, but he had made it known to his superiors at the State Department that he wanted to be posted in Libya at the next available opportunity.

[Ethan Chorin]

He was bidding on a position after me in Libya and he had just had this sort of enthusiasm. This is like one of the last places in the Middle east that's sort of completely off limits to Americans and unknown. And that clearly excited him and it's excited me.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Stevens had been in the Foreign service for about 20 years after starting and abandoning a career as an international trade lawyer.

[Paul Richter]

He could have led a comfortable Life in Washington, D.C. making a lot of money as a trade lawyer, but it wasn't enough for him.

[Leon Neyfakh]

This is journalist Paul Richter. He's the author of the book the Ambassadors, in which he details Chris Stevens tenure at the State Department.

[Paul Richter]

So at a rather old age, he went into the Foreign Service. It was basically kind of a second.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Career for him from the start. Stevens was particularly interested in the Middle east and North Africa. Before he put in his bid for a post in Libya, he had worked in Egypt Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem. He told friends he possessed a Jewish that drew him to the Arab world, a trait he apparently shared with a long line of Western diplomats.

[Paul Richter]

There's been a certain romance about the Middle east that goes back to T.E. lawrence and other British and Europeans who saw some mystery, some fascination that they didn't see in other parts of the world.

[Leon Neyfakh]

One of Stevens's chief influences was a book called the Arabists, which traces the history of American diplomacy in the Middle east from its roots in missionary work and British imperialism. This earlier generation of Middle east specialists was part of a long colonial history of Westerners romanticizing the Arab world. Starting in the 19th century, these diplomats and adventurers often wrote about the region as ancient, otherworldly and almost mystical.

[Paul Richter]

There is probably a colonialist dimension to it. Their attitude had some of that. There's something about the serenity, there's something about the harshness of the atmosphere and the beauty of the environment that draws them. And there's something about the exotic nature of the Arab world that they just can't find in other places and they keep going back to it.

[Leon Neyfakh]

As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he found there.

[Paul Richter]

He liked going out and enjoying goat meat cooked over a Bedouin campfire in the desert. He enjoyed talking to these Arabs who could tell you the history of their families going back many generations. These Arabs would talk about their distant relatives as if they died only a few years ago. And then later, Stevens would discover that they were talking about people who died centuries ago.

[Leon Neyfakh]

For Stevens, the US opening to Gaddafi was an opportunity to discover a place that had been closed off from the west for decades. In emails to Ethan Chorin, Stevens made clear how excited he was at the prospect of being posted there.

[Ethan Chorin]

Chris would write and ask something along the lines of, should I take, you know, is this as interesting as I think it is? I would describe what I was experiencing there and the positives and negatives, and I just had a sense that he. He understood and he too was willing to take some risks to have that kind of an experience.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In many ways, Stevens defining feature as a diplomat was his openness to risk and his willingness to sit down and talk to people whom others might have considered enemies. In 2006, when he was posted in Jerusalem, Stevens served as a liaison to the plo, the Palestine Liberation Organization.

[Narrator / Historian]

The Palestinian elections had a stunning outcome. A landslide victory for Hamas. Official results today showed the Islam.

[Leon Neyfakh]

That same year, when the militant group Hamas was elected to a majority in the Palestinian legislature. Stevens expressed hope that the United States would engage with them instead of writing them off as terrorists.

[Paul Richter]

After Hamas had won that election, Stevens wrote his closest friends and family and said, I hope the American side doesn't misinterpret this. I hope they understand that Islamists are not always villainous and maybe we can work, maybe we can find a way to deal with them.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In this respect, Stevens represented one side of a long standing debate in the world of American foreign policy about whether the United States should give the benefit of the doubt to Islamist political leaders in the Arab world. Stevens believed there were different kinds of Islamists. He once wrote that Islamist doesn't necessarily translate to extremist.

[Paul Richter]

I think he was always willing to open a conversation with people from pretty scary Islamist backgrounds. I tell a story about his meetings with one militia leader where he stayed up way into the night to debate East German political theory with this guy who'd been fighting as a jihadist in Afghanistan a couple of years before.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Stevens friendly posture towards Islamist groups distinguished him from some of his colleagues, including Ethan Chorin. Chorin believed then as now, that America must be supremely careful when dealing with Islamists, whether they're hardliners or moderates. When I spoke to Chorin, it was clear he was troubled by Stevens outlook on the Arab world and more specifically his approach to diplomacy in Libya. For Chorin, the tragedy of the Benghazi attack is that it might have been prevented if Stevens and his State Department colleagues back in Washington had taken the Islamist threat while more seriously.

[Ethan Chorin]

But this is at the heart of the Libya problem, is that there was this sort of long disjointed or absent period of many decades where the US Libya relationship was either non existent or very stressed. We didn't know who all the parties were. There were certainly clues, but we didn't know whom to trust. And there were people in Libya at the time, you know, before the attack who were basically saying, look, you Americans need to watch out because the people who you're dealing with are not your friends.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Knowing the difference between friends and enemies had always been a problem for the American mission in Libya. Two weeks after Chris Stevens first arrived in Tripoli in the summer of 2007, he was invited to Muammar Gaddafi's fortress for a banquet in honor of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Stevens was introduced to Gaddafi briefly on a receiving line. Journalist Paul Richter again.

[Paul Richter]

And he saw at this event Gaddafi's ambivalence toward the us. Gaddafi was hoping for a new relationship and he was hoping for trade deals, for weapons deals, for a new opening with the world provided by his new friends, the Americans. And yet his antipathy for the Americans still remained.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Gaddafi did not try to hide this antipathy. As Stevens observed in letters to his family, the dinner for Sarkozy was staged directly in view of a building that had been destroyed by American airstrikes in 1986. Gaddafi had commemorated it with a plaque recalling the failed American aggression. Near where Gaddafi and Sarkozy were sitting was a massive gold sculpture of a fist crushing an American fighter jet.

[Paul Richter]

And there was music played at the event, a patriotic scene song about fighting off the enemies of Libya. And this old anti American feeling that had sustained his regime for so many decades was still there.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Despite this apparent tension, Chris Stevens and his colleagues in Tripoli tried to build relationships with Gaddafi's inner circle, most importantly, his sons, who are widely regarded as the future of the country.

[Narrator / Historian]

Muammar Gaddafi has been married twice and has eight boys, biological children and two adopted.

[Leon Neyfakh]

In particular, Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam, emerged as his father's heir apparent and made great efforts to present himself to the west as a reasonable moderating influence on the regime. Sayf al Islam may be the most recognized and outspoken of those offspring. He attended the London School of Economics, seen as an advocate of reform. By this point, Hussein Al Shafi, the former prisoner at Abu Saleem, had finally gotten his passport. At one point during the three year process, he had to submit a letter addressing Gaddafi personally. In it, Al Shafi said he needed to get to Egypt or Tunisia to seek medical help for his wife.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

I wrote a big petition, man, you'll be laughing if you see it like this. Muammar Gaddafi, my president, my leader, my God. I am the former prisoners with no charge applying for nest. I promise I will defend Libya. Revolution. I will defend Mu. Gaddafi. I love you Gaddafi. I will be a good person, a good citizens. I will protect the green book in my heart. I love green book. Please, your follower, your lover, Hussein Al Shafi.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

For all that, El Shafi finally got his passport. Once he did, he and his wife were able to fly to Switzerland and from there they boarded a flight to the United States. When I interviewed el Shafi in 2021, he was living in Charlotte, North Carolina with his family and operating a luxury car service. By this point, he was used to telling the story of the Abu Saleem massacre. One of the first things he did when he arrived in the US was recount what he had witnessed to a group of activists working with Human Rights.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Watch back In Libya, Al Shafi had kept his story to himself out of fear that the regime would kill him for spreading it. Remember, Gaddafi had barely acknowledged the massacre and the government had not even informed the victims families that their loved ones were dead. Lindsay Hilsam again.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

Bit by bit, some people were released. And so they went to see the families of the men who'd been killed and gave them the bad news. And then the government started to issue some death certificates which didn't say what had happened. They just said, you know, your relative, your husband, your son, your father died. And so they had some kind of official word of it. And then the families began to join together because it became clear that these weren't just deaths, these were murders.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

Nobody knew anything about that fateful day for many years, until the relatives of.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The victims began to protest the killings and demand an explanation. Human rights lawyers in Benghazi took on the family members as clients and filed a legal claim demanding information from the government. In 2007, the lawsuit gave rise to the first public protest movement in modern Libyan history.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

The relatives held protest rallies outside the Justice Department in Bengal after they heard.

[Leon Neyfakh]

About what came to be known as Bloody Saturday at Abu Saleem prison.

[Lindsay Hilsam]

Now, this was a very bold move. Nobody demonstrated or protested in Gaddafi's Libya, but they didn't really care anymore. They'd lost everything. And so they started to do this, demanding justice, demanding compensation. And they were really a new group of opponents to the regime with an emotional power. And it was quite hard for the authorities just to lock them up and kill them, because most of them were old ladies.

[Leon Neyfakh]

The regime found the protesters impossible to ignore. And at the urging of Sayf al Islam, Gaddafi's ostensibly moderate son, the government started sending out death notices to hundreds of families, finally confirming after more than 20 years that their loved ones had been killed. Still, the protest continued. Every Saturday, the families would gather at the Benghazi courthouse, holding up photos of the people they had lost and praying.

[Podcast Advertiser / Narrator]

Demanding the bodies of their loved ones from the Gaddafi regime.

[Leon Neyfakh]

For a while, it was just about the only visible form of dissent in Gaddafi's Libya. But that was about to change. And for the second time in less than a decade, the United States government would be re evaluating its relationship with Muammar Gaddafi.

[Pushkin Industries Announcer / Producer]

On the next episode of Fiasco, Libya erupts in revolution. Gaddafi threatens to destroy Benghazi and America decides to get involved.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Did you feel relieved when you heard that the intervention had happened? Did it lift the pressure?

[Narrator / Historian]

Yes, yes, all of us, you know, he would have destroyed Benghazi he didn't want Benghazi anymore.

[Leon Neyfakh]

For a list of books, articles and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in our show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Ula Culpa, Sam Lee, and me, Leon Naifak, with editorial support from Sam Gramfelson and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher was Frances Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Valli, and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester and Joel St. Julian. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfiel, and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by teddy blanks at ChipsNY. Copyright counsel provided by Peter Yassi at Yassi Butler, PLLC thanks to arXiv.org, murad, Idris Nina, Ernest, Tay Glass, Carrie Baker, Ismail Swaya, Ellen Horn, Ben Ryder, James Brandt and Rachel Ward. Special thanks to Luminary and thank you for listening.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Why are TSA rules so confusing?

[Paul Richter]

You got a hoodie on.

[Leon Neyfakh]

Take it off.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

I'm Manny. I'm Noah, this is Devin and we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called no Such Thing where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming at me? I can't expect what to do now if the rule was the same, go off on me.

[Leon Neyfakh]

I deserve it, you know? Lock him up.

[No Such Thing Podcast Hosts (Manny, Noah, Devin)]

Listen to no Such thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hussein Al Shafi]

No Such Thing.

[Chris Grimes]

Barbie's gone blockbuster, OnlyFans is rewriting the rules for creators, and ESPN is leading the game in sports media. I'm Chris Grimes, the FT's LA bureau chief, and on September 17th and 18th I'll be hosting the Financial Times Business of Entertainment Summit in West Hollywood, where CEOs from, Mattel, OnlyFans, ESPN and many more will tackle the future of entertainment. Head to ft.com entertainment to unlock your exclusive FT discount. Use code FT podcast to save 20%.

[Leon Neyfakh]

This is an iHeart podcast.