As I understand it, the embassies are under threats often and they can’t shut things down every other day. So, they have to decide whether a threat is out of the ordinary or sounds more serious or imminent, etc. Who is responsible for making the decision & what the criteria are, I’m not sure.
I would think it would partly have something to do with where the threat is coming from, and that some decisions are made locally and then phoned in to the State Dept to ask for advice or permission to take a certain action.
All of our embassy and consular buildings in Libya had been left unprotected at the express orders of Hillary after the Islamist takeover. AQ knew it was an easy mark, and while Stevens may have been too trusting (as was posted elsewhere, he was a Third Worldist, one of those people who falls in love with a primitive culture and thinks he can help the people in it), he wasn’t responsible for his death.
He had an appointment in Benghazi with officials - he was actually signing a deal and opening a new cultural center, of all things - and did not travel there on 9/11, but was already at the consular outpost with his staff. His aide who was killed tweeted the night before that he had seen the local “security” photographing the building and wondered if they would all be murdered, but nothing was done to provide any more security.
It was the policies of the US government with its refusal to defend against the Islamic terrorists that led to his death.
Yesterday, AQ issued a communique, which I read in the Spanish press, that said that anyone who meets any American ambassador or emissary must follow the example of “the descendants of Omar Al Mujtar (the Libyans)” and kill him. They also said that their objective was to drive US embassies out of any “Muslim countries” and that Muslims in the US should attack diplomats and diplomatic facilities in the US as well because “they had a better opportunity to do so.”