In late August, the top-ranking U.S. military commander in Africa toured Libya — and had a cordial meeting in Benghazi with a notorious warlord: Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, called on Hifter, the leader of the Libyan National Army, during his series of meetings with top officials in Libya to “further cooperation” between the U.S. and that nation. Hifter “expressed a desire to expand security engagement with the U.S.” when they spoke, according to an AFRICOM press release.

Left out of the AFRICOM announcement is any mention that Hifter is a notorious “warlord,” according to members of Congress, whose LNA, which the State Department lumps in with “other nonstate actors, including foreign fighters and mercenaries,” has been accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and gross violations of human rights.

In 2019, I watched as Hifter’s forces lobbed munitions into the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, laying waste to civilian neighborhoods. Later, as I walked through the ruins of shattered homes, battered apartment buildings, and wrecked shops, the unmistakable scent of death hung in the air. That same year, Amnesty International documented indiscriminate strikes often using inaccurate weapons, in violation of the laws of war, by Hifter’s LNA. A year later, Human Rights Watch reported that fighters affiliated with Hifter “apparently tortured, summarily executed, and desecrated corpses of opposing fighters.” A U.S. State Department........

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