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We devote all of our selections today to Benghazi and aftermath. Streetwise Professor posts on modern-day McClellans.
The administration’s efforts to escape accountability for the clusterf*ck in Benghazi on September 11 grow more disgusting by the day. These efforts betray a nauseating combination of cowardice, dissimulation, and projection.
Yesterday, Hillary responded to revelations that within hours of the commencement of the assault, that the State Department, Pentagon, FBI, Intel agencies-and yes, the White House-had received an email stating that an Al Qaeda-linked group had claimed responsibility for the attack. Hillary’s response? How dare you-DARE YOU-”cherry pick” intelligence.
How’s that for projection, eh? What. Fixating on the (Mohammed video) wasn’t cherry picking? Really? Look at all the revelations that have come out demonstrating that the State Department and the White House had numerous reports to the effect that this was a planned terrorist assault. Yes, the evidence was conflicting. But they decided to run with the MoVid story-even going to the extreme of recording a sick-making apology video. They picked the most rotten cherry from the bunch and went with that. And they excoriate others for cherry picking-even when those others pick far better ones, plural. …
Craig Pirrong also says Leon Panetta has brought friendly fire on himself when he says the situation in Benghaze was too confusing.
There were drones in the air. There was a trained special operator on the roof of the annex lazing targets (while manning a machine gun). CIA personnel were in constant radio contact with their commanders. They were providing the coordinates of the mortars firing on the annex.
In brief, Panetta and others in DC had about as good real time information as you can possibly expect in a combat situation. Certainty? No: that’s not possible. But it is hard to imagine having better information. So not “knowing what’s going on” is not a valid excuse.
Is it a coincidence that multiple sources unloaded these devastating details the day after Panetta spoke?
I think not. The events themselves, the coverup (of which Panetta’s remarks are a part), and the attempts to pin blame on the intelligence agencies have no doubt made very many people very angry. People who know things.
Count on more fire to come.
Bill Kristol posts on what that incoming fire towards the administration might look like as Petraeus throws Obama under the bus.
Breaking news on Benghazi: the CIA spokesman, presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus, has put out this statement: “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”
So who in the government did tell “anybody” not to help those in need? Someone decided not to send in military assets to help those Agency operators. Would the secretary of defense make such a decision on his own? No.
It would have been a presidential decision. There was presumably a rationale for such a decision. What was it? When and why—and based on whose counsel obtained in what meetings or conversations—did President Obama decide against sending in military assets to help the Americans in need?
Back to Streetwise Professor as Craig posts on President Gutsy Call and the questions Obama should answer.
… To reprise some famous questions: what did he know and when did he know it? To which I add: and what did he do about it? What was he doing during the 7 hours of the assault? Was he in the White House situation room? If not, why not? If not, who was? Was he in communication? What decisions did he make? What was his reasoning?
The answers to these obvious questions don’t require him to await the completion of an investigation. They require him to open his mouth and tell the country what he knew; what he did; and why he did it. President, investigate thyself.
The guy who is in love with first person pronouns (have any doubts about that, check out the transcript of the last debate) loves to talk about himself and his wonderfulness. Why so shy now?
I think I know exactly why. He is running as Mr. Gutsy Call, the guy who made the daring decision to take out Osama. If it turns out that he made a not so gutsy call here, or didn’t make any call at all, that whole meme is shot to hell. And other than that, WTF does he have to run on?
There’s a big difference between approving execution of a plan that has been meticulously crafted, critiqued, and practiced over a period of months on the one hand, and making a split second call in a fast-developing situation with less than perfect information on the other. The real gutsy calls-gutsy in terms of courage, and in terms of having to rely on gut instinct rather than analysis and debate-are the split second kind.
It is an awesome responsibility to have to make either kind of decision, but especially the latter. I think that people would be understanding if he could provide a reasonably defensible rationale of his decision. There is usually a tendency to rally around the president, and to give him the benefit of the doubt about hard decisions, especially those involving combat: Jimmy Carter actually got a positive bump after the Desert One disaster. If he truly thinks it was the right call, he should be able to defend it, and should have a receptive audience.
Which leads me to the following observation: his refusal to answer any questions about Benghazi means that he can’t defend his decision.
It is the president’s bad luck all this came to a head as Mark Steyn was looking for a topic for his weekly column.
“We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s re-election campaign.
You’ll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.
We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’ father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”
Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video …
… Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state’s most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?
If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.” Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser?
Summing up, James Delingpole of London’s Telegraph says Benghazi will do to Obama what Al Qaeda did to Chris Stevens.
… The Obama administration’s duplicity and mendacity is nothing those of us who’ve been observing, aghast, his disastrous foreign policy approaches since at least his infamous Cairo surrender monkey speech couldn’t have predicted. And while it’s nice to see his chickens coming home to roost and encouraging to realise that his chances of becoming a second-term president are diminishing by the minute, it’s hardly a situation you might call – hmm what’s the word? Oh yeah – “optimal” for the grieving relatives of the four men who died needlessly in order to satisfy the President’s wishful thinking that the Al Qaeda threat is diminishing and that there’s nothing wrong with the Middle East’s intractable problems that can’t be solved with a few emollient words, beautiful lies and maybe the occasional NASA-endorsed outreach programme….