Hillary Clinton failed to provide proper security to the US Consular facility in Benghazi, Libya before the attack on Sept. 11, 2012 and she failed to secure any rescue operations for the four Americans who eventually died there. Recently released watch logs from the State Department operations center show she made no official inquiries from 10:30 p.m. that night through 7:15 a.m. the following morning. That is a long time to be missing when a U.S. diplomatic facility is under attack.
Why was no rescue effort mounted? That is the question that has been driving good people crazy since this happened. Every American manning a post anywhere on this entire planet has a right to believe the cavalry will ride to their rescue, or at least be launched toward them. That didn’t happen in this case and the blame lies with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama directly. The horrifying thing is official government records show no involvement from either one after an initial consultation.
Hillary had an obligation to fight for all the support she could get for her people once she heard they were under attack. The State Department watch logs should be full of notations like, “Secretary connected w/ DoD ref lack of relief forces” and “Secretary connected w/ POTUS ref Benghazi rescue” but instead there is blank space. She could not order the military to act, but she could damn sure have been lighting them up for failing to do so. That is leadership and she couldn’t even be bothered to answer that 3 a.m. call.
President Obama, however, could order the military to act and if you listen to the apologists he did so through Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The officer responsible for Libya was AFRICOM Commander Gen. Carter Ham and he confirmed that Secretary Panetta gave him orders.
“The Secretary of Defense gave me clear direction at the outset, you know, to deploy forces again in anticipation that the first mission was a potential hostage rescue of the U.S. Ambassador, recovering evacuation of the wounded, and other persons from Benghazi.”
But on February 7th, 2013, when Sec. Panetta testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee he had this exchange:
“Senator Lindsey Graham: My question is, did anybody leave any base anywhere to go to the aid of the people under attack in Benghazi, Libya, before the attack ended?
Secretary Leon Panetta: No, because the attack ended before they could get off the ground.”
This makes no sense since the attack lasted more than eight hours and the order to deploy forces was given not long after it began. Are we to believe that no US forces anywhere could have been sent toward the sound of gunfire? And it doesn’t matter if they could have gotten there in time, because no one knew how long this situation would last. The one thing you cannot recover is time, so the first thing to do is get people moving toward the fight. And yet, that is the one thing that did not happen.
Let’s try to reconcile that. There are a lot of things that have to happen for a military unit to respond to an emergency in a foreign land. The initial order from Panetta was to deploy forces in anticipation of a mission to rescue the folks in Benghazi. In his testimony Gen. Ham confirmed that Sec. Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave him operational control and authority to employ the units required. They were alerted and staged but never went wheels up en route to Libya.
We have heard there was no transport available or they weren’t ready until the battle was over, but if the closest units couldn’t launch, the next closest should have. The cavalry was called, but never sent out the gates to ride to the rescue. Why? If he really was told to do what was necessary to save our people, Gen. Ham would have had some unit from somewhere moving. So either he didn’t want to do that, or was not authorized to do more than alert and stage the units.
Does anyone really believe that President Obama would have left the decision to launch an armed attack into a foreign country to a lone General? He held six months worth of meetings before making the gutsy call to approve a raid on bin Laden.
Gen. Ham didn’t launch those units toward Libya because he needed approval from up the food chain to do so. That order never came.
It is the dog than didn’t bark. Hillary made no strident calls for someone, anyone to rescue her people and Obama fiddled while Benghazi burned. Then, while they both slept, our people in Benghazi died.
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