Filed under: Intelligence, National Security, Terrorism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Benghazi Libya, Deliberately Denying Help
The story gets uglier, the questions larger and more insistent. Over at National Review in the Corner, David French had an apt metaphor:”Benghazi is like peeling an increasingly rotten onion. Each layer is fouler than the last.”
He adds”Our embattled diplomats literally had the enemy in their sights, we had military assets in range, and not only were air strikes denied but special operations was told to wait. We abandoned our people, left them to die.”
An editorial at Investors pulls no punches:
Despite real-time video, emails to the White House and desperate cries for help, our defense secretary says we didn’t send rescue forces to our Benghazi consulate because we didn’t know what was going on.
In a statement bordering on the Kafkaesque, Leon Panetta told a news conference Thursday that four Americans, including our Libyan ambassador Chris Stevens, were left to die without a rescue attempt by nearby U.S. military forces because there’s “a basic principle here, and the basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”…
Excuse us, Mr. Secretary, but your administration had a drone over the consulate on Sept. 11, and you and President Obama had a meeting that included Vice President Joe “Nobody Told Us” Biden in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. Washington time, a little more than an hour after the onset of the attack. There were at least 50 minutes of real-time video of the attack as the battle was sent streaming directly to the Situation Room in the White House.
Real-time emails were also pouring into the Situation Room detailing that 20 armed terrorists were attacking our Benghazi consulate, that Ambassador Stevens was crouched in a safe room waiting for help as the al-Qaida terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia was taking credit for the attack. Most claims of responsibility for a terrorist attack come days after the event. This was, as they say, in “real-time.”
American Elephants 