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The emerging scandal of what happened in Libya

The emerging scandal of what happened in Libya

It is plainly obvious that we have not been getting straight answers from Obama officials about what they knew and when they knew it about the dangers facing our consulate in Benghazi and throughout the region. It may be deception, or they may be so incompetent they still don’t know.

There is credible information that there were warnings of trouble to come, and 9/11 itself should have put a consulate in a dangerous section of Libya on high alert with substantial protection afforded the Ambassador.  The story told by Susan Rice and Jay Carney that the attack was spontaneous is becoming laughable.

There also is evidence emerging that the Ambassador was left with minimal protection. Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com reports as follows:

According to a source close to Breitbart News and high up in the intelligence community, the Obama administration’s policy following Muammar Gaddafi’s death has been to keep a “low profile” during a chaotic time.

For this reason, according to the source, American Marines were not stationed at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli or the American mission in Benghazi, as would typically have been the case. In the spirit of a “low profile,” the administration didn’t even want an American company in charge of private security. Blue Mountain, the British firm the State Department hired, was willing to abide by the “no bullets” Rules of Engagement (ROE), so were a logical fit for the contract. These sub-standard protections for American diplomats were signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the ROE.

In essence, the Obama Administration tasked an unarmed British firm with security responsibilities that should have been handled by armed American servicemen, and it was all approved by the Secretary of State. Needless to say, the plan failed and an Ambassador was murdered, along with several others.

As of now, the State Department has not disclosed the full State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya.

We’ll see where this goes.  With the legacy media obsessed with getting Romney, it’s going to fall on others to get the truth out.  Whether that happens before the election remains to be seen.

Update 9-19-2012 State Department Reverses Denial of Hiring British Security Firm in Benghazi.

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Comments

I really appreciate that you’re addressing this. Remarkably, a glance at the generic google news listing several times today shows the headliner to be a faux Romney “video flap” and no followup at all about the Arab flap. For that, one has to do a search request. It’s frustrating beyond words.

Rich Lowry at National Review Online:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/322392/susan-rices-dodge-rich-lowry#

Susan Rice’s Dodge

Can she really believe the embassy attacks were because of a video?

Like Fast & Furious, this is the kind of horrific bad judgment that could continue to haunt the Obama administration, even if he is reelected. It can’t be ignored and no matter how many times he screams partisanship or racism, some people will see a duty to continue digging.

At least I hope so. I don’t trust the republicans in general to respond to duty but a few of them are decent people who will understand that when people die in the service of their country, someone should pay attention.

A collateral scandal, Prof.

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2012/09/scandal-white-house-revealed-names-of.html

In legal papers filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, the Justice Department argued that the government is under no obligation to make public the SEAL’s name or the names of Central Intelligence Agency personnel involved simply because officials shared their names, partial names or identities with the makers of a forthcoming movie about the raid, “Zero Dark Thirty.”

“The CIA and DoD did not authorize the filmmakers to make the names they shared with them public, to publicly associate the individuals with the CIA or DoD, or to expose those individuals’ identity in any publicly released film, and there was no reason for the CIA or DoD to have believed that any of this would have happened,” the Justice Department brief says. “In fact, [Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike] Vickers specifically told [filmmaker] Mark Boal, in providing him with the name of someone he could talk to, that ‘the only thing we ask is that you not reveal his name in any way as a consultant.'”
———————————-
Obama knows no bounds. None.

In a sane world, the House would fast track hearings and haul State Department personnel in to testify under oath with no “the FBI is investigating so we can’t speak” crap accepted. Hillary would submit her resignation and Obama would take full responsibility for his failure to provide even minimal US security for the facilities in Libya.

In the real world, the Congress will sit on its hands since its an election year. Hillary and Barack will continue to blame some stupid YouTube Clip and anyone who dares criticize the administration’s massive screw up will be thrown under the bus and run over repeatedly by the media.

Why do you think they were so hot to switch topics to Mitt Romney’s private campaign fundraising? Anything to change the topic. Remember back say…less than a week ago (Jeez it is like ancient history) when the Romney campaign was over for his challenging of Obama over his handling of Egypt and Libya? They do not want to discuss that any more.

I really hate to fall prey to paranoia, but the press’s Circling the Wagons around Obama, plus the news that DHS has ordered another 200 million firearm rounds, scares the carp outta me.

Do you think there’s a plan to use all that ammo on us if Obama loses….or if he wins???

Mrs. Clinton should be ashamed of herself. President Obama should be ashamed of himself. Of course the ambassador knew being a diplomat in Libya would be dangerous but our government should not have let our employees work among muslims who can go wild at any moment with virtually no protection.

This is stellar reporting by Michael Laehy. The Obamedia should be ashamed. They were once so proud of their investigative reporters.

Keep posting the news. The liar Obama and criminally negligent Hillary will have to face the music.

Hillary should resign immediately. She has been negligent in providing the protection our diplomats required in Benghazi. That was a mistake of epic proportions.

    David Yotham in reply to JoAnne. | September 18, 2012 at 11:33 pm

    Yes, I’ve read this elsewhere. It almost sounds like Libya needed a target and Clinton supplied them with one. The more targets, the better – the Muslims are bound to hit one sooner or later.

If we only had the infant social media technology of the 1980s and 1990s to exchange information in the truth, the Republic would have been lost after the 2008 election. The utopian radical egalitarian/redistributionist media would have helped turn the country into a City on a Dung Hill. Somehow this country will be saved one blog, one tweet, one facebook contact, one email at a time; it’s 2012, Thomas Paine informed the public about the tyranny of his time and he did it with a simple pamphlet. The interconnection of citizens in this election season cannot be underestimated. It is the same machine that turned the House of Representatives in 2010. That network is still intact. Spend time networking not panicking.

I heard this on the radio show and it at least makes sense and the pieces fit logically. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/glenn-beck-on-libya-u-s-consulate-attack-youre-being-set-up-america/

Let’s not jump the gun here. There was no Marine detachment in Libya because we were just establishing an embassy there. We have some 255 or so diplomatic stations in foreign lands, about 176 have Marine protection. There is a process which goes on before one is assigned. State, Defense, and the Corps have a set procedure which takes some time.

So it’s not that Marines were withheld. Now, the real issue is if State had warnings of potential problems, did they order increased security or at least advise stations to do so?

Secondly, if as has been reported, the demonstrations in Cairo had been called for by MB from late August, and the Libyan attack wasn’t a protest gone violent, why is the Administration so adamant about blaming the video?

I’d like to be the fly on the wall listening to all the other US ambassadors in the M.E. commenting on whether they will be next and IF their security detail is beefed up enough to withstand a coordinated al Qaeda attack with RPGs.

Well diplomats, will you throw yourselves to the wolves in the name of conciliation and mutual understanding to appease the next perceived insult? Is there any sacrifice too great for dear leader? Tell us, what cartoon, video or book release will be on your epitaph? How does it feel for your life to be considered as the price of tea in China to cover up the fecklessness and incompetence of Barack Obama? You serve at the leisure of this President, is your life similarly worth it?

It’s not just Libya. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is blowing up as well. His foreign policy is in shambles and yet we hear nothing about it. They focus on a tape of Mitt Romney.

Remember when Bush was in office, the 3 networks would update their Iraq war casualty count every night? Notice we hear nothing about that now either.

The Congress should call for the whole administration to resign immediately OldNuc posted above regarding Glenn Beck’s hypothesis that Ambassador Stevens was CIA, the two Navy SEAL were working on a weapons investigation, and Sean Smith sent a message that the house was surrounded and concern about getting out alive. Glen Beck’s hypothesis makes a lot more sense that what the administration is presenting as reality.
It is the height of craziness that the Marines at the embassy in Egypt do not have live ammunition. Maybe the Israeli have some extra paintballs not used in the last flotilla fiasco but seriously, they need ammo for self-defense. Pray for the end of the present administration.

*sigh* I used to do lectures on legal issues for researchers for a Fortune 100 company, and one module that I always included in the section on record-keeping was “good things happen to people who tell the truth.” The gist was that a researcher should just say what’s true to the best of his knowledge, at any given time.

A human being giving a truthful answer is often relying on a huge spectrum of information that supplements the given set of facts that are the subject matter of the question. Where a person at least tries to tell the truth, there are often emergent supporting facts that can be found upon further examination.

Lying is what unskilled amateurs do, and it invariably bites them back.