Tag Archives: #StandDown

#StandDown: Obama Let Benghazi 4 Die, Rather than Defy Libyan Authorities

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By Daniel Greenfield

FOX News continues to do invaluable work by investigating Benghazigate and Jennifer Griffin and Adam Housley have a new article which raises serious questions about the so-called “Timeline” as well as continuing to pursue the question of why the Benghazi were allowed to die by the Obama Administration.

Now Obama had no problem bombing and invading Libya to prevent a fake massacre in Benghazi whose existence he lied about in a speech to the American people. But he did have a problem sending troops into Libya to prevent an actual massacre of Americans against the wishes of the Al-Qaeda linked Libyan authorities.

The closing paragraph says it all,

According to a source who debriefed those who were at the CIA annex that night, “When they asked for air support, they were told they could have an unarmed drone.”

Any show of air power was clearly off the table. The CIA rescue team chartered a plane too small to use. US rescue teams coming from outside the country were only allowed to enter by the Libyans after all the fighting was done.

That unarmed drone was sent over by General Ham. Meanwhile the rescue op moves as slowly as possible. “It isn’t until 2:53 a.m. (about five hours after the incident began) that those orders are formalized by Panetta and the teams are told they can leave.”

The Pentagon says that the European-based team of rescuers landed at Sigonella air base at 7:57 p.m. on Sept. 12, more than 20 hours after the attack began and 40 minutes after the last survivor was flown out of Tripoli on a U.S. C-17 transport plane.

What cannot be confirmed is what time that team could have been outside Libyan air space. The Pentagon won’t say when they took off from Croatia.

Multiple defense sources say that the plane did not have permission to enter Libya. That permission would have to be secured from the Libyans by the State Department.

And so the rescue was effectively delayed, by both the Libyans and Obama’s cronies, until there was no chance that they would be drawn into a firefight at the CIA annex.

The team was most likely flying on a modified MC-130 P Talon 2. A modified C-130 flying from Croatia about 900 miles from the Libyan coast could have been there under three hours from take-off. Croatia to Libya is the same distance approximately as Washington, D.C., to Miami.

The CIF, which included dozens of Special Operators, was never utilized to help rescue 30 Americans who had fought off attackers on the ground in Benghazi until 5:26 a.m. on Sept. 12. Pentagon officials say it did not arrive in time to help.

Of course not. Helping was not a priority. Collaborating with the Libyan Islamists running things and their precious sensibilities was.

Or this is how it would have been put in Diplospeak. “Armed intervention in Libya will shape a perception on the Arab Street of the new government as American puppets. During this crisis we must rely on indigenous support from Libyan police and military authorities while keeping our intervention as low key as possible. While the deaths of American personnel are regrettable, armed intervention would lead to further attacks and far more bloodshed. The cycle of violence must end with us.”

And so Obama watched while four Americans died.

Beyond Impeachment: Obama Treasonous over Benghazi

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PJ Media:

By Roger L Simon

Is it treason when you put your own reelection above the good of your country and the lives of its citizens? If so, Barack Obama committed treason in leaving the four Americans to die in Benghazi.

Our Constitution defines it this way: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Aid and comfort to the enemy — what is that?

When you ascribe an action to the protest of a video when it is actuality a planned terror attack by Ansar al-Shariah, an established offshoot of al-Qaeda (if that’s not your “enemy,” then who) — and you knew that all along, you watched it live without doing anything, and then you told those who wanted to help to “stand down”? Meanwhile, our government may have been conspiring to arm another offshoot of al-Qaeda in Syria.

How much more treasonous can you get? Benedict Arnold was a piker.

Indeed, the discussion of Benghazi has just begun. And don’t be surprised if the conversation escalates from impeachment to treason very quickly. In fact, if Obama wins reelection you can bet on it. The cries of treason will be unstoppable. Not even if the mainstream media will be able to deny them.

As Pat Caddell [2] noted, those same media lapdogs have muzzled themselves in an unprecedented manner in this matter, but our Canadian friends [3] at least have some semblance of honor left, writing:

It is undoubtedly worse than Obama simply turned his back on cornered American citizens in a foreign land, knowing undoubtedly they would die. But that Barack did so without any compelling reason—except political—is beyond evil. Only a moral monster would have made that decision when it was within his powers to possibly save them with almost no effort of his own.

Moral monster? Those are extreme words but they fit an extreme situation and are appropriate to the use of the t-word. But it’s worse. Many now are trying to figure out the motivation for this behavior — beyond the obvious electoral whoring mentioned above, the need to be seen in a certain manner at a certain moment to be sure the Ohio vote doesn’t fall the wrong way.

But is there more than that? Is the treason yet greater? Were Obama and others covering up more than their ineptitude? Just what was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi that day? Why had he left the Libyan capital to meet with the Turkish ambassador on the anniversary of September 11?

Rumors abound. According to Admiral Lyons writing in the Washington Times [4],

…one of Stevens’ main missions in Libya was to facilitate the transfer of much of Gadhafi’s military equipment, including the deadly SA-7 – portable SAMs – to Islamists and other al Qaeda-affiliated groups fighting the Assad Regime in Syria. In an excellent article, Aaron Klein [5] states that Stevens routinely used our Benghazi consulate (mission) to coordinate the Turkish, Saudi Arabian and Qatari governments’ support for insurgencies throughout the Middle East. Further, according to Egyptian security sources, Stevens played a “central role in recruiting Islamic jihadists to fight the Assad Regime in Syria.”

Lyons adds, citing a Clare Lopez [6] article at RadicalIslam.org,

…that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with our Benghazi mission. During the terrorist attack, the warehouses were probably looted. We do not know what was there and if it was being administrated by our two former Navy SEALs and the CIA operatives who were in Benghazi. Nonetheless, the equipment was going to hardline jihadis.

Do we know that for sure? I certainly don’t, although on the face of it sounds like a “Fast & Furious” scandal on a global scale with extraordinary geopolitical implications. But I imagine there are those who do know the truth, or a lot of it, considering the events were being watched in real time.

None of this, of course, exonerates our government in not giving support to our four now dead men in the field.

Many questions remain to be answered — some of which are listed here [7]. But I do not think I am being excessive in raising the treason accusation. I would be pleased to withdraw it if proven wrong.

Los Angeles-based Roger L. Simon is the author of ten novels, including the prize-winning Moses Wine detective series, and six screenplays, including Enemies: A Love Story for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He served as president of the West Coast branch of PEN and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America. Mr. Simon was on the faculty of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama. In February 2009, he published his first non-fiction book – Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown. Mr. Simon is the co-founder and CEO of PJ Media.

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Why Our Forces Were Told to ‘Stand Down’ in Benghazi

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By Daniel Greenfield:

To understand what went wrong in the Benghazi mission, it’s important to begin by looking at what was so unique about it.

When the Islamist mobs began their September 11 rampage, they found embassies with high walls, heavy security and police protection. Even in Tunis and Cairo, where the Arab Spring Islamist regimes have been accused of collaborating with their fellow Salafists, there were credible military and police forces capable of preventing the kind of full scale assault that took place in Benghazi.

The mission in Benghazi, however, was an American diplomatic facility with few defenses in a city where the police were virtually helpless against the Islamist militias and where the national government had announced that it would allow the Salafists to destroy Sufi tombs rather than intervene.

On September 1, I wrote that the real implication of these remarks was that the Libyan government had given the Islamists a free hand and would take no action no matter what they did. And bloodshed was sure to follow. Ten days later it did.

After the fall of Saddam, American diplomatic facilities in Iraq did not remain unguarded or protected only by local militias. It was always understood that American diplomatic facilities in a country whose government had recently fallen were sitting ducks and needed heavy protection. The State Department cables show that this was something that quite a few of the Americans on the ground also understood. The Benghazi consulate had been attacked, and its next attack would only be a matter of time.

When Al Qaeda decided to commemorate September 11 with a wave of attacks on American diplomatic facilities across the Muslim world, from Tunis all the way to Indonesia, in a recreation of its own 1998 embassy attacks, its planners paid special attention to the one facility that was a soft target and surrounded by jihadist fighters. A facility that was a perfect target because it was completely exposed.

Benghazi should have either had the same protection that a similar facility in Iraq would have or it should have been closed down. Instead the State Department chose to rely on its friendly relations with the jihadists, having forgotten the story of the scorpion and the frog, trusting in an Islamist militia linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and to its future Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al Sharia attackers to protect it.

The State Department was not being cheap. Its budget had climbed steadily under Obama and it could have set up another Green Zone in Benghazi if it chose to. But that would have been a flashback to the Bush era that represented everything the appeasement lobby had hated about those eight years.

Libya was meant to be a new kind of war. Not a display of American arrogance and unilateralism, but a show of submissiveness to the goals and ambitions of the Muslim world. In post-American diplomacy, the Americans did not arrive with a show of force, surrounded by Marines and heavy fortifications, but bent humbly under the defensive shield of the Islamist Ummah. Rather than exporting the Dar Al Harb, the Americans would ask for the protection of the Dar Al Islam.

The reason that the Navy SEALS were denied the support of a Spectre C-130U gunship was the same reason that the consulate had been left nearly unguarded. And it was the same reason that so many soldiers had died in Afghanistan because they had been denied air and artillery support or even the permission to open fire.

What happened in Benghazi was only extraordinary because it caught the attention of the public, but American soldiers in Afghanistan had been suffering under the same conditions ever since it was decided that winning the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians was more important than the lives of American soldiers.

The four Americans killed in Benghazi lived and died by the same code as thousands of Americans in Afghanistan. And that code overrode loyalty to one’s own people in favor of appeasing Muslims. The two former SEALS broke that code, violating orders by going to protect the consulate and were abandoned in the field by an administration that prioritized Muslim opinions over American lives.

From the post-American diplomatic perspective, the lives of a few Americans, who knew what they were getting into, was a small sacrifice to make when weighed against the potential of turning the entire Muslim world around. A Spectre gunship blasting away at an Islamist militia in the streets of Benghazi would have ended the fiction of a successful war in Libya and infuriated most of the Islamist militias. Worst of all, it would have made Americans seem like imperialists, instead of helpful aides to the Islamist transition of the Arab Spring. It would have ruined everything and so it was shut down.

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