Posted 10/25/2012 06:56 PM EST, Investors.com
At 4 a.m. local time on Sept. 11 — six hours and 20 minutes after the initial attack began — former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed at the CIA annex not far from the consulate by a mortar shell. The machine gun they were firing was encrusted with blood, an indication they continued to fight after being wounded.
During that eternity, Woods and Doherty might have wondered between gunfire and explosions where the military, with bases strewn across Europe, was. U.S. forces were indeed being moved like chess pieces as the attack unfolded, but none came to their aid because no one gave the order.
President Obama, perhaps preoccupied with his upcoming Las Vegas fundraiser, met with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. ET, a little more than an hour after the onset of the attack.
He could have given the order but did not, even after an email, in which the al-Qaida-tied group Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility, arrived at 6:07 p.m. ET to a distribution list that included the White House Situation Room.
A Special Operations force went from central Europe to Naval Air Station Sigonella in southern Italy, just 480 miles from Benghazi. F-16s and Apache helicopters remained parked and unused at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy. Two Navy destroyers already in the Mediterranean Sea were moved off the coast of Libya on the day of the attack but were never used.
The question is: Why not?
Some suggest that sending nearby AC-130 gunships or Apaches would have been futile because in the chaos they couldn't have identified the attackers and might have hit innocents. A few well-timed machine gun bursts at nowhere in particular would have been sufficient to disperse the jihadists. We know there was no protest mob in the way and certainly we could have plucked those two heroic SEALs off the annex roof.
But to send help would have acknowledged it was a terrorist attack. It would have destroyed Team Obama's campaign mantra that Osama bin Laden was dead, al-Qaida was destroyed and the Arab Spring was in full bloom. Better to blame a filmmaker and his obscure video.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who pushed the video fraud, and whose employee, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, went on five Sunday talk shows to repeat that shameful and colossal lie, defended Obama's inaction in the face of terror by saying, "Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence" of a terrorist attack.
And the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was "workplace violence."
When terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, no Marines were deployed to protect them on the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet a Marine security detachment was guarding our embassy in Barbados.
"The last two casualties occurred well over six hours after the initial attack," Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham noted. "It is disappointing to hear that our national command authorities failed to try to reinforce the consulate with timely air assets, and that a consulate located in one of the most dangerous regions in the world was so unsecured."
Rather than sitting in the Oval Office to tell the American people how and why four Americans died at the hands of an attack by an al-Qaida-linked group, our less-than-optimal president yukked it up with Jay Leno Wednesday night after appearing with David Letterman two days after the attack, worrying about nothing more than his re-election and demonstrating that even after four years of on-the-job training how eminently unqualified he is to be our commander in chief.
Why, Mr. President, weren't there Marines with bayonets in Benghazi?
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