Benghazi’s Smoking Gun? Only President Can Give “Cross-Border Authority”
(I wrote this a couple weeks after Benghazi)
https://pjmedia.com/blog/benghazis-smoking-gun-only-president-can-give-%e2%80%98cross-border-authority%e2%80%99/
The Benghazi debacle boils down to a single key factor — the granting or withholding of “cross-border authority.” This opinion is informed by my experience as a Navy SEAL officer who took a NavSpecWar Detachment to Beirut.
Once the alarm is sent — in this case, from the consulate in Benghazi — dozens of HQs are notified and are in the planning loop in real time, including AFRICOM and EUCOM, both located in Germany. Without waiting for specific orders from Washington, they begin planning and executing rescue operations, including moving personnel, ships, and aircraft forward toward the location of the crisis. However, there is one thing they can’t do without explicit orders from the president: cross an international border on a hostile mission.
That is the clear “red line” in this type of a crisis situation.
No administration wants to stumble into a war because a jet jockey in hot pursuit (or a mixed-up SEAL squad in a rubber boat) strays into hostile territory. Because of this, only the president can give the order for our military to cross a nation’s border without that nation’s permission. For the Osama bin Laden mission, President Obama granted CBA for our forces to enter Pakistani airspace.
On the other side of the CBA coin: in order to prevent a military rescue in Benghazi, all the POTUS has to do is not grant cross-border authority. If he does not, the entire rescue mission (already in progress) must stop in its tracks.
Ships can loiter on station, but airplanes fall out of the sky, so they must be redirected to an air base (Sigonella, in Sicily) to await the POTUS decision on granting CBA. If the decision to grant CBA never comes, the besieged diplomatic outpost in Benghazi can rely only on assets already “in country†in Libya — such as the Tripoli quick reaction force and the Predator drones. These assets can be put into action on the independent authority of the acting ambassador or CIA station chief in Tripoli. They are already “in country,” so CBA rules do not apply to them.
How might this process have played out in the White House?
(the rest at the link)
Your role in all this has been fantastic —very helpful.
Under Reagan he did this.
"The 1986 United States bombing of Libya, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, comprised air strikes by the United States against Libya on Tuesday, 15 April 1986. The attack was carried out by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps via air strikes, in response to the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing." wikipedia
What the current administration did with or the way they handled the attack in Benghazi is STILL an act of treason that should be enforced old school style.
It seemed as if even the reinforcements in Tripoli was delayed as well. I’m not sure.