"It really doesn’t make any difference how close or far away our assets are from a firefight if no one gives them an order to act."
Carr: This is like something out of a movie, where some non-com says, “Colonel, colonel, our men are getting slaughtered there.” And no one has any interest in following it up.
It seems like fiction; it doesn’t seem like it would happen in real life.
HUNT: It's happened a lot in my time, unfortunately. Like I said, we saw it in the Congo: we saw it in Bosnia. We've seen a lot of incidents where an organization will not act. It’s frozen, and this is the case.
And that sergeant you are talking about is actually a general. This is immediately communicated that this embassy is under attack violently, and generals are looking on their IPADS at the pictures, and that’s how good this stuff is. Those images are all over the place. And we knew this was bad, getting worse, and did nothing, and then lied about it for 8 days?
FWIW in the two examples Col. Hunt gives, the Congo and Bosnia, he is not speaking of U.S. inaction in particular. Furthermore those aren't examples of a country failing to lift a finger to help its own representatives. In our case not merely our own citizens traveling abroad but our own envoys purposely placed in an unstable and hostile environment to do work.
As tragic as situations are like those that occurred in Bosnia and the Congo the call for action from our leaders, U.S. leaders, was not 1/1,000 as clear as it was in Benghazi.
Imagine a sheriff's deputy patrolling a very remote corner of his county. He is attacked and pinned down in his squad car by armed thugs and calls in to the station for help. Of course the dispatcher, by procedure and fear for his job, immediately alerts the head sheriff, all deputies, the highway patrol and every emergency response team leader in the county. And they all listen in on the radio transmission as the thugs close in and cut down the deputy. But they're not really sure the thugs got him or he got away before the radio died. No one moves, not one car leaves the station, no one who might be closer is asked to go to the scene and try and lend assistance.
The next day, after having lunch with the town planning commission, the Sheriff tells the press what a tragedy it is, he's going to investigate, too bad we don't have a bigger budget, blah blah blah. In a few days when we're pretty sure the bad guys are gone I'll send in some deputies to gather evidence.