THE 3 A.M. CALL JUST KEPT RINGING AT STATE
Posted on 10/10/2012 8:40:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Former State Department security officer Eric Nordstrom will testify today to the House Oversight Committee about the security failures that led to the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi and the assassination of our Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. Reuters got an advance look at his prepared testimony last night, and reports that not only did Nordstrom repeatedly request more security for the diplomatic mission, the State Department didn’t even bother to respond to his last two requests:
A U.S. security officer twice asked his State Department superiors for more security agents for the American mission in Benghazi months before an attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, but he got no response.
The officer, Eric Nordstrom, who was based in Tripoli until about two months before the September attack, said a State Department official, Charlene Lamb, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi “artificially low,” according to a memo summarizing his comments to a congressional committee that was obtained by Reuters.
Nordstrom also argued for more U.S. security in Libya by citing a chronology of over 200 security incidents there from militia gunfights to bomb attacks between June 2011 and July 2012. Forty-eight of the incidents were in Benghazi.
No response? That’ a stunning revelation, especially considering the corner of the world in which this took place. The fall of Moammar Qaddafi allowed the radical Islamist terrorist groups in the region to operate openly, a completely foreseeable consequence of the long-distance decapitation of the Qaddafi regime. The string of attacks, now even greater than we were first led to believe, shows why Nordstrom wanted more security in place. To refuse to even respond to those requests is as blatant a dereliction of duty that one can imagine.
ABC’s Jake Tapper hears the same about Nordstrom’s testimony:
There needs to be accountability....Hillary must be fired.
It sounds almost as if that Ambassador was deliberately set up by the Obama administration — I just can’t think of a plausible reason . . . unless Obama agreed to let the Islamofascists (whether Al Qaeda or Muslim Brotherhood or whatever) have an American Ambassador to partly pay for Osama, and Stevens drew the short straw, so to speak. . .
Not Hillary, fire Obama.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.