-——.my guess is no order was immediately forthcoming ——
That is the crux of the events. You are dead on.
My belief is that the Messiah seeing visions of the coming crucifixion, uttered some rambling gibberish that is now remembered as an order. He went to bed in the belief he had saved the mission, but like Hitler in the bunker, the subordinates could not discern any directive in the meaningless ramblings.
There was certainly no direct order such as “Go kill the enemy and save the ambassador.” There was definitely no strong words “stand Down” . Obama is incapable of making any such non lawyerly unambiguous statement.
I must confess that I’ve been a little surprised that everyone’s been interpreting Obama’s comment as indicating that he gave a directive to come to the aid of the Benghazi consulate. The manner and tone in which he made the statement has always come across to me as meaning he was ordering security for all of our OTHER facilities and personnel, with the parenthetical assumption that Benghazi was already lost.
Another possibility: Obama made his rambling speech about "do whatever we need to do," just as he said... but that he's leaving out what he said next: "just don't screw up the reelection campaign."
Or maybe "whatever you decide to do, run it past the political desk before you pull the trigger."