Posted on 01/24/2013 6:39:26 AM PST by SeekAndFind
During her congressional testimony today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly defended her failure to see key cables dealing with Benghazi by noting how many cables the State Department receives. She explained there are 1.4 million cables to the department a year, all addressed to her as secretary.
That’s wrong — and this poor excuse is worth examining.
In fact, every cable sent from the department is signed “Clinton” as long as she is in Washington. If not, each cable bears the name of the acting secretary — usually deputy secretary Bill Burns. But it’s obvious that these cables are not actually from her, and many bear captions like “From the Assistant Secretary to the Ambassador.”
Similarly, cables sent to the department are not all to her; that is nonsense. They may be captioned “to SecState Washington,” but that of course means “to the Department.” They will often say for whom they are meant, e.g., “For NSC Powers, for DOD International Security Affairs, for State DRL, NEA, PM” and so on. And upon arrival at State they are distributed in accordance with set rules, to many bureaus and offices.
So which cables does the secretary actually see? There are two answers. First, an ambassador can caption a cable “From the Ambassador for the Secretary” or even “Eyes Only for the Secretary.” Obviously an ambassador can only rarely get away with this and his justification better be good. Such a cable will get to the secretary unless staff finds that it is foolish or worthless. One question not asked of Clinton: Did Chris Stevens ever send a cable during his entire tenure marked “From the Ambassador to the Secretary” and, if so, what did it say?
More often, a secretary of state sees the cables that his or her staff pulls out because they are important and should be seen. Figuring out what the incumbent secretary wants to see, will wish to see, and will be angry for not having seen is very difficult when there’s a new secretary — but what is Hillary Clinton’s excuse on September 11, 2012, after almost four years in office? There had been three and half years to set up a system, to let the career officers of the Secretariat and the Operations Center know what she wants, and to have her personal staff figure it out too.
That is to say, if she did not see the Benghazi cables in a timely fashion, if she did not see Chris Stephens’s cables describing the deterioration of security, and if she did not see his requests for more security, this was a huge management failure on her part. It is a poor excuse to say, “Gee, the Department gets lots of cables” — and perhaps even worse then to hide behind an Accountability Review Board that pins responsibility on assistant secretaries and no higher.
Having worked as an assistant secretary of state and a deputy national-security adviser, I can report that even in those posts one is entirely swamped by cable traffic and needs a system to cope with it — to be sure that the really important ones get through. From all the available evidence, Hillary Clinton failed to establish such a system for herself, and that management failure is a far more important fact about her tenure than being the third woman to hold the post or having flown more miles than Condoleezza Rice.
Estrogen-Americans.
Progressives.
Fellow travelers.
Huma.
She is no worse than any Democrat. Yes, they are all bad.
Huma wants (to give) the same desk job Reggie has...
Probably 51% of the electorate, you know the women, the latinos, the blacks, the asians, the new immigrants, etc.
Why can’t an emergency call from an ambassador in a burning consulate get through to Hillary’s desk on 9/11? Inquiring minds want to know, even if the Democrat media doesn’t.
Talk about gross incompetence in both government and the press....
Some do so because shes a radical campus leftist, others because she's a female radical campus leftist.
All liberals love her because she's corrupt, doesn't care who knows it, and compels the GOP to roll into a ball whenever she raises her voice.
She’s a crook, a sleazebag, a liar, and incompetent to boot.
But she wiped the floor with most of the senate and congress yesterday.
Evita and her collegues did NOTHING-and did it badly... but they DO stuff their pockets while they posture as ‘statesmen’ and ‘leaders’.
They are aping (in their ineptitude and ignorance) what they THINK leaders and statesmen do. They recklessly and gratuitously generate enough hype and nonsense to feed the whole stable...then feed it into the criminally irresponsible maw of the MSM!
While all this is going on, they are traveling, vacationing, spending, partying and enjoying themselves like 10th generation dynastic Monarchs...this is all being done without compunction and wholly at the taxpayers’ expense.
It is a real tower of Babel and their leader is THE premier prototypical babbling idiot of all time!
She ran her ship aground. Fire her!
Neither Clinton nor Obama are qualified to handles a 3AM emergency call.
She got her 3 am wake up call on Sept 11th, and left the Americans in Benghazi to fend for themselves.
When I read that a huge number of libs really, really loved Obama’s poor showing in the first debate (it meant that he was just so doggone busy taking care of the country he didn’t have time to prepare) I knew there was no logic at all, to anything the libs say or do.
That’s why they will all vote for the witch if she runs. They will excuse her by saying ‘look at how she got all involved and shed tears and closed the barn door after the horse were murdered (so to speak)” and that will rally the troops to her defense. Which of course, they are already doing.
Now they claim it was just darn mean for ANY Republican to actually question her. None of them gives a damn that 4 Americans died on her watch.
It doesn’t matter to them that the number of dead soldiers has grown since he came into office. Or that he is dropping bombs on civilians, children, women in his attempt to make himself look like he is really, really working on killing terrorists (except now the are almost all gone, according to him).
There is no reasoning with these people.
The same people who elected the disastrously incompetent, unqualified, America-destroying Obama for a second term. Hillary will be a shoo-in.
I was disappointed with the questions NOT asked.
Hillary said she “placed a call to the president of Turkey”, or some country, I forget which, to ask for support at the consulate being mobbed on Sept. 11th. I wanted one of the senators to ask why she didn’t call the president of the USA for support of OUR consulate!
I was disappointed with the questions NOT asked.
Such as “. Was a CBA ever granted ( cross border authorizatio).
Thats the smoking gun that no one has the corage to ask, as the whole scenario will crumble.
Hilly may have actually been setting Barry up with the this oblique reference to callinf Turkey for help.
I.e. Barry wouldn’t give one, and told her/ panetta to let Turkey handle it.
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