Posted on 05/12/2013 12:54:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Obama administration got some backing Sunday for the way in which it responded as terrorists attacked the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, last September – a night of violence and confusion during which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said if he had been at the Pentagon at that time, "Frankly … I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were.”
Republican critics have said a Special Forces team or overflights by fighter aircraft based in Italy might have prevented the US losses or at least frightened off the attackers. Mr. Gates disagrees.
Such actions, he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, “without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on the ground, would have been very dangerous."
"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," Gates said, referring to morning-after analysis. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
“without knowing what the environment is”
I think it was pretty hot that night, wasn’t it?
RE: So letting people die, was the right decision - got it.
Jonah Goldberg gave a good illustration of this nonsense.
If you see a child struggling in the ocean, you have no idea how long she will flail and paddle before she goes under for the last time. The moral response is to swim for her in the hope that you get there in time. If you fail and she dies, you can console yourself that you did your best to rescue her.
But if you just stand on the beach and do nothing as the child struggles for life, saying, “Well, there’s just no way I can get to her in time,” it doesn’t really matter whether you guessed right or not. You didn’t try.
The White House and State Department insist they guessed right, as if that somehow absolves them of responsibility. They would have sent help if they could have, they claim, but they simply weren’t ready to deploy forces on September 11, the one day of the year you’d expect our military and intelligence agencies to be ready for trouble in the Middle East, particularly given that before his murder, Stevens warned of security problems in Benghazi.
But we know the administration ordered others who were willing, able, and obliged to come to the consulate’s rescue to “stand down.” They in effect told the lifeguards, “Don’t get out of your chairs.”
Though an unmanned drone was there to capture the whole thing on video, which must have been reassuring as the mortar rounds rained down.
Leon Panetta, who was the secretary of defense during the attack, mocked critics who wanted to know why the Pentagon didn’t scramble any jets from Italy to the scene. “You can’t willy-nilly send F-16s there and blow the hell out of place. . . . You have to have good intelligence.”
Never mind that real-time video of the attack is pretty good intelligence. An F-16 doesn’t need to blow anyone to hell to have an impact. As military expert and former assistant defense secretary Bing West notes, “99 percent of air sorties over Afghanistan never drop a single bomb.” Just showing up is often intimidating enough.
Surely Gates knows that northern Africa falls under AfriComm (Gen Hamm, at that time) and they had forces on standby and ready at Sigonella AFB Sicily, a relatively short distance away.
So, exactly why do we have these special forces? To just sit around and knit when our ambassadors gets attacked and then murdered? With all due respect, Sir, F-off. Like what one of the whistleblowers said - “This is the first time the State Department showed more balls than the military”
Hey Bobby. Armed drone pilots are a dime a dozen. You moron!!!
Here is a video of Rep. Chaffetz saying that Gen. Ham, commander of AFRICOM at that time, told him that assets were near enough to help and ready to go.There are teams around the world that train year around exclusively for rescues of Americans in hostage situations. Ambassadors and the personnel of diplomatic facilities are their highest priority.AFRICOM leader General Carter Ham was never given the order to secure the consulate in Benghazi. Youtube 1:43
Adm. James Lyons (Ret.) on Growing Benghazi Scandal
ADMIRAL LYONS: …All those comforting words that “We don’t want to put our forces at risk.” We had people at risk—they were crying for help! In a situation, you go with the resources you have available—and, in this particular case, we did have that 130-man Marine force recon team sitting there at Sigonella. Even if I only got 50 of them over there, that would have been significant in turning the situation around. We may not have been able to save the ambassador, but we certainly could have saved those other two SEALs that were over on the annex.
ADMIRAL LYONS: In perpetuating this lie, we also had administration officials lying to Congressional committees. That’s a felony. So, “What difference does it make?” It makes all the difference in the world. You cannot flaunt the truth here, just walk away from it and, basically, tell the American public to stuff it. That’s not acceptable.
The point on the organizing the two Marine anti-terrorist teams in Rota, that was good to go ahead and stand ’em up. What I find incomprehensible: The first team, it took them 23 hours to go a few hundred miles from Rota to Tripoli. I could go around the world in 23 hours, so that makes absolutely no sense to me.
These guys are mortified of getting petraeused.
The argument I heard on the talk shows today that made the most sense is that the available planes were in the north of Italy, and that while they could have gone, they would have needed refueling planes and there was not time to get them available. So my question is why don’t we have an arrangement with Italy to base in the south of Italy or Sicily, why don’t we have an aircraft carrier available? To what extent is the sequester involved in insufficient resources vs. other reasons for poorly positioned resources. Also listening to another aspect, I forget now what exactly, I found myself thinking was Petraus too distracted to be thinking as clearly and strategically as he needed to given the facts on the ground?
Gates doesn’t have a clue who decided what!
Wonder what slush fund of tax-payer’s money just sent a fat check to Gates’ offshore account.....
Not only that but several other embassies had been under threat from riots all day long and everyone in DC and at State and DoD had been on high alert all day long watching it all closely.
Gates also served previously as Director of the CIA. Not sure what his comments really mean. Nothing said in Washington should ever be taken at face value. Maybe he doesn’t want to be Petraeus’d, who knows ?
So Obama did make decisions that night? What were they? To whom did he express those decisions? When were these decisions made?
Decision: stand down; it’s late and I have to get up early in the morning.
That makes sense,
I never did like Gates and this is a perfect example of why my assessment of the man was correct.
Shut up Gates! We don’t care what you think!
Since when is “go to bed” the right decision???
And we wonder why Iraq was lost.
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