Attached is a link to the audio from an eye-opening segment of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday. A former Lt. Colonel Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) called in and commented in precise detail about the wide array of assets available to the President at the moment of the attack, the chain of command, and the nature of and process for secure digital instantaneous flash traffic communications for jeopardy events like the Benghazi US embassy attack. He also outlined the general response times for special forces operators to deploy, numbers available and much more. It was a startling review of how we are set up, staffed, and trained to intervene in these sorts of events. Responses are nearly automatic save the need for “trigger-authority” by POTUS or a chain of command delegate in the event POTUS can not be found.
Now that we know a surveillance drone was overhead and monitoring at the time of the attack, the scale and scope of the attack was clearer than we are being told.
The Lt. Colonel painted a picture that the lack of response to repeated pleas for help was a calculated decision made with enough certainty of the situation in real-time that the basis of the decision could only be political. He posited that it had nothing to do with confusion, fog-of-war, conflicting communications, and perhaps most insulting- Leon Panetta’s latest lame public statement that the non-response was due to the potential unknown peril for insertion assets because of a deficit of solid intel.
Rather, the Lt. Colonel concluded that the stand-down decision is a hangover of the senior military and executive’s institutional memory of the doomed 1980 Desert-One rescue mission in Iran. In other words…we can’t afford a failure this close to the election and this could go really bad if we scramble.
His review of the flash traffic communications process and chain of command indicates that the White House Situation Room, Pentagon Command, AfricaCOM, CENTCOM, State Dept. and a number of other critical command and control entities would have been automatically, immediately and simultaneously notified of the attack via secure digital flash-traffic messaging from the Technical Operations Center (TOC) in the Benghazi compound. He posits that the President and all others in the decision chain would have known within minutes that the attack was underway and the Ambassador was in grave peril. This is basic procedure. The administration’s post-slaughter picture of events painted for the public was one dominated by chaos, confusion, uncertainty, and misplaced assignation of the source of the bad-actors perpetrating the attack. But most importantly, a decision was made to take no action to deploy special operators standing by for insertion to fight and defend our personnel. From the beginning we have been told that what they believed they were witnessing was a demonstration gone awry with lots of conflicting intel…now we know that this was a purposeful fantasy spun for the media by the Executive.
From the embassy, there was immediate first person point of view secure flash-traffic communication of the situation. Regardless of the purported flood of non-secure email, tweets, facebook postings and all of the other distracting information we’re told was flowing, the thing that can’t be ignored is the instantaneous secure flash-traffic message that our diplomatic mission was in immediate peril.
The citizens of our country are being spoon-fed complete (and we can thank our President in the attribution for the word since he proudly invoked it a couple of days ago to publicly describe his opponent on the campaign trail) BULLSHIT. Sadly, this will all come out at some point in the near future because folks in the chain of command will eventually come forward and speak. True investigative reporters hungry for fame and fortune will find this story too irresistible to ignore. Unfortunately it will happen post-election.
The Lt. Colonel summed it up when he spoke to the prime imperative…you don’t leave your people behind, period. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens as a deployed diplomatic representative of the US is imbued with rank equivalent to a four-star general, and is in every way shape and form a pure extension and proxy of the President’s Constitutionally enumerated powers as the highest level leader of our affairs of state. He and his team were abandoned and murdered.
In the abstract if you believe each deployed US ambassador is a pure extension of our head of state, play out this scenario- the President is at one of our foreign embassies and the embassy is attacked and the mission is in grave peril. Help is requested. The decision is…stand- down because the situation is not clear enough and insertion response forces could get hurt or killed- ARE YOU KIDDING ME!
But this is actually what we are being told happened. PLEASE READ PANETTA’S latest news conference statement about why there was no military response to the attack and decide for your self:
“a basic principle here, and the basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.” LEON PANETTA
This should be a much more prominent story in the main-stream media. The focus appears to be on the wrong aspects of the story and most likely is purposeful. The narrative concerning the root cause of the attack being grounded in normal Libyan citizen’s outrage over an internet video sparking violence has shifted over time. It has now settled on an acknowledgment that the attack and murders are plainly the work of al-Qaida offshoots.
What is more at issue would seem to be getting to the bottom of why there was no overwhelming US military intervention during the nearly seven hour siege and battle regardless of who was perpetrating the assault. Why were the two special operators who eventually died fighting in the compound told not to intercede during the attack, and why were they not re-enforced by quick-response teams just hours away. Finally, why are we still being told that the situation was so unclear, intel so conflicting, that no intervention was advisable?
I wonder if the Lt. Colonel has put himself in jeopardy with regard to speaking publicly about sensitive or secret information…it was border-line, but I’m sure glad he came forward so we can have a conversation about this. Perhaps we have not heard the last of this.
PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS AND PASS IT ALONG TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.
If you’re patient and curious, please read the transcript of an October 9, 2012 State Department press briefing. The link to it is:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/10/198791.htm
Here’s why it is important to read this transcript. Sadly this many weeks after the murderous terrorist attack it is about all we really have to go on in the way of an official account. Although the State Department spokesperson provided a running account of the attack and the immediate aftermath, no exact running timeline was provided. Absent that minute-by-minute timeline, one can still conclude that Ambassador Stevens likely died fairly early on in the attack. It is not clear whether the US team who was in constant communications throughout the almost seven hour duration of the battle knew this for sure at the point that he couldn’t be found during the move from the Technical Operations Center (TOC) building to what is described as Building C. Stevens was not seen again for the duration of the battle. Regardless of whether Stevens was alive, dead or captured at that point, there were scores of other people still in danger and they deserved help.
We may never know to what extent ex-Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty saved lives before they died fighting in a concentrated mortar and RPG assault by the attackers almost seven hours after the incident started. The State Department briefing indicates that first fire was noted at 9:40 PM, and Woods and Doherty were killed six+ hours later at approximately 4:00 AM. With major rapid response insertion teams equipped, trained, and standing by with the ability to be in the fight within hours, why were these assets not scrambled & positioned regardless of whether a last minute no-go decision needed to be made?
Something is not right about what we’re being told, and no answers will be forthcoming until well after November 7th.
Lib-Whisperer 