rickyp wrote:fate

Benghazi was underdefended and we don't know why.

Sure you do. You just won't accept the reasons.

Accountability Review Board

"Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department ... resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,"

There have been 32 attacks on US embassies or consulates since 1932. Each one resulted in a review of security ...
It would be interesting to know what has changed since at Embasseys and consulates since the BenGhazi incident. But then, that would probably be a security breach... So the specifics of blame and the changes probably can't be fully known.
It might also be interesting to learn if the budget cut backs to the State Department, spearheaded by GOP, contributed to the problems. But I doubt that will ever be specifically addressed.

Security Incidents Prior to the Benghazi Attack

December 2011: Terror plot thwarted, but Benghazi emergency plan warns of many Islamic terrorists still operating in area.

March 2012: U.S. Embassy in Tripoli lead security officer, RSO Eric Nordstrom, requests additional security but later testified he received no response.

April 10, 2012: An explosive device is thrown at a convoy carrying U.N. envoy Ian Martin.

May 22, 2012: A rocket-propelled grenade hits the offices of the International Red Cross.

June 6, 2012: An IED explodes outside the Benghazi consulate compound.

June 11, 2012: An RPG hits a convoy carrying the British Ambassador. The U.K. closes its consulate. Col. Wood, military Site Security Team (SST) commander, is in Benghazi, and helps with emergency response.

July 2012: RSO Nordstrom again requests additional security (perhaps via cable signed by Amb. Stevens dated July 9, see below).

July 9, 2012: Amb. Stevens sends a cable requesting continued help from military SST and State Dept. MSD (Mobile Security Deployment team) through mid-Sept. 2012, saying that benchmarks for a drawdown have not been met. The teams are not extended.

Early August: State Dept. removes the last of three 6-man State Dept. security teams and a 16-man military SST team from Libya.

August 2, 2012: Ambassador Stevens sends a cable to D.C. requesting "protective detail bodyguard postions" -- saying the added guards "will fill the vaccum of security personnel currently at post... who will be leaving with the next month and will not be replaced." He called "the security condition in Libya ... unpredictable, volatile and violent."

August 8, 2012: A cable from Amb. Stevens to D.C. says "a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape" and calls them "targeted and discriminate attacks."

Aug. 27, 2012: The State Department issues a travel warning for Libya citing the threat of assassination and car bombings in Benghazi/Tripoli.

The whole Benghazi attack--but, in particular, the cover up. Why did it take so long for the Administration to tell us what they knew within 24 hours? Actually, they flat out lied.

Actually, as The Times reported this morning, the emails show that the deputy director of the C.I.A., Michael Morell, “deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya.” The State Department objected to that reference because officials thought it would make them look bad, but there is no record of the C.I.A. pushing back. There was no coercion or force, and no indication that the C.I.A. objected to the early, now much disputed claim that the killings were revenge for an anti-Islam Internet video.

The White House has long said that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who discussed the anti-Islam video on Sunday talk shows directly after the attack, was just reflecting the administration consensus at that moment. The e-mails, according to The Washington Post story, “appear to support that contention.”

On the contrary. Far from assiduously gathering and releasing information, the administration was assiduously trying to control and suppress it.

Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reports, by phone to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of any demonstration or video, later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.” “My jaw dropped,” he testified last week to Congress.

But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation — the first time in his 22-year career he had been so ordered. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice TV statements are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message — don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.

Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an e-mail saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.

What were the American people fed? Four days and 12 drafts later, a fiction about a demonstration that never was, provoked by a video that no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.

The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after strenuous State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.

That’s not an accretion of truth. That’s a subtraction of truth.

And why? Let the deputy national security adviser’s e-mail to the parties explain: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities” — fancy bureaucratese for “interests of the government agencies involved.” (He then added — “particularly the investigation.” But the FBI, which was conducting the investigation, had no significant objections. That excuse was simply bogus.)

Note that he didn’t say the talking points should reflect the truth — only the political interests, the required political cover, of all involved. And the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.

WH Benghazi emails have different quotes than earlier reported

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."
But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.
It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."
Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.
The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, "The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda."

rickyp wrote:

WH Benghazi emails have different quotes than earlier reported

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-5 ... -reported/

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."
But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.
It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."
Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.
The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, "The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda."

If the cover up is real, why are republicans changing the emails?
And if they are changing the emails, what else are they lying about? (See how this goes?)

Fate, you suffer from Obama Derangement syndrome....so you can't look at this in a balanced fashion. I get that being fed a line from Fox news, Breithbart and Hot Air can distort the perception of the world.

Its a fact that in the US the corrosion of the media and politics has lead to increases in ODS, and to a lesser extent to similar problems from the left.

There are indeed legitimate questions to ask about the deaths in Benghazi. But by looking for scandal, where there is none ...doesn't advance the cause of good governance.

A balanced assessment from the Washington Post today.
5 Myths About benGhazi

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... ml?hpid=z2

Was there a cover-up? It does appear White House spokesman Jay Carney wasn’t giving the full story when he said, at a Nov. 28 briefing, that the White House and State Department had made only a “single adjustment” to the talking points, changing the word “consulate” to “diplomatic facility.” It is also possible that State wanted to tone down or remove passages that might cast the department or Clinton in a bad light.

But the e-mails indicate as well that the White House and State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland were mainly concerned with prejudging an ongoing investigation by releasing classified information too soon. And there is little doubt that Rice’s taped remarks reflected the best intelligence assessment of the attacks at the time.

The Obama administration has responded that Hicks, a career diplomat, was no military expert. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former defense secretary Leon Panetta testified this year that a military rescue mission would not have been practical. Dempsey said it would have taken “up to 20 hours or so” to get F-16s to the site, and he called them “the wrong tool for the job.”

3. Obama and Clinton should not be blamed.

This is the Democrats’ favorite myth. In December, Clinton’s own Accountability Review Board concluded that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” might have contributed to the four deaths. But the report didn’t assign responsibility to any individual, and it confined blame for any mistakes to “two bureaus of the State Department.”

In fact, the Obama administration did appear to be playing down or ignoring security threats in Libya at the time. As the report said: “Simply put, in the months leading up to September 11, 2012, security in Benghazi was not recognized and implemented as a ‘shared responsibility’ in Washington, resulting in stove-piped discussions and decisions on policy and security.” The report also noted “known gaps” in the intelligence community’s assessments. And it’s the responsibility of those at the highest levels — the president and the secretary of state — to fill those gaps. In congressional testimony in January, Clinton said that she didn’t read an Aug. 16 cable from Stevens that raised questions about security and that she didn’t know about a decision to reject a request for more security. “I didn’t see those requests. They did not come to me. I did not approve them. I did not deny them,” she said. If so, it’s fair to ask: Why wasn’t Clinton involved?

these risks were known before the attack. As the Accountability Review Board report concluded, “At the time of the September attacks, Benghazi remained a lawless town nominally controlled by the Supreme Security Council (SSC) — a coalition of militia elements loosely cobbled into a single force to provide interim security — but in reality run by a diverse group of local Islamist militias.” Why was Stevens allowed to travel to such an unsecure place?

It represents a tragic failure of U.S. policy, one that should spark a larger discussion about whether the government has responded poorly to the Islamist threats that have emerged since the Arab Spring. It is reasonable to ask whether the Obama administration, starting with the president himself, created the conditions for Benghazi by being overconfident about the destruction of al-Qaeda and playing down the significance of extremist elements, possibly linked to al-Qaeda, that had emerged in Libya and elsewhere. Unless these threats are better understood, it is easy to imagine a similar disaster happening elsewhere.

Because Benghazi cost precious American lives, it should be investigated carefully rather than politicized endlessly.

The officials spoke to CBS News in a series of interviews and communications under the condition of anonymity so that they could be more frank in their assessments. They do not all agree on the list of mistakes and it's important to note that they universally claim that any errors or missteps did not cost lives and reflect "incompetence rather than malice or cover up." Nonetheless, in the eight months since the attacks, this is the most sweeping and detailed discussion by key players of what might have been done differently.

"We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots," said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. "It's actually closer to us being idiots."[

. . .

The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as "FEST" is described as "the US Government's only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide." It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.

Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: "I wish we'd sent it."

"The U.S. military base in Sigonella, Sicily, was 480 miles away from Benghazi. Stationed at Sigonella were Special Operations Forces, transport aircraft and attack aircraft ... Fighter jets could have been at Benghazi in an hour; the commandos inside three hours." Your administration had seven hours, Mr. Secretary, seven hours.

GMTom wrote:Leon Panetta claimed we could not send forces into an "unknown situation" yet this is exactly what these troops are trained for and "unknown"? we had constant email correspondence, we even had a drone over the compound sending real time video ...this was an "unknown" situation?

I say the preventable deaths of 4 Americans is scandalous. I gave a long timeline showing all the events leading up to 9/11. To ignore them is not "good governance."

freeman3 wrote:I'm sorry, fighter jets? Yeah, how could you use fighter jets in such a chaotic situation? Maybe just blow the whole compound up, right? And sending troops into a completely unknown situation is problematic. What if they got knocked down by a RPG? This second-guessing is nonsense. Most likely they would have gotten there too late and may have contributed to the casualty list.

freeman3 wrote:And the emails released by the White House show that the whole theory that the White House knew it was a terror attack and did not originate from a protest about a video is completely wrong. The CIA was the one that said this. How many times that I have read here and elsewhere that the administration "knew" that the attack had nothing to do with a protest. Yet, those allegations were wrong--the CIA was the one that got it wrong. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/benghazi ... Za6WkocPLs

The emails confirm the ABC News report that the so-called "talking points" written by the CIA on the attack underwent extensive revisions – 12 versions – and that substantial changes were made after the State Department expressed concerns.

The early versions of the talking points, drafted entirely by the CIA, included references to the al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia and to previous CIA warnings about terror threats in Benghazi. State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland expressed concerns about including those references in the talking points.

A senior administration official said that Deputy CIA Director Mike Morrell agreed with Nuland's concerns and made the changes himself. There is no email record, however, showing that Morrell shared Nuland's concerns.

"I'm with Toria," wrote then Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs David S. Adams, agreeing with Nuland's concerns about a section on the CIA's intelligence on Benghazi extremists. "That last bullet especially will read to members [of Congress] like we had been repeatedly warned."

“The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document,” wrote a CIA official from the Office of Public Affairs, at 9:15 p.m. on September 14. “We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”

So, too, does an email from CIA director David Petraeus to Chip Walter, on the legislative affairs staff at the agency, after Petraeus was provided a final draft of the talking points that had been through the interagency scrubbing. “No mention of the Cairo cable, either?” he wrote. “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.” Petraeus’s use of the word “either,” suggests he disliked not just the omission of Cairo but the removal of something else as well.

The Cairo reference is important for another reason. It is the first step on a long, circuitous journey to understanding why the CIA initially reported that the Benghazi attacks had been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo” and how the Obama administration came to depend on that phrase in selling its narrative about a YouTube video.

There was an intercepted communication between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists, one of whom participated in the Benghazi attack. According to sources familiar with the communication, a jihadist in Libya, believed to be a member of Ansar al Sharia (AAS), reported to a more senior operative about his participation in the Benghazi attack. The AAS member mentioned having seen the Cairo protests earlier in the day before joining the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi. (There is disagreement among analysts whether the jihadist joined the Benghazi attacks because he had seen the protests in Cairo or simply after he had seen them.)

Next made-up scandal?

danivon wrote:I am by no means a military expert, but I'm pretty sure that fighter planes are not really designed for, or used in, urban warfare. Especially not if, say, you didn't want to accidentally kill uninvolved civilians nearby. Fighter planes are really more about providing air cover and keeping it. If the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was aerial, I wasn't aware of it.

But forces were sent there. We know this, and have known this for some time, because the casualties included at least one of the people sent.

After some discussion, the CIA's Global Response Staff (GRS) at the CIA annex, which included senior security operative Tyrone S. Woods, decided to implement a rescue. By 10:05pm, the team was briefed and loaded into their armored Toyota Land Cruisers. By this time, communicators at the CIA annex were notifying the chain of command about current developments, and a small CIA and JSOC element in Tripoli that included Glen Doherty was attempting to find a way to Benghazi.[2

Hindsight might suggest that more could have been done, but I'm not sure that would have been clear at the time. But just saying that some nearby hardware of any kind should have been sent on spec is grasping, it seems.