tom

Lets review what you have to say Ricky, how accurate is your assessment based on the timeline

?
Its not my assessment. Its the facts in evidence, on Wikipedia, with corroboration or documentation for each fact on the site.. Where did you get the information for your "assessment"?

Tom

Or are you assuming some things??? (as I had wrongly assumed the former seal was a current marine ...but lets ignore for now how he was ordered to stay away)

Why should we ignore your claim that he was ordered to stay away? Don't you have evidence for this... Since he obviously travelled from tripoli and engaged the terrorists, either he wasn't following orders (unlikely) or he had no such orders.He was a CIA operative in the region responsible for security....

Tom

it started at 9:42 AM
it took almost a full hour (10:32 AM) until the Sect of Defense to be notified (that is already a problem and something that is already fishy sounding)
Why?

Look, most of the BS propogated on this issue ignores a major fact. Most of the presence in Libya was CIA. They have their own security and response forces and their own protocols.
There's also something incredibly naive about comments regarding the timeline and the response. First, the immediate response was by the CIA and some DSS security. Their response failed to protect Stevens and the Information officer. However two security at the Embassey were rescued.
The second attack was met by the CIA and DSS security forces, and aided by the response team and the Libyan soldiers... And they were succcessful. Only two CIA security were killed, versus about 100 Libyan terorists. (By the way 6 Libyan govenrmetn troops died helping the Americans).
All in all the response was reasonably successful. One abhors the faact that 4 dieed, hwoever 32 were evacuated. And, do remember most of those 32 were armed operatives .... not innocents .
This was not a major failing like 238 MArines being blown up in their barracks. It was an organized military assault that was dealt with by local CIA and DSS security, in a short time frame.

Why is there such a fetish over the speed with which the chain of command was informed? That Panetta and the President weren't informed immediatly didn't matter really. There was a protocol and plan in palce, and it worked fairly well. Leaders delegate responsibility. The responsibility for security in Benghazi was down to the CIA and DSS. To the extent that they saved 32 people they reacted effectively.
If the CIA had informaton of an impending terrorist attack, and didn't share, thats an obvious failing. That has nothing to do with Panetta, certainly nothing to do with Hagel. It certainly involves Obama, but the events and timeline of the reaction to the attack add nothing to that particualr discussion.
If, when Obama was informed of the attack you expect him to micro manage the response. Thats just stupid. He delgates that duty to the CIA, DSS and perhaps the military. Since the CIA and DSS got their people out at the expense of only 2 security officers.... they seem to have been professional. And they didn't require the military.


Tom

then we have the whole matter of Obama continuing to tell the lie that this was not a terrorist attack but rather a demonstration regarding the anti-Islamic film for several days he told this story when it was known all along that this was a terrorist attack. Nobody seems to be questioning that bold faced lie are they?

And this is total bullshit.
On September 12 U.S. President Barack Obama condemned "this outrageous attack" on U.S. diplomatic facilities[137] and stated that "[s]ince our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others."[137] After referring to "the 9/11 attacks," "troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan", and "then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi"[137] the President then stated that "[a]s Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it."[137] He then went on to say, "[n]o acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done."[137]

After the attack, Obama ordered that security be increased at all such facilities worldwide.[9] A 50-member Marine FAST team was sent to Libya to "bolster security."[138] It was announced that the FBI would investigate the possibility of the attack being planned.[139] U.S. officials said surveillance over Libya would increase, including the use of unmanned drones, to "hunt for the attackers."[139]

Secretary of State Clinton also made a statement on September 12, describing the perpetrators as "heavily armed militants" and "a small and savage group – not the people or government of Libya."[140] She also reaffirmed "America’s commitment to religious tolerance" and said "Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet," but whether true or not, that was not a justification for violence.[141] The State Department had previously identified embassy and personnel security as a major challenge in its budget and priorities report

Why should we ignore your claim that he was ordered to stay away? Don't you have evidence for this... Since he obviously travelled from tripoli and engaged the terrorists, either he wasn't following orders (unlikely) or he had no such orders.He was a CIA operative in the region responsible for security....

no,
these two CIA agents were not in Libya for security but rather to do other jobs such as rounding up weapons and such, they were NOT security personnel as you want us to believe.
Your claim that these two agents were NOT ordered to stand down is contrary to reports, no we have no "proof" (the CIA keeps everything secret, no kidding!) but reports are that they finally ignored orders to stand down THREE times.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2 ... to-reason/

Look, most of the BS propogated on this issue ignores a major fact. Most of the presence in Libya was CIA. They have their own security and response forces and their own protocols.

SIX people?
and only two of them were killed?

After the attack, Obama ordered that security be increased at all such facilities worldwide.[9] A 50-member Marine FAST team was sent to Libya to "bolster security."

yes, they arrived 22 hours after it all started, that sure is "FAST" huh?

There's also something incredibly naive about comments regarding the timeline and the response. First, the immediate response was by the CIA and some DSS security.

it took almost an hour and a half to notify the President? It took only moments to order drone surveillance.

your "claim" that Obama did NOT continue with the movie reference,funny how your opinion is just that, he in fact DID continue with the misrepresentation
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... ghazi-lie/

try as you like, this is a cover-up and the President screwed up ...badly
where is the liberals outcry for truth?

tom you really should check your sources, The Forbes article is dated. And from it:

According to a Fox News report by Jennifer Griffin, former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty (who were later killed), were ordered to stand down three times following calls during the attack. The first two times occurred soon after they heard initial shots fired, informed higher-ups at the CIA annex, and requested permission to go to the consulate to help out. However, they ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate, which by that time was on fire. The rescue team then returned to the CIA annex about midnight after evacuating those who remained at the consulate and retrieving the body of Sean Smith. They had not succeeded in locating Ambassador Stevens

Ms. Griffin has Doherty and Woods located together, being told to stand down...
In fact at the time of the first attack Doherty was in Tripoli and was ordered to get a response team to Ben Ghazi. Woods was in Ben Gahzi.... But since there were several attempts to get to the consulate, where dos Griffin get her information. ? It certainly doesn't agree with the fact that the DSS and CIA security went to the consulate twice...

Here's how the CIA agents are described: two embassy security personnel, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods,[70][71] both former Navy SEALs.[72][73] Senior intelligence officials later acknowledged that Woods and Doherty were contracted by Central Intelligence Agency, not the State Department as previously identified,[74] and were part of a Global Response Staff (GRS), a team that provides security to CIA case officers and countersurveillance and surveillance protection

If they are part of GRS..... they were part of GRS... One was onsite at the annex at the time of the attacks, the other in Tripoli..

And no Tom.
The CIA didn't have 6 people at the embassy. There were 32 people there. Most were CIA, some were DSS, so armed force, and they were joined by Doherty's 5 man team and a company of Libyan soldiers ...

tom
yes, they arrived 22 hours after it all started, that sure is "FAST" huh?
Why did they have to get there faster? The Ben Benghazi site had already been evacuated, and Tripoli was on high alert with Libyan army guarding it in force...
If you think that 22 hours represents incompetence, what would represent competence. 18 hours?

By the way, quoting an editorial from the Washington Times that misquotes Obama as evidence is also BS.

What exactly is being covered up Tom? How did the president screw up?
All you present is old stories from months ago, that have been refuted as evidence has been presented.
There was incompetence in Ben Ghazi. The CIA screwed up on knowing that the attack was being planned in the first place. But, that happens in intelligence doesn't it? Perhaps the CIA doesn't want to accept blame, but is it really the presidents fault that CIA operatives couldn't predict an attack?
The response to the incident was based upon DSS and CIA security response. It went reasonably well.
A poor response would have seen all 32 staff and the armed response team dead as well. Tactically, they did pretty well.

You support the liberals no matter what the case it would appear. You see no problems, nothing fishy, have no problem with Obama not being forthcoming? Wow, just wow!

GMTom wrote:The other question, would it possibly be better to make such positions elected positions? Same with say Superior Court judges, would it possibly be better to have them elected as well? I really can see the pluses and minuses of both sides. Maybe this is best in a new thread???

I think it's better here than having imported the conspiracy theory stuff from the Benghazi thread over (to keep things tidy, you and DF can chat there about it if you like).

On the question of elected individual cabinet members, I think it's likely to be a bad idea.

First of all, who is the electorate? Should it be, as for the Presidency, the people of the nation? Should it be delegated to politicians like the US Congress? Either way, it's bound to just increase the level of partisan debate and polarisation.

Second of all, it means effectively that the cabinet 'team' is not set up as a team, but rather is a collection of individuals assembled by committee. You don't select a sports team that way (the English FA used to, and it was a really dumb idea, hence when we started entering the World Cup we'd get beaten easily). While each cabinet member has their own area of responsibility, they also have to work together as well as with the President.

Thirdly, it would increase the propensity for the posts to be filled by politicians. Sometimes it makes sense to have technocrats rather than people who are adept at winning votes.

I don't think the UK way is particularly perfect. Cabinet members have to be members of Parliament. That means either being MPs in the Commons (who are already elected to be in the Legislature and so we have a big overlap with the Executive) or members of the House of Lords. The latter way is how 'outsiders' or non-politicians can be brought in, but the problem is that not only do they (currently) then get a life long seat on the red benches, they also are part of the Legislature again (albeit a weaker part).

The advantage of having the President/Prime Minister select their own cabinet is that you are actually retaining the responsibility in the Executive side. To take the decision away from the senior executive and give it to others would mean someone else is making the decision.

That does not (as Sass alludes) stop the Legislature or the Judiciary from holding cabinet members to account.

It also, as Sass pointed out, does not mean that the senior Judiciary are the same as the cabinet.

geojanes wrote:

Doctor Fate wrote:Bulletin: Hagel is being temporarily filibustered because the Administration will not give Congress info re: Benghazi. All you have to do is listen to McCain or Graham to know that.

...

That's what the Hagel thing is about.

We'll have to agree to disagree on the accuracy of Hagel's statement, but on the relationship of Hagel to Benghazi, that's interesting. If this was really about getting answers to unanswered questions and holding people accountable, wouldn't Republicans be trying to get one of their own into the DoD so that he could help force those answers? Why take it out on Hagel, who is one of them? If what you're saying is true, it seems that Republicans are more interested in making a scene than finding any answers.

Please. Hagel is "one of their own?" He's Obama's buddy.

No, the Republicans are interested in answers.

Who briefed the President during the course of the attack?

Answer that and I'll stop. Here's a hint: they won't say.

There are many unanswered questions. The problem is that the stooges on the Left can't fathom that the Man, who can't even say he won't use drone strikes on Americans in US territory, also refuses to answer questions about Benghazi.

After all, as your next Presidential candidate said, "What difference does it make?"

Stop relying on nothing but Leftist sources.

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article ... ck_check=1

Graham said Sunday that the FBI interviewed the Americans who were evacuated from Benghazi, but won’t give copies of the transcripts to Congress.

“This is an ongoing criminal investigation is what they told me. We’re going back to the law enforcement model where we’re treating al Qaeda as sort of a Mafia, a criminal element rather than enemy combatants,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Furthermore, he said, weeks passed before the CIA called the FBI about the interviews, an indication that those agencies are reverting back to the days when they often failed to coordinate on such matters.

Of course, if you read your "reliable sources," you only get this:


http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2 ... hazi-cover

Q. How is it possible that the Americans were begging for additional security in Benghazi and the Secretary of State knew nothing about it?

Q. Who is being held responsible for the failure to heed all the obvious warnings and the pleas in the MONTHS leading up to the attack?

MCCAIN: I hope I wasn't rough on her, but I think we need to make it clear there are many unanswered questions months after the tragic deaths of four brave Americans and we still don't know what shape the talking points that Ambassador Rice used. We still don't know when the president was briefed. We still don't know why the survivors who were flown to Germany were not asked the next day whether it was a spontaneous demonstration or not.

We still don't know why the president continued for at least two weeks afterwards to say that he didn't know whether it was a terrorist attack or not, and of course, the exchange that he had with Mitt Romney in their debate, where he said he had called it a terrorist attack when he hadn't.

But there are so many questions that remain unanswered. Why were so many warnings ignored by the State Department? Why was it when the person in charge of the detail of 16 people objected and requested to stay because of the failure in the security there around the consulate? Why did they heed the warnings when there was an attack on the British ambassador? None of these questions have been asked to the satisfaction of, frankly, any of us who paid close attention.

VAN SUSTEREN: Did you get them today? I didn't have a chance to watch all the hearings or in the House, and a lot of members talking and they get to the end of the time and they have to get the answer in writing later because they've been either praising her or roughing her up. There really wasn't sort of, what do you know, when do you know it, who was there? There's very little of that in the hearing.

MCCAIN: First of all, it's not too surprising given members of Congress. But second of all, you only have five minutes. So I had to lay out in my five minutes those questions that remained unanswered, because, with all due respect to the secretary of state, she basically sort of said that everything had been taken care of.

Greta, why in the world should we not know what the e-mails were, where they decided what particular language that Ambassador Susan Rice would use in talking to the American people? Why would Ambassador Rice say Al Qaeda has been decimated? We know Al Qaeda hasn't been decimated. We know it's on the rise.

VAN SUSTEREN: Why -- I realize you're in the minority here, but Ambassador Rice talked to senators behind closed doors. She has not been summoned to the house where the majority, Republicans have the majority so none of this -- she has those answers and she hasn't been summoned.

MCCAIN: I'm not sure how many answers she has because --

VAN SUSTEREN: That's why she was chosen or gave her the points.

MCCAIN: The president said in defense of her, she doesn't know anything about Benghazi. That was the president's statement. She was given a set of talking points. Now, she should have known better. She should have checked them out, the same way that Colin Powell should have known better when he told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

But I don't think she has many of the answers. The answers lie within the State Department, the CIA, and the White House. Who changed the talking points and why? Because the talking points, if it had included the classified information they had would have depicted a very different version of events than the ones that ambassador rice told the American people.

And, I guess finally, why would we ever think that people bring mortars and rocket propelled grenades to spontaneous demonstrations? I mean, on the face of it, this cannot be ignored, the fact that this was all in the heat of a presidential campaign, a president who was campaigning, saying bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda's on the run. We know that's not true.

http://nation.foxnews.com/benghazi/2013 ... s-benghazi

The President even had to lie about it during the debate--and get his bacon saved by Candy Crowley.

and your source Fate is Lindsey Graham who says

Graham said that a call from Obama during the attack might have saved two of the four Americans who were killed. In the White House response, Ruemmler said that an accountability review board Clinton convened immediately after the attack found that “there simply was not enough time given the speed of the attacks for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference

Now presumably Graham is talking about Dougherty and Woods who were killed defending the CIA quarters in the early part of the morning.
These guys were part of the armed forces, firing at attacking terrorists. Dougherty was the leader of the response team from Tripoli that came with the Libyan armed forces.
How would Obama making a call going to help? The CIA was responding with the assets they had in place, and two of their men were killed.
The two Graham is talking about died when the building roof was hit by mortar rounds.... Does Graham think that there was a way to engage the enemy that close to the CIA quarters where there was no potential for harm coming to the defenders...? If so, why do they wonder about the force from Italy? Would they be somehow imbued with special powers making them immune to enemy bullets or mortar rounds?
Whats particularly galling about this Ben Ghazi nonsense is that McCain and Graham were big apologists for the Iraq failures ... and refused any real effort to investigate or uncover all of the mistakes, blunders, intelligence failures and leadership failures in that conflict. A conflict of choice where 4,000 died, not 4.

Woah, woah!!

So when people say that '4 Americans died' because no help was sent, one of the dead was part of the help that was sent?

What gives?

Doctor Fate wrote:Please. Hagel is "one of their own?" He's Obama's buddy.

The guy's a two term senator with a conservative voting record from a conservative state. It's not like he was some northeast Republican that split votes between Republican and Democratic issues. He is a self-made multi-millionaire, "job-creator," combat veteran. If he isn't a Republican, the Republican tent is so tiny, how could it have a future?

the "help sent" was a SIX man CIA team, here we have a mob firing guns and mortars and RPG's and you think this six man team is considered "help" woah, woah, what gives? ...well I guess a bandaid might be considered "help" for a wound that requires stitches?

and Hagel was at one time considered a Republican, sure. But how about the last few years? Please, let's stop looking at the past and look at the present, the guy is no friend of Republicans in the least. I think he is simply a kiss ass who cozies up to those who can offer him the most, sure looks that way!

Maybe he is just remaining consistent while the Republicans collectively lose their minds and descend into a pastiche of Know-Nothing populism?

By the way, that 6 man team was not alone. There were Libyans there as well. Maybe foreigns don't count

tom

the "help sent" was a SIX man CIA team, here we have a mob firing guns and mortars and RPG's and you think this six man team is considered "help" woah, woah, what gives? ...well I guess a bandaid might be considered "help" for a wound that requires stitches?

Did they manage to successfully evacuate the 32 people at the ANNEX?
If so..... then how was the "help" insufficient?

GMTom wrote:Hagel was at one time considered a Republican, sure. But how about the last few years? Please, let's stop looking at the past and look at the present, the guy is no friend of Republicans in the least. I think he is simply a kiss ass who cozies up to those who can offer him the most, sure looks that way!

He was a Republican senator from Nebraska until 2009, when he was in his 60s, and suddenly he's not anymore? That's CRAZY. The guy is as conservative as they come, and like many good conservatives thought that the war in Iraq was wrong and worked against it, and against what the President wanted. Does that make him not a Republican anymore? If you disagree with the President on policy, does being a Republican mean keeping quiet?

You can preview 40 or 50 pages of his most recent book here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=n8uqGjGksZwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

The guy is a Republican.

I understand the math. The Republican constituency is shrinking, and to bolster your shrinking constituency, you need to have fealty from everyone in it, as diversity of opinions weakens the already small numbers. This fealty is done best in the ultra-orthodox communities here in NYC, where everyone in the congregation votes, and they vote exactly as the Rebbe tells them to vote, which gives them an enormous political voice far greater than their numbers. I get the math, but it's not very American, is it?

Why anyone would want to be in the Republican's club when it treats its distinguished members in such a shoddy way, I have no idea. Party of Stupid!

if he is so "Republican" then why did he support Democrats in the last election?
if he is so "Republican" then why did he slam the party in the press?
if he is so "Republican" then why did he suddenly switch to supporting Obama's "foreign policy" (is their one?) when it became clear he was winning the Presidential race?

Party of stupid, maybe, I can't argue about that but please "enlighten me" as to how the Democrats are any more intelligent? Please, these guys are also quite stupid! You are falling prey to the MSM deception no doubt.

and Ricky
Did they manage to successfully evacuate the 32 people at the ANNEX?
If so..... then how was the "help" insufficient?
...people DIED, no it was not sufficient!