Why Obama Chose to Let Them Die in Benghazi

November 2, 2012
By Karin McQuillan

 The burning question is why Obama didn't give orders to defend our consulate and American lives in Benghazi.  The answer is becoming clearer each time President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta issue a denial or explanation of their inaction. 

To the president's surprise, he chanced on an honest reporter during a local interview on the campaign trail in Denver.  On October 26, for the first time, Obama was asked directly about the explosive reports on CBS and Fox News, a week earlier, that the CIA and our military denied direct requests for help by the Americans fighting for their lives during the seven-hour battle in Benghazi.

Denver TV's Kyle Clark twice tried to pin Obama down by asking the key question: "Were they denied requests for help during the attack?"

Obama's answer is the proof of his guilt, and it gives us a clue as to the doctrine informing his decision to do nothing.  The most damaging part of Obama's evasive answer is this:

... the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. ... I guarantee you that everyone in the state department, our military, the CIA, you name it, had number-one priority making sure that people were safe.

This is the blatant lie that condemns the liar.  The president says here that immediately, "the minute I found out what was happening," he gave the order to the military, the CIA, to everyone, to secure our personnel in Benghazi and do "whatever we need to."

Yet the undeniable fact is that nothing was done.  We know that the CIA security agent in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods, asked for permission to rescue Ambassador Stevens when Stevens was still alive and in the safe room.  Woods was told twice by the CIA to stand down.  He then disobeyed direct orders and rescued the survivors at the consulate, but it was too late for Stevens and Sean Smith.

Secretary of Defense Panetta tells us the military had gunships and Special Forces less than two hours away in Sicily but felt it was too "risky" to send in reinforcements or air cover.  It would have been normal military procedure to pre-position air cover and assets from Sicily to Benghazi, but Panetta says this was not done.  

The air support and FAST platoons, we are told, were left in Sicily.  All the U.S. military did was send two unarmed drones to observe the battle.

So if President Obama is not lying about his directives, he is saying that the CIA and the Defense Department and our military chain of command disobeyed the direct order of our commander in chief to do everything in their power to rescue our people under attack in Benghazi.  And that as commander in chief, Obama did nothing in response to their dereliction of duty.

That doesn't happen.  No one believes that; the president is lying.  He did not issue directives to the CIA, our military, and State to "secure our personnel" and "do whatever we need to do."

We know it was not the CIA on its own that made the decision to abandon Ambassador Stevens and the eight others with him in the consulate.  The CIA say they did not advise anyone in the administration to deny help to the Americans in Benghazi.  A CIA spokesman on October 27 issued this statement:

No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.

General Carter F. Ham, the combatant commander of Africa Command (AFRICOM), says he was never asked to send help. 

Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, said that General Ham told him during a visit to Libya that he had never been asked to provide military support for the Americans under attack in Benghazi.

On October 18, General Ham resigned. 

Panetta explained why no help was sent on October 26, the same day Obama was telling the Denver reporter he had ordered the military to do "whatever we need to."

Panetta admitted we did nothing.  He says the military had the readiness and capability to help.  He says the military responded quickly and deployed forces close to Benghazi, ready and capable of responding "to any contingency."

We quickly responded, as General Dempsey said, in terms of deploying forces to the region.  We had FAST platoons in the region. We had ships that we had deployed off of Libya. We were prepared to respond to any contingency and certainly had forces in place to do that.

Panetta then tells us why the forces were never deployed.  He says the top leadership of our military didn't want to send reinforcements, even air support, into harm's way.  It was too risky.  Panetta does not indicate that he knew of Obama's supposed directives to do "whatever we need to" to save the Americans trapped in the 9/11 attack. 

"[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," Panetta told Pentagon reporters. "And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.

Note that General Ham had already told Congressman Chaffetz he was never asked to provide military support. 

Panetta's statement that we didn't have enough intelligence to risk sending air or combat support is not credible.  We had real-time information by video, radio, and e-mail.  We had laser targets painted on their mortar nest.  When else do you send reinforcements, if not into dangerous situations? 

Max Boot writes in Commentary:

Special Operations Forces and other military forces are used to acting on incomplete information, especially in a situation where Americans are under fire and in danger of being overrun. At that point, caution is normally thrown to the wind, and Quick Reaction Forces are launched.

We certainly could have saved the lives of CIA agents Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty if  President Obama had given orders to do so.  There were two drones and perhaps a gunship overhead.  The two men died because they painted laser targets on the jihadi mortar nests.  They were radioing for air cover, expecting that the target would be bombed and the jihadi attack ended.  This is what Navy SEALs do.  We have learned from experts that American Special Forces paint such laser targets only when air cover is immediately available, as it gives away your position to the enemy.  According to these experts, Woods and Doherty must have believed that air cover was immediately available.  Their calls for air support went unanswered, and they died.

If there weren't a manned drone and a gunship sent out -- it was now six hours into the battle -- that indicates that Obama and Panetta did not direct the military to be ready to intervene if necessary.  If the drone was sent unarmed and the gunship never sent, it says the military never intended to help under any circumstances. 

Bing West, a distinguished combat correspondent and former assistant secretary of defense, has produced a timeline of the Benghazi attacks, which went on for most of the night, suggesting there was plenty of time for substantial U.S. forces to scramble from the U.S. base at Sigonella,

Sicily, located almost exactly as far away from Benghazi as the Libyan capital of Tripoli, from whence a small, ill-armed quick-reaction force of 22 men was finally sent. "Stationed at Sigonella," he notes, "were Special Operations Forces, transport aircraft, and attack aircraft - a much more formidable force than 22 men from the embassy."

President Obama says, "I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to."  It is clear that he did not issue such a directive, or else the CIA and the military defied him.

Why would our president not come to the defense of our consulate under attack?  This is an attack on American soil.  This was a 9/11 attack by an al-Qaeda branch in Libya.  Therein lies the answer.

Obama does not believe in using the military to defend our national security, which he sees as aggressive, Republican, and cowboy.  This was Obama's 9/11, not Bush's.  He did not see the attack on our embassy as a jihadi attack on American soil.  He saw a group of aggrieved Muslim citizens, with good reason to be angry -- the spontaneous mob enraged by an offensive video.  He would follow a Democrat policy of promoting peace, not war, in which avoiding civilian casualties is the paramount goal. 

The other answer is directly political.  It would be damaging for Obama's already weak record to admit that there was a 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda in one of the supposed successes of the Arab Spring.  Responding militarily would have made the weaknesses of Obama's foreign policy all too evident.  An American military response would have undercut one of Obama's main campaign slogans: "GM is alive and Osama is dead."

Treating Benghazi as a spontaneous mob attack inflamed by an offensive, Islamophobic video was a flimsy story, but the liberal media was quite willing to accept it without question.  Our politically corrupt media not only went along with that nonsense, but so crucified Romney for daring to comment on what happened that Romney shut up.  The story of the offensive video played to Obama's progressive base, which believes that there is no war on terror -- just bad behavior by bigoted Americans that causes Muslims to attack us.

Obama's ideology blinded him to the need to defend American lives under al-Qaeda attack on 9/11/12.  He put his ideology and his politics ahead of Americans lives.  He let four brave men serving our country fight without help and die. 

This decision will doom Obama's chances of re-election if widely known.  That is why our politically corrupt media is censoring this news as hard as it can.  They do not want the majority of Americans to know.  But they cannot keep the lid on.  It is too big, and too awful.  The only question is one of time before Election Day.

American Thinker

Report: Benghazi Consulate Warned of Imminent Terrorist Attack Three Hours Before Raid

• 
• Guy Benson

 And another part of the cover-up crumbles.  If you haven't already, go back and ready my five-point omnibus post from earlier to get up to speed on how the administration's Benghazi narrative is coming apart at the seams -- thanks largely to an avalanche of leaks from people in the know who refuse to be scapegoats.  If Jake Tapper's "drip, drip, drip" analogy is appropriate, here's another major splash from Fox News' Jennifer Griffin this morning.  The first portion of the clip is rehashing some of the information we've seen over the last day or so; it's the back half that contains several important items:

Fox News has learned that US military intelligence was reporting as early as 7pm Eastern -- less than four hours after the attack began -- that Ansar al Sharia carried out the attack.  The intelligence was relayed to the military with no caveats, according to a source familiar with the intelligence.  Further, two State Department cables show that Stevens' team warned Washington...US intelligence officials confirm to Fox that in fact there were reports from the ground in Benghazi three hours before the attack on the consulate that a Libyan militia was gathering weapons and gathering steam.

So not only did the administration know within 24 hours that this had been an act of terrorism, they knew within four hours which specific Islamist group was responsible for the raid.  (Remember, those August cables mentioned at least ten active jihadist militias in the city). The US staff in Benghazi sent explicit warnings about a lack of security at the consulate in August, as requests for reinforcements were being routinely denied.  They also fired off urgent cables mere hours before the assault began, informing Washington that a terrorist attack had been set into motion.  Why do these details matter?  Because the White House -- the president, the Secretary of State, the UN Ambassador -- continued to insist for days that this 9/11 terrorist attack was connected to (non-existent) spontaneous protests over an obscure online video.  Clinton even denounced the video while standing next to the caskets of the fallen upon their return.

 This was a completely false storyline, pushed for reasons that remain unclear -- although I think the motives are becoming more readily apparent by the day.  The president has said that his administration has been fully transparent, updating the public on critical information as it's come in -- even feigning great offense that anyone would suggest otherwise.  The flat truth is that his White House has done nothing of the sort.  Let's recall this assertion from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney three days after the massacre:

The White House on Friday said a report stating the president failed to act on knowledge of a potential attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya was “absolutely wrong.” White House press secretary Jay Carney said there was “no actionable intelligence” ahead of the attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. “There was no intelligence that could in any way have been acted on to prevent these attacks,” he said. “The report was false.”

We now know that there was intelligence.  Lots of it -- not only in the weeks leading up to the coordinated ambush, but in the hours before it unfolded.  That intelligence was bolstered throughout the seven-hour ordeal, during which people "at the most senior level" of the administration denied multiple desperate pleas for back-up for reasons that remain an infuriating mystery.  The president still isn't answering questions on this front, seeking political refuge in a haze of "ongoing investigation" obfuscation.  It seems the Las Vegas Review-Journal's scathing assessment of our current Commander-in-Chief is very much on target.  Parting thought: Are the CIA and State Department "going to war" over this?

UPDATE - Fox News' panel of Kirsten Powers (a Democrat) and Judith Miller (a Pulitzer Prize winner, formerly of the New York Times) just lambasted the media for deliberately ignoring this enormous story to protect their preferred candidate through the election.  Some reporters like Eli Lake, Sharyl Atkisson, Jake Tapper and others are doing excellent work on this, but it is strangely not breaking through into major coverage -- with the exception of Fox, which has treated this seriously.  By comparison, Jonah Goldberg recalls the mad feeding frenzy over George W. Bush's decades-old DUI revelation in the closing days of the 2000 campaign.  It's not a secret what's going on here:

Again, these are not conservative partisans predictably ripping the "lamestream media."  This is a Democratic strategist and a long-time MSMer being honest about what is playing out before their eyes, plain as day.

Townhall

New Bombshells Rock Benghazi Scandal

• 
• Guy Benson

 Damning details about this national scandal continue to emerge, even as the administration hunkers down and tries to wait it out on a political timetable.  ABC News' Jake Tapper describes the succession of appalling revelations as a slow drip, but the stream is picking up.  Let's pick through what we've learned over the last 48 hours alone (if you're short on time, skip down to item number five, which is the biggest story of the bunch):
 
(1) As Katie reported yesterday, secret cables sent from US personnel in Libya to the State Department offered dire and specific warnings that our diplomatic mission in Benghazi was extremely susceptible to a coordinated attack.  Such a raid was a significant cause for concern, the document said, because the US team had identified no fewer than ten Islamist militias operating in the city (some of which had already launched attacks against Western targets).  And yet numerous subsequent requests for additional security measures were denied -- and the American security presence was actually scaled back.  Watch Fox News' national security correspondent Catherine Herridge explain why she views the newly-unearthed documents (authored by Amb. Stevens and sent to Hillary Clinton's office prior to the attack) amount to a "smoking gun:"

 

"The warning that came from Benghazi was very specific.  It said 'we cannot sustain an attack.  The militias are everywhere, Al Qaeda was here.'  This was known to the US intelligence community as well...this comes three and half weeks before the attack."

(2) Six weeks after the assault, and after the FBI had finally picked through the wreckage, journalists were still discovering sensitive State Department items in the burned-out compound.  In a stunning expose, Foreign Policy reports that several of these documents indicated that on September 11th itself, members of our diplomatic core were deeply concerned about their own personal safety and distressed over the lack of security.  Someone even drafted an ominous letter expressing suspicions about apparent potentially problematic surveillance of the compound being undertaken by at least one of the local Libyans charged with protecting it:

When we visited on Oct. 26 to prepare a story for Dubai based Al Aan TV, we found not only Stevens's personal copy of the Aug. 6 New Yorker, lying on remnants of the bed in the safe room where Stevens spent his final hours, but several ash-strewn documents beneath rubble in the looted Tactical Operations Center, one of the four main buildings of the partially destroyed compound. Some of the documents -- such as an email from Stevens to his political officer in Benghazi and a flight itinerary sent to Sean Smith, a U.S. diplomat slain in the attack -- are clearly marked as State Department correspondence. Others are unsigned printouts of messages to local and national Libyan authorities. The two unsigned draft letters are both dated Sept. 11 and express strong fears about the security situation at the compound on what would turn out to be a tragic day. They also indicate that Stevens and his team had officially requested additional security at the Benghazi compound for his visit -- and that they apparently did not feel it was being provided.

One letter, written on Sept. 11 and addressed to Mohamed Obeidi, the head of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs' office in Benghazi, reads: "Finally, early this morning at 0643, September 11, 2012, one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the U.S. special mission and furthermore that this person was part of the police unit sent to protect the mission. The police car stationed where this event occurred was number 322."

How inadequate was the security provided by the locals?  Read on:

“We were given assurances from the highest authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that all due support would be provided for Ambassador Stevens’ visit to Benghazi. However, we are saddened to report that we have only received an occasional police presence at our main gate. Many hours pass when we have no police support at all.”

This would have been less of a problem if our own government had provided resources to adhere to its own bare minimum security standards, but as we know, that never happened.  Watch Fox News' national security correspondent Catherine Herridge explain why she thinks the newly-unearthed cables
 
(3) According to Newsweek's Eli Lake, the State Department made the decision not to request military back up during the hours-long, ongoing raid.  The CIA has already disclaimed responsibility for that egregious call, and now Defense officials are pointing the finger at the Obama State Department:

Military backup may have made a difference at around five the following morning, when a second wave of attackers assaulted the CIA annex where embassy personnel had taken refuge.

It was during this second wave of attacks that two ex-SEALs working for the CIA’s security teams—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods—were killed in a mortar strike. Normally it would be the job of the U.S. ambassador on location to request a military response. But Stevens likely died in the first two hours of the attack. The responsibility for requesting military backup would then have fallen to the deputy chief of mission at Benghazi or officials at the State Department in Washington. “The State Department is responsible for assessing security at its diplomatic installations and for requesting support from other government agencies if they need it,” a senior U.S. Defense official said. “There was no request from the Department of State to intervene militarily on the night of the attack.” The president, however, would have the final say as to whether or not to send in the military.  

And where was the president as all of this happened?  Back to the aforementioned report from Jake Tapper:

As he left his Marine One helicopter Wednesday evening and walked to the residence of the White House, President Obama did not respond to a question shouted out by ABC News’s Mary Bruce about when he would begin to provide answers to the numerous questions building up about what exactly what went wrong in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The president smiled and continued walking ... As of now, the White House has disclosed that President Obama was informed about the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi at roughly 5pm by his National Security Adviser Tom Donilon as he was in a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. At that meeting, senior administration officials say, the President ordered that the U.S. begin moving military assets into the region to prepare for a range of contingencies.

But beyond that, the White House has punted, saying the Accountability Review Board established by the State Department is investigating the matter and what went wrong. No detailed tick-tock, no information about the president’s involvement in decision-making. In addition, they’re preparing for a closed-door hearing of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence on November 15.

In other words, the White House is stonewalling -- at least through the election, and possibly beyond.

Someone made the ultimate call not to use force to save those Americans' lives.  It might have been the president, despite his casual claims to the contrary.  It might have been Secretary Clinton.  We don't know because the administration continues to hide behind its "ongoing investigation."  If there were bad decisions made by people at the highest level, no such inquiry is necessary.  Top officials know exactly who made these decisions -- they just don't want the American people to share that knowledge, at least not yet.
 
(4) The president keeps telling interviewers that he's keenly interested in the results of this very, very important investigation.  But then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made an accidental admission yesterday:

Today, the White House press secretary let it slip during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One that President Obama’s inaction on the Benghazi situation now extends to inaction on the supposed investigation taking place. The administration has still not made clear what exactly is being investigated, or the extent of the investigation. And President Obama doesn’t much care.

Said Carney: "He has not participated in the investigation. He is anticipating results that show us exactly what happened and who is responsible and what lessons we can learn from it and ensure it never happens again. He expects the investigation to be rigorous."

The president is taking a hands-off approach to this sham of an investigation.  What a surprise.  I guess he's got his hands full with more important things these days, just as he evidently did before and during the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including a sitting Ambassador.
 
(5) The motherload, from CBS News:

CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG). "The CSG is the one group that's supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies," a high-ranking government official told CBS News. "They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon." Information shared with CBS News from top counterterrorism sources in the government and military reveal keen frustration over the U.S. response on Sept. 11, the night ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 other Americans were killed in a coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya. 

Counterterrorism sources and internal emails reviewed by CBS News express frustration that key responders were ready to deploy, but were not called upon to help in the attack ... Another senior counter terrorism official says a hostage rescue team was alternately asked to get ready and then stand down throughout the night, as officials seemed unable to make up their minds. "The response process was isolated at the most senior level," says an official referring to top officials in the executive branch. "My fellow counterterrorism professionals and I (were) not consulted."

"The process was isolated at the most senior level."  These "senior level" officials are the ones clinging to the investigation excuse.  It's now completely obvious why.  An absolute disgrace.

Townhall

How to Abandon Our Bravest Citizens in a War Zone

October 22, 2012
Hugh de Payns

Watching a video of a consulate being overrun while a credible defensive response is almost immediately available is criminally negligent. 

Late last week, CBS News reported that several significant military options were available and very, very nearby.

CBS News has been told that, hours after the attack began, an unmanned Predator drone was sent over the U.S. mission in Benghazi, and that the drone and other reconnaissance aircraft apparently observed the final hours of the protracted battle...

The Pentagon says it did move a team of special operators from central Europe to the large Naval Air Station in Sigonella, Italy, but gave no other details. Sigonella is just an hour's flight from Libya. Other nearby bases include Aviano and Souda Bay. Military sources tell CBS News that resources at the three bases include fighter jets and Specter AC-130 gunships, which the sources say can be extremely effective in flying in and buzzing a crowd to disperse it.

To reiterate from the report, one choice was only an hour away: send one, two, or even three of the available AC 130 Spectre gunships overhead to lay down a murderous suppressive fire around the Benghazi consulate.  Apparently these gunships are frightening things to behold and terrifying to face.  According to several people who have firsthand experience with these aircraft, these planes are flying gun platforms bristling with multiple 20mm Gatling guns and rapid-fire recoilless 40mm and 105mm artillery.

 Sending a gunship over the consulate might even have ended this engagement immediately by convincing the attackers to head home.  If two were cycled, then nearly continual coverage would have been possible until a contingent of U.S. forces arrived to deal with what remained.

Instead, the White House did nothing.

To be clear: if this information is correct, two U.S. Navy SEALs did not abandon their posts.

We abandoned them.

Correction: for several hours, the White House watched videos of our men fighting off these animals, while they abandoned our brave men -- men whose lives were of more value than everyone in the White House who decided to do nothing and go to bed that night.

Yes, we should understand that employing the Spectres would have involved risks, one of which is sending military forces into a sovereign nation.  Yet from all appearances, Libya -- and Benghazi in particular -- is "Indian Country" and is completely lawless and largely ungoverned.  This of course begs for another point of order: revelation of what our U.S. ambassador was doing in such a dangerous and uncontrolled area to begin with. 

Taking advantage of the firepower we have -- again, to preserve and safeguard the lives of the brave men we send abroad -- would send a message: U.S. interests and the safety of our diplomatic staff will be protected, and sovereign U.S. property will be vigorously defended.  Finally, our citizens in uniform must understand that they will not be abandoned. 

No one gets left behind.

...Unless, that is, Mr. Obama is making the decisions.  In that case, you are just another inconvenient person to be thrown under the bus.  It's getting crowded under the Obama bus.  How long until he throws America under the bus?

Shame on our government, and shame on the people in the White House.

American Thinker

Devastating Ohio Editorial: Obama's Handling of Libya Indefensible

by John Nolte 12 Oct 2012

 Even though the mainstream media's Narrative Gatekeepers won't allow for a national discussion on the security failures in Libya and the subsequent White House cover up, that doesn’t mean voters are disinterested or that local media outlets in the individual states aren't covering the September 11 anniversary attacks. This morning, the Columbus Dispatch out of the crucial swing state of Ohio, published a brutal (because it's true) editorial lashing out at Obama's dishonest and incompetent mishandling of Libya:

The fact of a successful terrorist attack against the U.S. on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — a day, above all others, when security for American officials in volatile countries should be at its utmost — is demoralizing and infuriating.

After months of concern by diplomats in Libya about the country’s deteriorating security, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three embassy employees were murdered by heavily armed and organized terrorists. The possibility the government could have prevented their deaths by responding to their pleas for greater security is devastating. …

What is equally evident is that, despite repeated concerns by diplomats working in Libya, the administration shortchanged security. And when the worst happened, it wasn’t willing to tell the truth to the American people.

And as of Wednesday, administration officials continued to insist that the consulate had adequate security.

The tragedy is magnified by the fact that Stevens, by all accounts, was passionately devoted to restoring Libya as a U.S. ally. He wanted to help build a democratic nation. But he wasn’t blind to the danger still posed by militant Islamists and other anti-American groups.

The murder of Stevens and his colleagues raises serious questions about the administration’s priorities and competence.

Read it all.

The administration's serial lying continued straight through to last night's vice presidential debate when Vice President Joe Biden declared twice that the administration never received requests for increased security in Benghazi. This is the moment most likely to haunt  Obama for the rest of the election. According to one report, the White House has already attempting to distance itself from Biden's remarks:

The Cable asked Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes whether Biden was speaking for the entire Obama administration, including the State Department, which acknowledged receiving multiple requests for more Libya security in the months before the attacks. Rhodes said that Biden speaks only for himself and the president and neither of them knew about the requests at the time.

This is the rare White House scandal that's very easy to unpack and Ohio unpacking it is not good news for Obama.

 Big Journalism

Bombshell: US Security Teams Removed From Libya Prior to Attack, Over Stevens' Objections

• 
• Guy Benson

 In case this recent development wasn't egregious enough, another shoe has dropped in the Benghazi scandal -- adding more fuel to the speculative fire about why the administration seemed so motivated to coordinate a dishonest cover-up (read that link) after the fact.  CBS News takes the lead on this outrageous story:

 

The former head of a Special Forces "Site Security Team" in Libya tells CBS News that in spite of multiple pleas from himself and other U.S. security officials on the ground for "more, not less" security personnel, the State Department removed as many as 34 people from the country in the six months before a terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Lt. Col. Andy Wood will appear this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing that will examine security decisions leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. Speaking to CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Wood said when he found out that his own 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force were being pulled from Tripoli in August - about a month before the assault in Benghazi - he felt, "like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers. There was concern amongst the entire embassy staff."

"They asked if we were safe," he told Attkisson. "They asked... what was going to happen, and I could only answer that what we were being told is that they're working on it - they'll get us more (security personnel), but I never saw that." Wood insists that senior staff in Libya, including Ambassador Stevens, State Department Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, and himself, all wanted and had requested enhanced security. "We felt we needed more, not less," he tells Attkisson. Asked what response their repeated pleas got from the State Department in Washington, Wood says they were simply told "to do with less. For what reasons, I don't know."

ABC News has more:

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens wanted a Security Support Team, made up of 16 special operations soldiers, to stay with him in Libya after their deployment was scheduled to end in August, the commander of that security team told ABC News. The embassy staff’s “first choice was for us to stay,” Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, 55, told ABC News in an interview. “That would have been the choice of the embassy people in Tripoli.” But a senior State Department official told ABC News that the embassy’s Regional Security Officer never specifically requested that the SST’s tour be extended past August, and the official maintained there was no net loss of security personnel...

When confronted with this damning report, a State Department official blames the lack of security on insufficient paperwork (security preferences were never "specifically requested") and suggests that Washington believed there would be no "net" security loss on the ground.  If you believe either of those excuses, re-watch the CBS News interview above -- or read this story from ABC News, which obtained a memo showing State rejecting specific security requests in Libya.  Essentially, the administration told our diplomats to do more with less and trust Libyan forces to replace the elite American security personnel.

 Reporting from Newsweek's Eli Lake highlights the problems with this strategy, which Amb. Stevens recognized and addressed in a diplomatic cable sent the very day he was assassinated:

Just two days before the 9/11 anniversary attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, two leaders of the Libyan militias responsible for keeping order in the city threatened to withdraw their men.  The brinksmanship is detailed in a cable approved by Ambassador Chris Stevens and sent on the day he died in the attack, the worst assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission since the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran. The dispatch, which was marked “sensitive” but not “classified,” contained a number of other updates on the chaotic situation on the ground in post-Gaddafi Libya.  The cable, reviewed by The Daily Beast, recounts how the two militia leaders, Wissam bin Ahmed and Muhammad al-Gharabi, accused the United States of supporting Mahmoud Jibril, the head of the Libyan transitional government, to be the country’s first elected prime minister. Jibril’s centrist National Forces Alliance won the popular vote in Libyan elections in July, but he lost the prime minister vote in the country’s Parliament on Sept. 12 by 94 to 92. Had he won, bin Ahmed and al-Gharabi warned they “would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,” the cable reads. The man who beat Jibril, Mustafa Abushagur, lost a vote of no-confidence Sunday, throwing Libyan politics back into further uncertainty. The threat from the militias underscores the dangers of relying on local Libyan forces for security in the run-up to the 9/11 military-style assault. 

Americans must ask themselves how these appalling failures were allowed to occur, and who is responsible.

The administration peddled several false tales to the public for many days after the attack, even though intelligence reports indicate that they knew better from day one.  Why?  Not only were requests for reinforcements declined, existing defenses were scaled back, in spite of numerous threats and attacks leading up to the 9/11 massacre.  Why?  I've pondered whether the White House wanted to maintain a "light footprint" perception in Libya at all costs, rooted in political considerations.  If so, those costs were quite high, indeed.  I'll leave you with a devastating video of the cover-up timeline, produced by Heritage.  This is slowly growing into a national scandal, but here's why it should already be A1, above the fold every day:

 
UPDATE - In his wide-ranging foreign policy address in Virginia late this morning, Mitt Romney criticized the Obama administration for their serial opacity and misdirection regarding the Benghazi raid:

Last month, our nation was attacked again.  A U.S. Ambassador and three of our fellow Americans are dead—murdered in Benghazi, Libya.  Among the dead were three veterans.  All of them were fine men, on a mission of peace and friendship to a nation that dearly longs for both.  President Obama has said that Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues represented the best of America.  And he is right.  We all mourn their loss. The attacks against us in Libya were not an isolated incident.  They were accompanied by anti-American riots in nearly two dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also in Africa and Asia.  Our embassies have been attacked.  Our flag has been burned.  Many of our citizens have been threatened and driven from their overseas homes by vicious mobs, shouting “Death to America.” These mobs hoisted the black banner of Islamic extremism over American embassies on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
As the dust settles, as the murdered are buried, Americans are asking how this happened, how the threats we face have grown so much worse, and what this calls on America to do. 

These are the right questions.  And I have come here today to offer a larger perspective on these tragic recent events—and to share with you, and all Americans, my vision for a freer, more prosperous, and more peaceful world.  The attacks on America last month should not be seen as random acts.  They are expressions of a larger struggle that is playing out across the broader Middle East—a region that is now in the midst of the most profound upheaval in a century.  And the fault lines of this struggle can be seen clearly in Benghazi itself. The attack on our Consulate in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012 was likely the work of forces affiliated with those that attacked our homeland on September 11th, 2001. This latest assault cannot be blamed on a reprehensible video insulting Islam, despite the Administration’s attempts to convince us of that for so long.  No, as the Administration has finally conceded, these attacks were the deliberate work of terrorists who use violence to impose their dark ideology on others, especially women and girls; who are fighting to control much of the Middle East today; and who seek to wage perpetual war on the West.

This is some of Romney's strongest rhetoric yet on this subject.  One wonders if he'll challenge the president even more forcefully during the final foreign policy themed presidential debate.  More on Romney's speech later.

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