“So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C‑130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now,” Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during an interview last month, The Washington Examiner has learned.
The committee released excerpts of the interview ahead of a congressional hearing that will take place on Wednesday.
Pure political partisan bullshit from the chief propaganda organ of the Republican Party - the Washington Examiner, which is less objective than FOX News and is known for reporting things out of context - like, for instance, the fact that
the defense department did not certify that there was time or manpower to respond effectively. Yes, 4 people died- and yes, there should be an investigation as to why the US was not prepared on 9/11 to defend its considerable assets in the semi-occupied Muslim periphery.
FYI: Benghazi smells like a classic October Surprise, a la the delayed release of the hostages. It was likely a Hail Mary devised to hijack the election last minute, but it failed. And now they're trying to create a Monica Lewinsky out of it for purely political reasons (so it didn't completely fail).
Here is why this thing is so sad. Imagine a president who was told on August 6 2011 that Bin Laden was - in the near term - determined to hijack planes and turn them into flying bombs for the purpose of attacking skyscrapers. Further, please imagine that the president in question was advised to have planes "scramble ready" - which is standard protocol for protecting the eastern seabord - so that our military forces could at least engage these "flying bombs" which were aimed at the most densely populated parts of these United States. Now, further imagine that the president's chief terrorism advisor - Richard Clarke, first hired by Reagan - was sternly rebuffed when he tried to explain the urgency of Bin Laden and the pending attacks. Specifically, Clarke was told that the administration was only interested in removing Hussein, which was a policy developed by the neocons under Clinton (who, by the way, agreed with the neocons because Iraq, after 10 years of sanctions/bombing, was the best option for increasing our military footprint near the world's most vital resource. I happen to think the policy makes a lot of sense when you realize what would happen if the region fell under the control of someone capable of denying us access to the lifeblood of our economy: oil).
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Please, finally, imagine that because the August 6 2011 memo was ignored (and because a host of unambiguous and actionable warnings by Clarke were ignored), 3,000 Americans died - and another 4,000+ were sent to their deaths because of a misrepresentation of the motives for war. Worse, imagine if that same president forbid anyone from his team from testifying in front of a Grand Jury about this collassel failure to defend the United States. And because of this president's unwillingness to provide information about what happened, the American People will never learn how the most basic defense protocols were somehow left off on this day, and, as a result, "flying bombs" aimed at high-causality targets (
as was predicted in the August 2011 memo) were allowed to fly unobstructed to their targets.
After you imagine all that, please ask yourself one question: is it any wonder that the party responsible for ignoring the greatest attack in American history is now trying to make something out of nothing? The party of Monica Lewinsky never stops manufacturing scandals. They are fighting a civil war.
When are we going to wake up? The Republicans are not fighting Islamic Terrorists. They are fighting Obama and the Democrats. Benghazi, like 9/11, is a political weapon used for agitating the stupid and winning elections.
The leadership of the radical right is not concerned about Islamic terrorism, which
in this case is very real. They are concerned with the
political uses of Islamic terrorism. FYI: This is the oldest political strategy in the book. Hitler claimed to be defending Germany against the Jewish Bolsheviks who, he claimed, were bent on destroying Real Germans and the German way of life.
You can't make this shit up folks! In libtard world, security forces were not told to "stand down", they were told to "stay were they were"
