My biggest issue with both the Clintons is that they seem to treat most issues with great expediency. The flip flops and waffling may be strategic triangulation but… This is why I always admired/appreciated George W. Bush for his resolve. We cannot run our country by polls. And, with this in mind, I really have to wonder whether Trump is not most guilty of catering to populist whims of all…
Resolve is good but results matter more. For example, if the results are:
1.) a trillion dollar War About Nothing
2.) the deaths of large numbers of innocent civilians
3.) an endless regional quagmire
4.) the most serious recession since the Great Depression
5.) an erosion of fundamental civil liberties
:then count me out of the George W. Bush fan club.
The war was about dealing with the security threat that Iraq posed. You know this and continue to ignore it.
Yes, the US was directly responsible for 50,000 of the 150,000 deaths in Iraq from 2003 invasion to present. I note that you fail to criticize Saddam/UN for the 500,000 to 1,000,000 who died due to lack of food/medicine despite more than enough funds being available to purchase this through the Oil for Food program. I suppose we should ignore the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam during his reign of terror not including the millions more in his wars because we all know “Iraq was a stable and secular” country prior the ridiculous US led invasion. Right?
I thought that you blamed the Jews (sorry!) Israelis for this. Now, it is the US in Iraq and before that it was (fill in the blank). The fact is the Middle East is a violent, repressed, noncompetitive, illiterate society that needs reform desperately. All manner of efforts have been tried. And I suppose your suggestion to leave it alone would be fine if it were not exporting millions to Europe and other countries (and well before the Syria crisis).
Did Bush cause it? Is Obama not responsible in anyway for the slow rate of growth due to unknown unknowns like Obamacare, excessive regulation, unfriendly tax and regulatory policies? Hello? CO2 is a dangerous gas?
So many say this but … what civil liberties have you or any others lost? and if they were so bad (as per the Democrats) why are they still in place and even greater under Obama?
The truth is out there.
mediaite.com/print/hillary-c … a-51-ufos/
(What difference, at this point, does it make?)
The truth is that Hillary Clinton could do nothing about Benghazi for multiple reasons already cited. If you want to attack her for crony politics, money politics, various corruption scandals, Bill’s treatment of women, then go for it. This continued focus on Benghazi, however, is not credible. Let’s have a real debate about her tacking back and forth on major issues to cater to prevailing public opinion as a major weakness but this? Bah!
Letting the troops on hand go in would have been a nice gesture.
By the way, do we really need a president who can’t do anything about anything for various weak excuses? That’s not my idea of a leader. That’s my idea of some fool who is simply in the way.
If the government can’t do anything constructive then what’s the point of having so much government? Health care, employment, race relations, foreign relations… everything these people touch turns to shit. Time to tell them hands off.
Not her decision to make. And who was on the ground to advise what the conditions on the ground were? So, what this could have ended up as is another Blackhawk Down Somalia style. Are you comfortable with consigning our men and women in the armed forces to those kinds of risks? would you have been then?
As to who was in charge and how much time it would have taken and what could have been done… read on… Where in all of this do you think Secretary Clinton is to blame?
[quote]In February, the Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was asked by Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, why F-16s at Aviano Air Base in Italy weren’t deployed to Benghazi that night.
“This is the middle of the night now, these are not aircraft on strip alert,” Dempsey said. "They’re there as part of our commitment to NATO and Europe. And so, as we looked at the time line , it was pretty clear that
it would take up to 20 hours or so to get them there
. Secondly, senator, importantly,
it was the wrong tool for the job."
Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified that "unfortunately, there was no specific intelligence or indications of an imminent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. And frankly, without an adequate warning, there was
not enough time given the speed of the attack for armed military assets to respond.
“That’s not just my view or General Dempsey’s view. It was the view of the Accountability Review Board that studied what happened on that day,” he added.
“This is not 9/11,” Panetta said in a February interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
"You cannot just simply call and expect within two minutes to have a team in place. It takes time.
That’s the nature of it. Our people are there, they’re in position to move, but we’ve got to have good intelligence that gives us a heads up that something’s going to happen."
Hicks said that around 10 p.m. on the night of the first attack, he was at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli talking to State Department officials in Washington, regional security officer John Martinec at the U.S. Embassy, defense attache Lt. Col. Keith Phillips and others.
Phillips was reaching out to officials with the Libyan Ministry of Defense and to the chief of staff of the Libyan Armed Forces, as well as officials with the Joint Staff and the U.S. Africa Command.
Hicks recalled asking Phillips, “Is there anything coming?”
He said Phillips replied "that the nearest fighter planes were Aviano, that he had been told that
it would take two to three hours to get them airborne, but that there were no tanker assets near enough to support a flight from Aviano."
There was one team that headed from Tripoli to Benghazi, arriving at around 1:15 a.m., Hicks said.
Phillips, Hicks recalled, “worked assiduously all night long to try to get the Libyan military to respond in some way.” The Libyan prime minister called Hicks and told him that the U.S. ambassador had been killed, after which “the Libyan military agreed to fly their C-130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements.”
Hicks said that four U.S. Special Forces troops in Tripoli – led by the leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, SOCAfrica – planned to hitch a ride on the Libyan plan to travel to Benghazi to help.
“We fully intended for those guys to go, because we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability, to the bare minimum,” Hicks recalled.
But
the four were informed by someone with SOCAfrica that they didn’t have the authority to go,
Hicks said.
"So Lt. Col. 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,’’ Hicks said. “And so they missed the flight.”
“They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it,” Hicks said. “I still remember Col. Gibson, he said, ‘I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.’ A nice compliment.”
The C-130 left between 6 and 6:30 a.m., so the four Special Forces troops would not have arrived in time to fend off the 5:15 a.m. attack on the CIA annex in Benghazi.
Hicks said he recalled asking Phillips again if any military help was coming. "The answer, again, was the same as before. It’s too far away, there are no tankers. … There is nothing that could respond. …
“I guess they just didn’t have the right authority from the right level,” Hicks recalled.
Panetta, in his February testimony defending officials’ actions, said, "The bottom line is this, that we were not dealing with a prolonged or continuous assault, which could have been brought to an end by a U.S. military response, very simply, although we had forces deployed to the region. Time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.
"Despite the uncertainty at the time,
the Department of Defense and the rest of the United States government spared no effort to do everything we could to try to save American lives. Before, during and after the attack, every request the Department of Defense received we did, we accomplished.
"[/quote]
cnn.com/2013/05/06/politics/ … tleblower/
So, help me out here… how does all of the information above which indicates a primarily Department of Defense authority and decision-making process stick to Hillary Clinton? She was, remember, Secretary of State NOT Defense.
Not her decision to make. [/quote]
The buck stops elsewhere?
Did not make the call.
theblaze.com/blog/2014/07/07 … cue-units/
[quote]Timmerman divulges that the former Secretary of State, and current Director of the CIA, did the following on the night of September 11, 2012:
“They refused to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), the only structured, experienced, interagency reaction team that could have decided which resources of the government were available for deployment immediately.
They refused to activate the State Department-led Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an extraordinary operational unit whose sole purpose was to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack and to stand up emergency services within hours using dedicated military, law enforcement, security, medical and secure communications personnel. They practiced a full-scale exercise twice every year at an overseas location.
Both decisions were clearly based on political opportunity, not operational concerns.”[/quote]
Yeah. Real tough.
Orange is the new black.
Why not post the entire article?
You have seen that the Defense Department did not have the ability to respond. And within your own cited article, this:
[quote]
“Why was the refusal to convene the CSG so important?
“Convening the CSG would have meant there was a terrorist strike under way,” said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who supported Hillary clinton in her 2008 presidential bid. “Clearly, they didn’t want to make that kind of admission.”
That decision was made at the White House by John Brennan and by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon,
who preferred to handle the crisis in a way that wouldn’t sound all sorts of alarm bells.”
On the refusal to activate the State Department-led FEST, Timmerman writes:
”The refusal to activate the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) also indicated the administration’s unwillingness to face facts…
[Mark Thompson, a member of the U.S. Marines and leader of counterterrorism response efforts within the State Department] saw what was happening in Benghazi and immediately knew what to do and what resources he had available. Once he learned from the 10:05 PM alert from the State Department Operations Center that Ambassador Stevens had been taken to the safe haven, he alerted his leadership, and recommended that they deploy the FEST. He described what happened next in dramatic congressional testimony:
I notified the White House of my idea. They indicated that meetings had already taken place that even that had taken FEST out of the menu of options.
I called the office within the State Department that had been represented there, asking them why it had been taken off of the table, and was told that it was not the right time and it was not the team that needed to go right then.[/quote]
NOTE: He called the WHITE HOUSE and was told the option was NOT on the table and we know why. The Department of Defense said it could not get the planes there. ALSO, note that IF the White House decides that something is not going to happen, the Secretary of State does not get to TRUMP (haha) or REVISIT that decision. You do understand this, right? RIGHT?