Benghazi: People Died Obama Lied

It took MONTHS to plan and train for the captue of Bin Ladin. They made mock-up of the compund and even moved stealth equipment into play just for that mission.

Read what Gates said again. Why would he offer this opinion? What has he to gain or lose in this matter? Until the investigation is complete, I will take his opinion over that of the armchair generals here on 285Bound.

With respect to sending in special forces or a small group of people to try and provide help, based on everything I have read, people really didn’t know what was going on in Benghazi contemporaneously. And to send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, I think, would have been very dangerous. And personally, I would not have approved that because we just don’t it’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces. The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way. And there just wasn’t time to do that. Given the number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from Gaddafi’s arsenals, I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft – over Benghazi under those circumstances.

Fish, while sometimes SF does have plenty of time to train and loads of intelligence they can use, they also go in fast and hard with very little info more often.

Raids like OBL are pretty rare.

And raids like the one proposed for Benghazi by Monday morning quarterbacks are more rare.
The very possible "Blackhawk Down" situation would have been a better trade-off?

True, don't want a Blackhawk Down disaster like what happened under Clinton.
Where the military requested armor but were denied by Bill's Sec'y of Defense because it wasn't the image the administration wanted to project.

The blame game again? Don't you ever tire of it?

Actually not. I don't know how effective armor would actually be in the slums of Mogadishu. To me, the main reason Blackhawk Down went wrong was mission creep. The military tried to do too much.

A couple of people here have blamed Benghazi on the Republicans not giving the President the money he requested.

The Washington Post Fact Checker wrote a report on it today and pretty much tore that claim apart.

“The Department of State’s base requests for security funding have increased by 38 percent since Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, and base budget appropriations have increased by 27 percent in the same time period,” said the bipartisan Senate Homeland Security Committee report on the Benghazi attack.

The report added that baseline funding requests have not been fully funded since fiscal year 2010, but noted that Congress had been responsive in providing “Overseas Contingency Operations” funds to the State Department in response to emergent security-driven requests, mainly for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“However, there was no supplemental or OCO request made by the President for additional diplomatic security enhancements in FY 2010 or FY 2011,” the report pointedly noted. “Neither the Department of State nor Congress made a point of providing additional funds in a supplemental request for Libya, or more specifically, Benghazi.”

One huge problem was that the facility was deemed temporary — as we have noted, most of the officials there were working for the CIA, not State — and thus it could not be funded with standard overseas building funds. (Despite persistent news media reports, this was not a “consulate”—far from it.)

it is almost as if Boxer is living in a time warp, repeating talking points from six months ago that barely acknowledge the fact that extensive investigations have found little evidence of her claim that “there was not enough security because the budget was cut.”

State Department officials repeatedly told Congress that a lack of funds was not an issue. Instead, security was hampered because of bureaucratic issues and management failures. In other words, given the internal failures, no amount of money for the State Department likely would have made a difference in this tragedy.

Three Pinocchios

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/WashingtonPost/Content/Blogs/fact-checker/StandingArt/pinocchio_3.jpg?uuid=uLasnkniEeCn1tWe_T6KGA

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/barbara-boxers-claim-that-gop-budgets-hampered-benghazi-security/2013/05/15/d1e295cc-bdb0-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_blog.html#pagebreak

And today Obama made sure to divert the Benghazi story by saying he wants congress to make sure embassy stecurity is fully funded (shiftiing false blame). If Hillary's daughter Chelsea had the ambassador job in Benghazi, do you think she would have left her there being guarded only by Libyans? And if there wasn't enough money to fund real security, would she have just left her there anyway? Not a chance.

Since we are speculating, Do you think Chelsea would have declined offers for additional security the way that Stevens did?

Photo-fish wrote: Since we are speculating, Do you think Chelsea would have declined offers for additional security the way that Stevens did?

Who knows... but I hope our State Dept. isn't so inept, that they had no idea they set up shop in country with an unstable government and a population mixed with terrorists and still smoking rocket launchers. I would hope a little common sense would prevail when the security wall was blown up a month earlier and the British ambassador left due to his convoy being attacked. Just a few signals that were completely ignored due to some unnamed person's incompitency.