Two former Navy SEALs died fighting in Benghazi, Libya, on 9/11/12: Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

This is from the Weekly Standard:

Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were part of a Global Response Staff or GRS that provides security to CIA case officers and provides countersurveillance and surveillance protection. They were killed by a mortar shell at 4 a.m. Libyan time, nearly seven hours after the attack on the Consulate began – a window that represented more than enough time for the U.S. military to send back-up from nearby bases in Europe, according to sources familiar with Special Operations.

Earlier they had called for military support which was denied.

There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours – enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. … [And] a  Special Operations team, or CIF which stands for Commanders in Extremis Force, operating in Central Europe had been moved to Sigonella, but they … were told to stand down. A second force that specializes in counterterrorism rescues was on hand at Sigonella, according to senior military and intelligence sources. According to those sources, they could have flown to Benghazi in less than two hours. …

An American Quick Reaction Force actually did arrive from Tripoli “at the Benghazi airport at 2 a.m. (four hours after the initial attack on the Consulate) and was delayed for 45 minutes at the airport because they could not at first get transportation, allegedly due to confusion among Libyan militias who were supposed to escort them to the annex, according to Benghazi sources.”

But according to Diana West writing at Townhall, the “Libyan militias who were supposed to escort them” were themselves al-Qaida affiliated terrorists, so the delay may well have been deliberate:

Libya Shield Brigade [is] an eastern Libyan militia aligned with the Libyan government. Libya Shield members met the eight U.S. Marines who arrived in Benghazi from Tripoli in the wee hours of Sept. 12, 2012. Libya Shield escorted our Marines to the secret annex [its location being known to the Marines], where the survivors of the consulate attack had successfully taken cover, [and which] did not come under mortar attack until soon after Libya Shield and the Marines arrived.

Coincidence?

It was in this barrage … that ex-SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed. …

They went on fighting up to the moment they were killed. The special operator who went on firing a machine gun from the annex roof could have been Woods or Doherty. The gun was found encrusted with blood, which means that the operator was wounded. Also, he “had visual contact and a laser pointing at the Libyan mortar team that was targeting the CIA annex.” He was “calling in coordinates of where the Libyan forces were firing from.”  They could have been stopped from the air. The drone that was hovering overhead and sending the images back to Washington was equipped with fire power. All that was lacking was a command to fire.

Who instructed the Libya Shield Brigade to meet the Marines? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta? With the Commander-in-Chief’s instructions/approval/consent?

Panetta has said that they, the high command sitting safely in D.C., did not know enough about what was going on to send military help, either to the Ambassador beleaguered at the mission station, or to the annex which came under attack soon after the eight Marines got there. But the drone was transmitting images, and information was coming in continuously from the annex throughout the attack. Washington was watching the events unfold “in real time” at the State Department.

Why was help denied? Why were the soldiers sacrificed?

Consider the Libya Shield Brigade, and why it was trusted by the Obama gang.

Diana West tells us:

The Libya Shield Brigade, she reports –

… fought in the anti-Gadhafi revolution … under the black flag of al-Qaida.

It’s leader, Wissam Bin Hamid, is “a veteran of jihad in both Iraq and Afghanistan”.

He and his like in Libya had –

… fought and killed Americans, and “now, they’re escorting Marines to secret American annexes, and doing so as a matter of Obama administration policy.”

The Obama policy  of “outreach to jihadists”, in Diana West’s phrase. 

In other words, the cause of Islam.

That is the cause to which Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were sacrificed.

What is the real, the shocking truth that the Obama administration is trying to conceal about the tragic events in Benghazi, when the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered in an Islamic terrorist attack?

The answer to that question also answers another that has been hanging in the air: Why was the US Ambassador to Libya in Benghazi on that day – the anniversary of 9/11 – in an insecure building without sufficient protection? What was he doing there? What urgent mission did he have that took him away from the comparatively safe embassy in Tripoli?  

Now we learn that Ambassador Chris Stevens’s mission in Benghazi on that fatal day was to organize the shipment of arms to the rebel militias in Syria.

And that means: the shipment of arms, by order of the President of the United States, to al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization which the President himself constantly declares to be the enemy of his country. 

No wonder President Obama, Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of the stoats and weasels have been lying their heads off and trying to put the blame for the whole hideous and tragic episode – for what amounts to an act of war – on somebody’s little video. Scraping the bottom of the excuses-barrel.

The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have now taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East.

Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, the leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Once Qaddafi was overthrown, Chris Stevens was appointed as the ambassador to the new Libya run by Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amounts of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.

One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Amb. Stevens was there – on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now-copiously-documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates – for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj. …

He quotes Fox News as reporting that –

The Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on September 6th in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms – including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles – apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.

What cries out for further investigation – and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election – is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison?

The “consulate” in Benghazi was not so much a diplomatic outpost as a brokerage bureau for the distribution of illicit arms.

And the broker-in-chief  was the  President of the United States of America.

Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that, while administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Amb. Stevens and his colleagues was launched, instead they call it a “mission.” And what Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” which lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”

We know that Stevens’ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. But it may also have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”

It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy Senior Fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed – and were known by the local jihadis to house – arms, perhaps administered by the two former SEALS killed along with Amb. Stevens.

What we do know is that the New York Times – one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country – reported on October 14, 2012 article that, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists … ”

In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies, as well.

That would explain his administration’s desperate, and now-failing, bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.

“The serial deflections”, yes. Or just say the stupid, transparent, blustering lies.

The truth is out now. Obama has been covertly arming al-Qaeda while claiming to have effectively destroyed the organization by permitting the killing of Osama bin Laden. He has tasked US representatives abroad with the arming of America’s enemies.

The State Department was his chief agency to carry out the treacherous plan, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton his closest partner in the plot. 

They must not only be driven from power, they need to be brought to trial for treason.

*

Here’s the official story now being put out (via Fox news) to explain Ambassador Stevens’s presence in Benghazi on the fatal night:

Fox News has also learned that Stevens was in Benghazi that day to be present at the opening of an English-language school being started by the Libyan farmer who helped save an American pilot who had been shot down by pro-Qaddafi forces during the initial war to overthrow the regime.

For that footling purpose he went to Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11?

And had a social call from a Turkish diplomat who just happened to be there at the same time?

The lies go on and on. How dumb do the stoats and weasels think we all are?

A terrorist group claimed responsibility for the 9/11/12 attack on the Benghazi consulate, and Washington was immediately notified of the claim, just after midnight in Benghazi, 6.35 pm in Washington. The attack had started at 9.40 pm local time. That means that officials of the Obama administration knew about the claim two and a half hours into the incident which lasted about seven hours. It needs to be emphasized: the White House Situation Room and high officials in the State Department, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Services all knew the consulate was under attack by an identified terrorist group, Ansar al-Sharia, while it was happening. (Ansar al-Sharia is a sub-group of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM. It is also affiliated with the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, which was hired by the State Department to provide stand-ins for the missing protection force of the US legation. See our post, State Department employed terrorists as guards in Libya, October 14, 2012.)

The Commander-in-Chief himself must have made the decision to allow nothing to be attempted to save the ambassador and the other Americans in the compound. Instead, it seems, he decided to cover up the terrorist onslaught by inventing a lie that it was something else. It was, he and his coven fictionized, a peaceful protest demonstration in the streets outside the consulate which suddenly turned violent. Yeah, that was all it was to start with. And then the demonstrators being suddenly unable to contain a moment longer their extreme indignation over some video made in America that was unkind about Muhammad, they seized handy mortars and AK-47s which were lying about in the vicinity as such things do, and guns ablaze they poured into the compound to wreak vengeance.

This is from Fox News:

A series of internal State Department emails obtained by Fox News shows that officials reported within hours of last month’s deadly consulate attack in Libya that Al Qaeda-tied group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.

The emails provide some of the most detailed information yet about what officials knew in the initial hours after the attack. And it again raises questions about why U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, apparently based on intelligence assessments, would claim five days after the attack that it was a “spontaneous” reaction to protests over an anti-Islam film.

Ansar al-Sharia has been declared by the State Department to be an Al Qaeda-affiliated group. …

The emails obtained by Fox News were sent by the State Department to a variety of national security platforms, whose addresses have been redacted, including the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon, the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence.

Fox News was told that an estimated 300 to 400 national security figures received these emails in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding. …

The timestamps on the emails are all Eastern Time and often include the subheading SBU, which is shorthand for “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

The third email came at 6:07 p.m. ET and was sent to a different email list but still includes the White House Situation Room address and a subject line of “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack (SBU).”

“Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli,” the email reads….

The emails on the day of the attack … challenge [ie. show to be lies – JB] not only the initial statements made by administration officials like Rice about the strike, but also recent claims that they were only basing those statements on the intelligence they had at the time. …

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney backed up Rice on Sept. 18. He said: “Based on information that we – our initial information … we saw no evidence to back up claims by others that this was a preplanned or premeditated attack; that we saw evidence that it was sparked by the reaction to this video.” Carney went on to say “that is what we know” based on “concrete evidence, not supposition”.

Blatant shameless liars all! What a squalid bunch!

An imam of the “religion of peace” (President Bush’s and President Obama’s ridiculous description of Islam) preaches violence against Christians and Jews and action to damage the US economy, on the Friday following the attack by Muslims on the US consulate in Benghazi and the murder of the ambassador and three other Americans.

Last night, in the final presidential candidates’ debate before the election, President Obama said patronizingly and insultingly – as if Mitt Romney were an ignorant moron:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Part of the audience laughed.

But which of the two debaters was displaying ignorance?

This is from Commentary, by Jonathan S. Tobin:

Contrary to the president’s assertion, the creation of aircraft carriers and submarines did not mean that we needed fewer ships. Quite the contrary. Aircraft carriers need just as many if not more supporting vessels than the obsolete battleships that are no longer under commission. So do subs.The decline in naval strength compromises America’s ability to project power abroad.

And there is danger of war right now in the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea.

Furthermore, US soldiers still use bayonets. And though warhorses may be fewer now, they too are still used – have been used with devastating effect in Afghanistan.

Here’s a video about that:

And here’s a picture of US soldiers battle-ready with fixed bayonets in Iraq:

While Obama officials looked on, their man in Benghazi was slowly murdered amidst smoke and flames.

What might have been done to help Ambassador Stevens when the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked – and while the officials in the State Department and the Pentagon knew that it was being attacked? Even at that late hour could anything have been done to save him and his staff?

CBS News explores the possibility:

Here’s the text, to mull over at leisure:

The closer we get to the election, the harder Republicans in Congress are pushing for answers to a big question: What really happened in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya last month that killed the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans?

Some lawmakers are asking why U.S. military help from outside Libya didn’t arrive as terrorists battered more than 30 Americans over the course of more than seven hours. The assault was launched by an armed mob of dozens that torched buildings and used rocket propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.

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 State Department, White House and Pentagon declined to say what military options were available. A White House official told CBS News that, at the start of the attack, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “looked at available options, and the ones we exercised had our military forces arrive in less than 24 hours, well ahead of timelines laid out in established policies.”

Even as some action of theirs is seen to be useless and pointless, they find a way to boast!

But it was too late to help the Americans in Benghazi. The ambassador and three others were dead.

A White House official told CBS News that a “small group of reinforcements” was sent from Tripoli to Benghazi, but declined to say how many or what time they arrived.

Retired CIA officer Gary Berntsen believes help could have come much sooner. He commanded CIA counter-terrorism missions targeting Osama bin Laden and led the team that responded after bombings of the U.S. Embassy in East Africa.

“You find a way to make this happen,” Berntsen says. “There isn’t a plan for every single engagement. Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments. They made zero adjustments in this. They stood and they watched and our people died.”

Passively stood and watched.

Did any of them really hate what they were allowing to happen? Or were they too busy preparing excuses?

Oh, it seems they did do something. Or started to do something:

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.

Rick Nelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Navy pilot who worked in counter-terrorism, says such missions can be very risky. “A lot can go well, right, as we saw with the bin Laden raid. It was a very successful event,” he says. “But also, when there are high risk activities like this. a lot can go wrong, as we saw with the Iranian hostage rescue decades ago.”

Add to the controversy the fact that the last two Americans didn’t die until more than six hours into the attack, and the question of U.S. military help becomes very important.

Sending the military into another country can be a sensitive and delicate decision. CBS News has been told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did seek clearances from Libya to fly in their airspace, but the administration won’t say anything further about what was said or decided on that front.

Let’s think about that last paragraph. So the special operators flown from central Europe to a point in Italy only one hour’s flight away from Benghazi, and the fighter jets and Specter AC-130 gunships which might have dispersed the attackers, were not ordered to proceed because Hillary Clinton had asked for, was awaiting, and had perhaps not received permission from the Libyan “government” to enter the country’s airspace? A “government” that did not, could not, protect the consulate as it should have done? A “government” that was helped to power by the US?  This “government” Hillary Clinton decided must be treated with all formal rectitude at such a critical moment, when Libyan nationals were destroying the consulate and killing the ambassador?

She was the presidential candidate in 2008 who proposed herself as the leader who could cope best if the phone rang at 3 am because a crisis somewhere in the world needed to be dealt with urgently.

What a failure she has turned out to be! What a fumbling fool!

And where was President Obama while all this was going on? What did he say? What orders did he give? Was he asleep? Did the phone ring? Did he not hear it? Or if he did, and he answered it, what did he say? Anything? Or was he saving up his words, preparing a beautiful speech for the Rose Garden the next day?

These weasel words, these hollow assurances:

The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. We’re working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats.

Or: “let’s bolt the stable door really tight now that the horse has flown.”

I’ve also directed my administration to increase our security at diplomatic posts around the world. And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.

Then came an indirect reference to the video which from then on, for weeks, he was going to blame for what happened in Benghazi:

Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.

Already, many Libyans have joined us in doing so, and this attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya. Libyan security personnel fought back against the attackers alongside Americans. Libyans helped some of our diplomats find safety, and they carried Ambassador Stevens’s body to the hospital, where we tragically learned that he had died.

It apparently took hours for the Libyans who got hold of Mr Stevens – dead or alive – to deliver him to the hospital. What did they do with him in that time? According to some reports he was sodomized.

But what actually happened to the ambassador is of much less importance to Obama than keeping on the best of terms with the chaotic state of Libya.

Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks. … And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi. …

No acts of terror …

Yes, he did say “acts of terror”, but whether he meant to include the Benghazi attack in that category was not clear. (See the whole text here.) And if he did, why did his spokesmen refuse to attribute the attack to terrorists for weeks afterwards, preferring to blame some obscure video of mysterious provenance?

… 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.

We will make that mistake, if mistake it is. We do not believe for a moment that justice will be done. Not by this president.

The stupid and dangerous policies of the lefty governments of Europe (they’re all on the left, including those who call themselves conservative), to encourage massive Muslim immigration and then privilege the immigrants over the indigenous populations, has unsurprisingly provoked the rise of extremely illiberal factions. Some of them speak of war. Here’s an example from France.

Come let us mock at the great

That had such burdens on the mind

And toiled so hard and late

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind. …

Mock mockers after that

That would not lift a hand maybe

To help good, wise or great

To bar that foul storm out, for we

Traffic in mockery.

-W.B.Yeats

It seems that the murderers of Ambassador Stevens and four of his staff are protected from retribution by the lies the Obama administration has told about the tragic event.

How this is possible emerges from a round-up of reports in GlobalPost on the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked the US consulate in Benghazi:

Ahmed Abu Khattala, who was identified by a witness and officials as one of the Islamist militia commanders leading the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, has denied being involved.

Khattala told Reuters in an interview that he was present during the incident but wasn’t one of the ringleaders.

Present while his militiamen were violently attacking the consulate, but not “involved”? Just a bystander looking on, bemused – or amused – by the antics of the killers?

According to the Associated Press, Khattala describes himself as a founder and commander of the Abu Obaida Bin Jarrah.

He told the AP in a separate interview that he went to the site of the attack to rescue men he had been informed were trapped inside.

Ah, he was there to rescue the US ambassador, was he?

The New York Times noted that “just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.”

So that’s what America has been reduced to by Obama’s policy towards the Arab revolutionary states: a toothless old blusterer, like the Libyan “government”, whose threats need not be taken seriously. And are obviously not being carried out, or not with great dispatch anyway. Maybe sometime, one day, someone will be sent by the State Department to take some action against Khattala.

Indeed, Khattala said, “These reports say that no one knows where I am and that I am hiding,” according to Reuters. “But here I am in the open, sitting in a hotel with you. I’m even going to pick up my sister’s kids from school soon.” …

The Times classified Khattala’s manner as defiant. No authority has questioned him on the attack, he told The Times, and he has no plans to go into hiding.

Taunt, taunt the USA.

“All this talk is baseless,” Khattala told the AP. “I am in Benghazi, have a job and live my life normally. I have not been accused by any party with any allegations … I am not a fugitive or in hiding.”

Meanwhile, US government sources told Reuters that Khattala is being probed as a suspect in the attacks, though investigators are not clear what role he played.

Isn’t the – totally invisible – probing meant to find out what role he played?

A Libyan interior ministry official with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters that Khattala was photographed at the consulate on Sept. 11, but there was not enough evidence for an arrest. The official said, “Just because someone is there doesn’t mean they were behind it.”

But they were there. They were in it – a massive armed attack in which four Americans, including the representative of the United States, were murdered. Every one of the participants should be targeted for punishment.

Khattala’s account of the attack … alleged that the assault grew out of a spontaneous protest when Libyan or American guards inside the consulate’s compound fired on the protesters, provoking them.

Only there was no protest. Khattala is seizing on the lie that the Obama administration has been telling. If they now call him a liar, they accuse themselves.

Mock, mock the USA.

Except about “God”, Mitt Romney was really funny in his speech at the annual Alfred E. Smith charity fund-raising dinner last night. Most of his good-natured jokes are at Obama’s expense. He looks great too.