Militia leaders told U.S. officials just two days before the attack that they were angered by U.S. support of a particular candidate for Libyan prime minister and warned “they would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,” Stevens wrote in the cable the morning of Sept. 11, 2012.
January 22, 2013
"Just hours before he died in a terrorist attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Ambassador Chris Stevens sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..."
"... painting a chaotic, violent portrait of the eastern Libya city and warning that local militias were threatening to pull the security they afforded U.S. officials."
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Oh so what!
This was just a bump in the road, as Obama said.
When is Clinton scheduled to testify under oath, clearly all of this up?
This thing has gotten very political
Why the buzzkill? There's parties what need attending.
I don't know why you're bringing this up now - its been clearly proven that a video caused the lack of security and we have the producer locked up. You're just trying to gin up fear and uncertainty at this time of national joyfulness at the President's perpetual inauguration.
Sent a cable? Nobody has a phone? Hillary doesn't have a phone number that you can call? Did Stephens use Western Union? How do you send a cable? Does he have a cable machine that he carries around? WTF?
Benghazi not mentioned in the second inaugural. He's in denial.
Also not mentioned: the national debt or S & P or jobs.
He talked about collective action but with regard to Benghazi and the ntional debt he should have talked about collective inaction.
Let's focus on what can be done to hold those accountable, and figure out if there was any funny business.
The goal is for this to be less likely to happen in the future
Chick, I'll send you a cable later.
No one cares.
I think the "funny business" is about how come we suddenly decided Ghadafy was such a baddie he had to, and right now!, after making nice with him for 23 years after Lockerbie, and that is what has brought on Hillary's fits of "indisposition."
The problem is that Stephens sent the cable to Condeleeza Rice so HRC didn't get it. You see it was Bush's fault.
Who was the Turkish diplomat? Why was it so importatant to Stevens to arrange a meeting with this person in Benghazi where security was questionable?
AllenS said...
Sent a cable? Nobody has a phone?
You send a cable when you want a record of your alert. The contents of phone calls can be disputed.
And it's interesting that this ocurred. The administration assured us these guts were "heroic".
Everything they've done since the attack has been to prevent the public from understanding what ocurred.
Let's focus on what can be done to hold those accountable, and figure out if there was any funny business.
The goal is for this to be less likely to happen in the future
The best way to avoid this situation in the future is not to elect incompetent arrogant assholes. That pretty much eliminates most democrats.
I was kinda surprised that Hillary came out so soon and announced the Algeria thing was terrorism done by terrorists. Is she certain it was not caused by a film? Shouldn't she wait til an investigation has been done before she jumps to conclusions by blaming Muslim extremists?
None of this would've happened if it hadn't been for that rich bastard Mitt Romney distracting the President with his selfish campaigns and silly debates. And don't even get me started on the House Republicans. Why can't they be like the Senate and just do what they're told?
People who voted for Obama do not care about this issue.
People who voted for Obama do not care about this issue.
As bad as the pre-attack decision-making about security matters at State was, questions about it pale in comparison to a) those about Obama's actions while the Benghazi attack was underway and b) exactly WHO made the decision to go with the video Tube o' You tape as the prime explanatory factor for said attack. While State's actions (to inclu Hillery) prior to the attack may be somewhat explained by mere common bureaucratic bungling, questions arising from a&b (above) raise deeply serious questions about whether Obama was supremely recreant in his duties as President and CinC in the case of the former and facts of mendacity and bad faith in the latter. THOSE are the key questions to be gone into in exquisite detail because we're talking impeachable offenses here..
Clinton is to testify tomorrow.
People who voted for Obama do not care about this issue.
It deserves repeating, more's the pity.
And, c) Unfortunately (For both the Republic and the Elephants) TosaGuy (above) is right..
Mali, Syria, it's all a non-issue.
Gotta keep strumming the vaginas.
Benghazi... Isn't that the name of the big-bottomed gal who sang the national anthem during yesterdays festivities?
So Hillary got that 3 AM call, and just blew it off?
Maybe Hillary got the call, but when she went to dial 911 on her rotary phone, she couldn't find the 11.
The testimony is scheduled to be broadcast on CSPAN-3.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/310496-1
Assuming, of course, that she shows up this time.
So Hillary got that 3 AM call, and just blew it off?
Thread winner. She will never be president. Thank God.
Relax, it's being investigated.
Obama: "How's Hillary's head?"
Bill Clinton: "Not a good as Monica's."
Oh, stop 'dredging-up' the past, there are taxes to raise.
The administration has Top Men working on it right now.
A bit OT but I too have a question about what a "Cable" is these days.
I am old enough to remember, though the 80's, Telex, Teletype and TWX. All of them were clunky teleprinters. These were "cables" and many company letter heads included with address and phone number "Cable Acme, Podunk IA" or the like.
So when someone sends a cable nowadays is it a regular email? Some sort of super encrypted email? A fax? or what?
John Henry
Clinton is to testify tomorrow.
Free crabs tomorrow, too.
Obama once said he wasnt opposed to wars, just stupid ones. Obama then involves us in a stupid war in Libya to topple a leader who posed no threat to us and has now created a power vacum in the region, not to mention the fighters and weapons that are now flowing to Mali.
If the media wasn't fellating the guy 24/7 or gushing over his wifes wardrobe, these facts might actually have been shared with the electorate.
I'm sensing criminal dereliction of duty.
Though “cables” used to refer to telegraphs, these days they’re basically group emails; the State Department even handles them with Microsoft Outlook.
The distinction is a little blurry, but emails are private communications between addressees, whereas cables are important messages accessible to many people with appropriate security clearance. They also get saved onto a database, with varying degrees of secrecy.
http://www.newser.com/story/106459/what-the-heck-is-a-cable-anyway.html
What I don't understand is how Stevens could have possibly gone and got himself killed and embarrassed Obama and his administration. How thoughtless.
Is it just me, or is our foreign policy is a shambles? Of course, it's hard to influence what is out of control, but if you've played a part in igniting/inflaming the situation, then foreign policy is to blame.
Sending an email is fine when you are sending one at a time of the day (night) when you don't want to wake someone up, and there is no urgency, and when they read it, they can send you one back. But, WTF, Stephens thought his life was in danger. Why send a cable/email? You call on the phone and say: THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL ME! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND THAT?
Fritz nails it.
That 3AM phone call ad is going to get reworked if she's dumb enough to run.
Looks like Willie is going to be able to do all the leering he wants for the rest of his trashy life.
Adam Curry and John C Dvorak at the No Agenda Podcast (www.noagendapodcast.com ) have been saying since almost the day after the attack that this was a kidnapping gone bad.
Their thesis is that Obama set up a fake "kidnapping" so Chris could be held hostage until the last week in October. At that point Obama, via diplomacy, negotiations or military action would dramatically get him released.
An alternative theory is that it was a kidnapping with no Obama involvement. We stood down figuring that we would negotiate him back somehow.
A couple days ago I finally got around to reading an article I had downloaded to my Kindle last year. This was from PressTV which I looked up after reading and find it is the Iranian news agency.
This article also claims it was a kidnapping gone bad. It claims that it was done by the CIA, Romney and other "neocon" forces to get Romney elected. It goes into quite a bit of detail and background.
It claims that this is the reason why Petreaus, Allen (? The Marine general) and 5-6 other high ranking military were relieved or reassigned shortly after.
I don't know who was behind it, Obama, CIA or Jihadis on their own. The kidnapping idea, nutty as it is, makes the most sense of any that I have heard.
You can read the PressTV article here:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/11/19/273240/coup-and-countercoup-in-washington/
John Henry
Seeing how Libya turned out, you almost have to hope Assad wins.
If John is correct, then it would tend to vindicate the idea Dictator Zero was in deep electoral tapioca as early as early September.
Mrs. Clinton is putting banana peels all over her floors today.
Did anyone notice she's looking like she did in the 80s before the presidential run?
Glasses & hair.
Further outrage.
I thought about it too late...but I wanted to go vote wearing a white T shirt with BENGHAZI in big letters on it, and all spattered with blood.
It wouldn't count as electioneering because it doesn't mention a candidate.
Seeing Red said...
Did anyone notice she's looking like she did in the 80s before the presidential run?
Glasses & hair.
Oh, yeah, I think she knows it's over.
She can't wait to retire to some little B&B with Huma.
I can't ignore this until I'm done ignoring Fast and Furious - whatever that is.
This may end up being the most uneventful 8 years in American history. Journalist will remember it as the good old days when nobody even wanted you to work, and the paychecks came anyway. The golden era of journalism.
They LIED and people DIED.
Hillary should have resigned after that. Heck Bill mearly lied while messing around with Monica, but in this case people really did DIE.
Yes she had her 3 AM call and just ignored it.
It has a lot of emotional resonance for me because I watched a couple of movies this weekend which include this theme:
Braveheart...Robert the Bruce and the nobles betray Wallace on the battlefield...heartbreaking
Behind Enemy Lines (shot down pilot in Bosnia)--for political considerations, they aren't going in to rescue the pilot. He has to make it to a friendly town himself...which he manages to do. Then the helicopters barely miss spotting him. You have this sinking feeling of abandonment. And yet he devises a plan to signal that he's still there and needs rescuing.
And to some extent, some scenes in Training Day.
I know the ambassador knew the full extent of the risks of embassy work in a troubled part of the world. But did he know that his government would leave him twisting in the wind? Who would have counted on that event risk?
The next President, if a Republican, will get a real Press, and when they do their job, people on the right will say what about the free ride you gave Obama, and the left will deny it ever happened. It's an amazing thing how we pretend to have values and believe in them, and then just do whatever feels good anyway.
AllenS, a cable is what you send when you want a written record for later, if something goes wrong. A phone call is for when you do NOT want a record for later.
The LOC report, was much more on point they didn't want Gibril who was considered a moderate, Magarief
lost his bid, after Benghazi, and Zidan, has enabled the Salafis like
Ausjali to the top ranks of the Govt.
The next Prez won't be a Republican. Florida will never vote for a Republican for President again: too many Third World imports live here now, and they don't vote for Republicans. How's a Republican going to win the Presidency if they start out spotting the Dems California, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey, not to mention many other smaller Blue State Guarantees?
Well, Icepick, may I suggest that Stephens should have called first, and relayed the urgency in his situation, and then spend the time to send a cable. Then, I would have called every 3 minutes, SCREAMING INTO THE PHONE!
So Hillary got that 3 AM call, and just blew it off?
In Hillary!'s defense, by that time, the issue was above her head, being handled in the White House (or not being handled). The firefight, etc. was apparently being watched in real-time in the WH Situation Room, and the President was reported to have viewed it, before going to bed in preparation for his upcoming fund raising trip to the west coast the next day. And, maybe as importantly, someone had to have given a stand-down order for military intervention, and that most likely had to have come from the White House. That is not something that Hillary! could have ordered or overridden.
The place where she probably does have some culpability is in the drastic cut-back of security the month before, and in not responding to the Ambassador about the deteriorating security situation in Libya in general, and Benghazi in particular. And, yes, also in the decision to back militant Islamists to oust more stable rulers in Libya and neighboring Egypt.
Well, Icepick, may I suggest that Stephens should have called first, and relayed the urgency in his situation, and then spend the time to send a cable. Then, I would have called every 3 minutes, SCREAMING INTO THE PHONE!
AllenS, are you sure he didn't do that? Maybe he had been doing so, with no appreciable effect, and decided to at least get it into the record in case something went wrong.
The next Prez won't be a Republican. Florida will never vote for a Republican for President again: too many Third World imports live here now, and they don't vote for Republicans. How's a Republican going to win the Presidency if they start out spotting the Dems California, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey, not to mention many other smaller Blue State Guarantees?
By running a Hispanic and/or a woman. Republicans have a much deeper bench in terms of non-black minorities, and in electable women. Right now, there are Sens. Rubio and Cruz, and Gov. Hernandez as Hispanics.
Obama won this last time for a couple of reasons. One was that Hispanics broke for him at a higher than expected level. But, why wouldn't they at least somewhat back a Hispanic Republican nominee over a White Dem, in the same way that Blacks so overwhelmingly voted for Obama? Even 50% would probably swing the race to the Republicans.
Secondly, the Republicans are likely to duplicate Obama's GOTV efforts. Remember, the election was really swung by the Dems pestering ultra-low information Dem leaning voters to vote, having identified them through sophisticated data mining.
Finally, I think it likely that we are still mired in the eighth year of the Obama Recession at the next Presidential election. Or, the Republicans could retake the Senate in 2014, and start the economy back towards recovery. Obama seems determined to double down, and double down again, on the same policies that made this the worst recovery since the failed economic polices of FDR in the 1930s. They just don't get that flushing almost a billion dollars a year down the drain, much of it ending up in the pockets of their cronies, and borrowing maybe 40% of the budget is not a good way to get out of the recession. In four more years, the Good Old Days will be those under George W. Bush, and not really Clinton or Reagan.
John said...
An alternative theory is that it was a kidnapping with no Obama involvement. We stood down figuring that we would negotiate him back somehow.
Why add the conspiracy theories when you're so close without them? The most likely scenario is that Obama believed responding to the attack with force would increase the body count because he believed the purpose was to kidnap rather than kill the Americans.
This isn't all that hard to figure out. Obama and Axelrod, together with their willing MSM accomplices, saw right away that Benghazi was Tehran 1979 redux. All those comparisons to Jimmy Carter were coming true right before their eyes, and right smack dab on the eve of the election, no less. Collectively they did the only thing they could do: bury the story and the truth of what happened so deep it would never see the light of day.
Hillary may or may not have gotten the proverbial 3:00am call (or cable), but it makes no never mind. Hillary answers to BHO, and it was his presidency to lose, and he wasn't about to lose it thataway, like JC did.
Drilling down a bit, it sounds to me like the militias knew the attack was coming and found a pretext to get their people out of the way.
Lol, Two Feathers is on fire today.
Re screaming into the phone, if he would have called some friendly press like NRO, he might have gotten helicoptered out in time.
"Seeing how Libya turned out, you almost have to hope Assad wins."
I'm guessing the over-arching idea is to reverse colonialism and return the lands to their original holders, thereby eliminating internecine squabbles, AND provide the Israelis with a target rich environment.
Wow... Good thing that nobody in the media gave a damn about this back in the fail... Er, FALL.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Obama administration, already in progress.
cubanbob said...
So Hillary got that 3 AM call, and just blew it off?
Thread winner. She will never be president. Thank God.
Do you really think so? Did we learn nothing in November? If the Democrats can so hornswoggle the American people as to get the worst president in any of our lifetimes* re-elected, they can put enough lipstick on the Hillary pig to get her in.
* - No living American was around for Buchanan, who was worse.
Icepick said...
The next Prez won't be a Republican. Florida will never vote for a Republican for President again: too many Third World imports live here now, and they don't vote for Republicans. How's a Republican going to win the Presidency if they start out spotting the Dems California, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey, not to mention many other smaller Blue State Guarantees?
1/22/13, 10:38 AM
Dont know about you but I live in FL. In a mostly blue county and my precinct is so blue the secret republican voters could all fit in a phone booth. Yet with all of that there is no chance the state will vote for a state income tax. The governor is a republican and so is the legislature. Zero is the apogee of the liberal state. 2016 starts the regression if for no other reason because of lack of revenues and the inability to borrow cheaply. The food fight will be nasty indeed.
Clyde said...
cubanbob said...
So Hillary got that 3 AM call, and just blew it off?
Thread winner. She will never be president. Thank God.
Do you really think so? Did we learn nothing in November? If the Democrats can so hornswoggle the American people as to get the worst president in any of our lifetimes* re-elected, they can put enough lipstick on the Hillary pig to get her in.
* - No living American was around for Buchanan, who was worse.
1/22/13, 11:40 AM
She doesn't have Barak's magic racial amulet to protect her. Indeed no one else ever will.
Response from Secretary Hillary to Ambassador Stevens on his cable:
"Sucks to be you Chris!"
Ambassador Stevens unavailable for comment.
"Response from Secretary Hillary to Ambassador Stevens on his cable:
"Sucks to be you Chris!"
Ambassador Stevens unavailable for comment."
I thought I had it, but I concede.
In other words there was forewarning. The Benghazi massacre should not have happened.
What were the rules of engagement in Benghazi? That seems to be the Achille's heel of our security forces. In some places they are prevented from mounting a proper defense (e.g. Seal Team VI aboard a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan). While in other places they are disarmed and left vulnerable to attacks (e.g. in America).
The list of people who may have given the order to "stand down" is getting shorter.
The weapons--and perhaps the al-Qaeda terrorists from Benghazi--carried out the Algerian gas plant attack. The CRITIC message went to the President--by design of the system. He would have had to be unreachable for it not to go to him. So who do you think issued the stand-down order?
' ... while the Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee chaired by Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has its own hearing."
Forget about any really tough questions from this guy.
Hillary's testimony is going to be a whole lot of nothing because the questioning will concentrate on problems at State, if what Senator Corker just said is any indication:
“There will be a lot of focus just on the State Department and the systems and the internal accountabilities and, it feels to me, like a lot of this was because of just a State Department that is stovepiped,” he said, adding that he would call for a top-to-bottom review of the department. “It is almost full of sclerosis and unable to really attend to the issues of security and make decisions that need to be made in this regard.”
See -- nothing to do with Obama. It was all just a bureaucratic problem.
It was a gun-running operation from Libya to Islamist rebels in Syria via Turkey. Period. This only dawned on Rand Paul in late January, apparently.
But @Seeing Red is quite right: nobody cares. There's no bell curve when it comes to the intelligence of Americans. It's a smashed mound of soft mud with a miniscule right tail.
Re the cable released today, I smell a rat. An election in July with a guy who squeaked by w/our support caused them to kill our ambassador? Not buying it. If that were truly the reason, there would have been no reason for White House, Clinton, et al. to go permanently dark and pull the bizarre video move.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/22/the-real-reason-behind-benghazigate/
I mean they were fairly forthcoming on the attack in Algeria where a multi-national work force was attacked, taken hostage and killed that had Americans in it. Guess they learned their lessons on transparency from Benghazi. Oh wait...
A report from The Weekly Standard updates how well "the investigation" is going "over there", and it confirms how much the Jihadists won on Sept. 11, how much they know it, and are capitalizing on it.
The dull-eyed paper shuffle going on over here should be criminal.
I have wondered how soon, thanks to this disastrous Presidency, we will all need guns to defend from Jihadists in our own streets. Four years? Fifteen? Cowardice has consequences.
Thanks, Dem voters. among other things you have certified a "war on women" beyond your dreams.
@ Seeing Red -- Wait! Someone does care. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS. She had several aggressive tweets on the subject today. (would embed the link if I knew how)
http://twitchy.com/2013/01/22/boom-cbs-sharyl-attkisson-tears-into-obama-admin-over-benghazigate/?utm_source=autotweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter
Racist.
Just because.
2 people escaped the Algeria massacre. they're promptly interviewed on international TV.
32 people were allegedly rescued in the the Benghazi fracas. ?? where are they who are they. ?? why no interviews of any of them or their families
2 people escaped the Algeria massacre. they're promptly interviewed on international TV.
32 people were allegedly rescued in the the Benghazi fracas. ?? where are they who are they. ?? why no interviews of any of them or their families
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