Obama refused CIA requests for military backup during Benghazi attack

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer 

 

The scandal just keeps getting bigger, while the mainstream media tries furiously to distract attention from it.

"EXCLUSIVE: CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say," by Jennifer Griffin for FoxNews.com, October 26 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later was denied by U.S. officials -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11. 

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out.

They were told to "stand down," according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to "stand down."

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request 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 Spectre 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. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators.

A Special Operations team, or CIF which stands for Commanders in Extremis Force, operating in Central Europe had been moved to Sigonella, Italy, but they never told to deploy.

In fact, a Pentagon official says there were never any requests to deploy assets from outside the country. 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. They were the same distance to Benghazi as those that were sent from Tripoli. Spectre gunships are commonly used by the Special Operations community to provide close air support.

According to sources on the ground during the attack, the special operator on the roof of the CIA annex had visual contact and a laser pointing at the Libyan mortar team that was targeting the CIA annex. The operators were calling in coordinates of where the Libyan forces were firing from.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that there was not a clear enough picture of what was occurring on the ground in Benghazi to send help.

"There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on here," Panetta said Thursday. "But the basic principle here ... is that you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on."

U.S. officials argue that there was a period of several hours when the fighting stopped before the mortars were fired at the annex, leading officials to believe the attack was over.

Fox News has learned that there were two military surveillance drones redirected to Benghazi shortly after the attack on the consulate began. They were already in the vicinity. The second surveillance craft was sent to relieve the first drone, perhaps due to fuel issues. Both were capable of sending real time visuals back to U.S. officials in Washington, D.C. Any U.S. official or agency with the proper clearance, including the White House Situation Room, State Department, CIA, Pentagon and others, could call up that video in real time on their computers....

Obama in Cahoots With Known Terrorists 

By: Diana West  / Townhall Columnist

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column addressing the national scandal that investigation into the security failures and lies surrounding Benghazi-gate must also expose. This even larger scandal concerns the fact that throughout the revolutionary cycle known as Arab Spring, the Obama administration threw in Uncle Sam's lot with the bad guys -- the "rebels," the "martyrs," the Muslim Brothers, the whole jihad-happy and Shariah-ruling crew in Libya and the wider Middle East. In so doing, Uncle Sam, more or less, crossed to the "other side."

We are continuing this same treacherous policy in Syria, something I hope Mitt Romney (as president, I also hope) comes to understand quickly. In Libya, Obama's Arab Spring policy -- supported by U.N.-niks, Republicans and media alike -- meant making common cause with al-Qaida forces and other jihadists, including Libyan veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq who fought and killed Americans. It was if the whole world had gone mad.

Take the Libya Shield Brigade, 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 -- relying on GPS coordinates the Marines brought with them -- where the survivors of the consulate attack had successfully taken cover. This annex did not come under mortar attack until soon after Libya Shield and the Marines arrived. Coincidence? It was in this barrage, by the way, that ex-SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed.

John Rosenthal has reported at WND.com that the Libya Shield Brigade fought in the anti-Gadhafi revolution -- which Uncle Sam, of course, supported -- under the black flag of al-Qaida. Rosenthal further notes that in October 2011, Libya Shield's leader, Wissam Bin Hamid, issued a statement to Arabic jihadist websites stating: "The Islamic Shariah is a red line, we will not cede one rule of it, and Islam is the only law-giver and not (merely) the foundation (of the law)."

Bin Hamid, not at all incidentally, is also described on an online jihadist forum as a veteran of jihad in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This is what I mean by Libyan "allies" who have fought and killed Americans from the Other Side. Now, they're escorting Marines to secret American annexes, and doing so as a matter of Obama administration policy.

This is a crucial piece of the Benghazi story. The U.S. wasn't relying on Libya Shield and, as I've written before, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade in some ad hoc security arrangement. This is all part of continuing Arab Spring policy.

A U.S. embassy cable made public by congressional investigators makes this patently clear. While requesting more security on March 28, 2012, Eric Nordstrom, then U.S. regional security officer in Libya, notes that "rebuilding and expanding" the "local" guard force is one of his "core objectives." This objective directly relates to what he describes as the State Department's recommendation for "developing plans to transition our security staffing ... to (a model) that incorporates more locally based and nonemergency assets."

Naturally, these "plans" weren't working. Hence, Nordstrom's request for more American security. And hence the denial from State for reasons, Nordstrom told Congress this month, that came down to the fact "there was going to be too much political cost." It is these "politics" -- this Obama policy of outreach to jihadists -- that must be exposed and stopped.

The final diplomatic cable to go out under the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens' name is dated Sept. 11, 2012. It recounts events of the previous week in Benghazi, including a Sept. 9 meeting between an unnamed U.S. diplomat and, whaddya know, Wissam Bin Hamid, commander of Libya Shield. A second Libya Shield commander, Muhammad al-Gharabi, was also present. During a fractious-sounding meeting, the Libyans declared their support for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate then running to become Libyan prime minister, and threatened to withdraw security from the U.S. in Benghazi if another candidate won in upcoming elections.

It makes for surreal reading. Here we see a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, jihadist veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighter for Shariah under the al-Qaida flag threatening American officials, and it's just another bulleted point in a routine cable home to the State Department. Little wonder, of course, that two days later, Bin Hamid's militia and others like it in eastern Libya were unable to forestall disaster. What a dastardly joke: They were all too likely involved in it.

It gets worse. As Rosenthal notes in his WND.com article, "The jihadist inclinations of Bin Hamid and his Libya Shield forces are not unknown to the U.S. government. Indeed, a recent study prepared by the research division of the Library of Congress links the Libya Shield Brigade to al-Qaida and even cites speculation that Bin Hamid may be the leader of the al-Qaida network in Libya."

We must find out how we got to this perilous place and why. But first we have another question to answer:

Do we really want four more years of the same?

Liberals Find out Women Aren’t Amused 

By: John Ransom  /  Townhall Columnist

Soon will come the finger-pointing.

Liberals will gnash their teeth, pull their hair and recriminate.

Yes; true, this is normal behavior on the part of liberals. But this time the behavior will be uproarious and hilarious.

Because this time, the folks who brought us Occupy Wall Street won’t be in a drum circle, but in a circular firing squad facing their comrades, their righteous fingers loaded and looking for blame.

“Oh, Chicago!” they’ll say. “Bang, bang.”  

Sure, there will be the typical liberal shots at the “racists” on the right who denied Obama a second term.
But the delicious irony lost on them will be found in their final chant of “It’s all Bush’s fault.” But that irony won’t be lost on history.

Count me amongst those laughing hardest.

Because Obama’s term can best be described as a Harold Ramis movie.

Remember when Obama had to redefine his stimulus program that was supposed to create millions of jobs, to only “saving” millions of government jobs?

“We spent a trillion dollars on what?” Ha, ha.

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As Jimmy Kimmel explained at the 2012 White House Correspondents Dinner:

 “Mr. President, remember when the country rallied around you in the hopes of a better tomorrow? That was hilarious. That was your best one yet.”

Well not quite.

There was that time that Obama got roughly $90 billion for green energy jobs, or green energy “investments,” as he calls them, which were touted to save us billions of dollars in imported oil and create 5 million green energy jobs.

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 set aside $90 billion in renewable energy grants and loans for a grab bag of thousands of projects—wind farms, solar installations, natural gas fueling stations, biofuel research, and a $5 billion weatherization project for low-income homes,” reports BusinessWeek.com. “Digging into the public records of the $21 billion spent so far through 19 U.S. Department of Energy programs reveals 3,960 projects that employ 28,854 people.”

Only 4,971,146 jobs left to go!

Four more years? No, at that rate it would take 693 years for Obama to create 5 million green energy jobs at the rate he created them over the first four years. And at the current cost, Obama would have to spend $3.6 trillion just to create those jobs.

That’s 25 percent of our GDP dedicated to creating about 3.5 percent of our jobs, if it ever happened.

You can not find a better punch line that knocks the water out of Obamanomics so completely. Forget about Obama’s 1 percent. At $727,000 per job, the 3.5 percent who would have green jobs would have it pretty good.

Thankfully economics, and by that I mean real-life market forces, not wishful theories by central bank and Ivy League economists, have prevented Obamanomics from working.

So as a healthy alternative to providing actual money to families during the recession, Obama created the bumper sticker war that liberals call: The Republican War on Women (R-WoW).

R-WoW’s not doing so hot though. It’s based on the faulty assumption that Republican men want to control women’s brains and their uteruses. And it's way too transparent an attempt to distract from Obama's record of failure.

I’ll admit that as a man I don’t always understand women. They are girly and often smell powdery. That and the insides of their purses intimidate me. But I know that they have a healthy respect for money. This I understand.

If you gave them a choice between a job that pays money and free birth control, the ones I know would pick a job.

They aren’t buying into the R-WoW credo that the GOP is somehow hostile to women. And it’s not just the girls I know. According to the latest AP survey the vaunted gender gap that Obama counted on to get re-elected has disappeared. The seven-point advantage that Obama had with women in 2008 has vaporized in 2012.

“Less than two weeks out from Election Day,” reports CBSNews “Republican Mitt Romney has erased President Obama's 16-point advantage among women, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows.”

Just a month ago, says CBS, “women favored Mr. Obama over Romney on the economy 56 percent to 40 percent. Now, the split has shifted to 49 percent for Romney and 45 percent for Mr. Obama.”

And the irony here is that the harder the administration tried to push R-WoW, the more they alienated women. It was just about a month ago that Obama’s disastrous debate performance forced liberals to cue up the War on Women once more as an alternative to…policy, results, progress, or a real president?

And yes, I find the irony of this hilarious.

Obama has been done in by his own campaign device, done in by women who wouldn't buy his R-WoW BS. Ha! It could all make a wonderful Will Farrell comedy.

Women, however, it seems, are not amused.    

LIAR...LIAR...LIAR!!!

Panetta Says Military Did Not Intervene in Libya Attack Because They Didn’t Have Any ‘Real-Time Information’

By Madeleine Morgenstern / The Blaze

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday the U.S. military did not intervene when the U.S. Consulate in Libya was under assault last month because military leaders did not have enough information about what was happening on the ground.

Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon there was no “real-time information” on which to act, even though the military was prepared to do so, CNN reported. U.S. forces had been on heightened alert because of the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, but Panetta said the Benghazi assault was over before military leaders had a good handle on what was going on, according to the Associated Press.

“The basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta said. “And as a result of not having that kind of information…[we] felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the six-hour assault, which has since been labeled a terrorist attack.

Panetta said there has been “a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on here” questioning decisions in the weeks since the attack.

“This happened within a few hours, and it was really over before we had the opportunity to really know what was happening,” Panetta said.

CBS reported last week that there was an unmanned drone dispatched over the U.S. Consulate that apparently viewed the final hours of the attack.

A Defense Department official told CNN there was a drone in the air but was not directly over the area when the attack started. The official said the drone was redirected and was able to record some of what was happening, and described it as “looking down, seeing a bunch of buildings and fires, a lot of chaos on the ground.”

PETITION: Barack HUSSEIN Obama must be held responsible for the MURDERS and cover-up at Benghazi

The assault at Benghazi is deliberately and with malice being covered up as this administration tries to wash away the blood on their hands by lying and changing their story over and over. Why...to deflect away from their actions of gross negligence and incompetence or worse...complicity...and NOT have this Obama called 'bump in the road' (gagging) tarnish the usurpers re-election campaign. Well you know what...it's up to us to get the word out that 'We the People' have drawn a line in the sand and we DEMAND answers and arrests where warranted.

Please click on the link below to SIGN AND SHARE as we are running out of time.

http://www.causes.com/actions/1696525?fb_comment_id=fbc_480190172002239_5567144_480192345335355#fd321e9cf3284

No truer words said

While it IS all about the economy, make November's Presidential vote rallying cry 'Remember Benghazi' and honor our American dead because...

Op-ed:

PETITION: Barack HUSSEIN Obama must be held responsible for the MURDERS and cover-up at Benghazi

By: Diane Sori  

October 26 · Started by Diane Sori 

 

To: The US House and Senate

Four Americans were brutally slaughtered at Benghazi yet Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his entire administration denied any link to islamist terror groups for weeks, instead choosing to blame the attack and MURDERS on a two-bit video. They knew the truth for while the 7-hour attack was actually in...See More

 

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By signing your name to this petition we are sending a loud and clear message that 'We the People' have had enough of this president and his administration's LIES and cover-ups about Benghazi. We DEMAND the truth be told and told NOW, and that if need be according to our Constitution and rule of law that ARRESTS BE MADE even if it means the arrest of Barack HUSSEIN Obama himself. 

Here is the direct link to sign the petition...time is running out.

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