carnage and culture: Libya

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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

'Let's move on': Hillary's blithe response after devastating Congress report reveals she lied and lied again about what caused US Ambassador to die in Bengazi

By David Martosko, US Political Editor and Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent For Dailymail.com

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

28 June 2016

SOMBER: Obama and Clinton spoke at the 'transfer of remains' ceremony when the victims' bodies were returned to the U.S., as their administration worked behind the scenes to spin the news

Hillary Clinton dismissed a Republican broadside on her and President Obama over the Benghazi attacks today saying: 'Move on.'

The Republican members of the House Benghazi committee issued their 800 page report with excoriating words for her and the president, accusing her of 'shameful' conduct over her secret email account, and the White House of lying about what caused the attacks.

Her 'homebrew' server was only revealed because of the investigation into the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The blistering 800-page report excoriates the Obama administration, finding that it lied about what caused the attacks which claimed the lives.

It says what went wrong may never be fully known because of a 'shameful' decision by Hillary Clinton not to turn over the contents of her secret 'homebrew' server, whose existence only came to light because of the investigation.

But her response was curt. 'I think it is pretty clear it is time to move on,' she said.

Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee claimed Tuesday that the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton lied repeatedly to the American people about the nature of and reasons for the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, even as they privately acknowledged what caused them.

The report offers no explanation for why it took 18 hours for military assets to reach the Libyan city - many hours after the president ordered every possible measure to be taken, and the then defense secretary testified that he ordered deployment.

A scathing report provides new ammunition against Clinton, then the secretary of state, and turn the assault on an under-protected U.S. diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA facility into the election-year issue it was always destined to be.

Republicans' central argument is that the Obama White House chose to deceive Americans rather than risk the public relations nightmare of admitting terrorists had struck Americans overseas, less than two months before Obama's re-election day.

'They misled the American people and said, "We can't tell the truth. We can't talk about how bad the security situation was.

'We can't talk about the fact that, that this was a terrorist attack. we have to mislead the American people because we are just eight weeks before an election",' Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, one of the committee's Republican members, claimed Monday morning on CNN.

The panel's chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, and other Republicans also accuse the Obama administration of stonewalling important documents and witnesses.

Democrats say the panel's main goal is to undermine Clinton's presidential hopes.

The former secretary of state said Tuesday in Denver, where she held a campaign event, that she would 'leave it to others to characterize this report but I think it is pretty clear it is time to move on.'

'I have said from the very beginning nothing is more important than the security of our diplomats and our development officials to go into dangerous places around the world pursuing American values, interests and our security,' she said.'

'While this unfortunately took on a partisan tinge, I want us to stay focused on what I've always wanted us to stay focused on and that is the important work of diplomacy and development,' she added.

'We cannot withdraw or retreat from the world. America needs a presence for a lot of reasons,' Clinton continued.

'And the best way to honor the commitment and sacrifice of those we lost is to redouble our efforts to provide the resources and support that our diplomats and our development experts deserve.'

Mystery of the missing military

The report provides an extraordinarily detailed insight into the military assets which could have been sent to try to save American lives.

But it does not find a reason why it took 18 hours for help to arrive - by which time the ambassador had been rescued by locals, ironically former members of the Gadaffi regime which the U.S. had helped to overthrow.

It says that AFRICOM - the Pentagon's African command division, which is based in Germany - could have made use of Marine FAST (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) platoons, based in Spain, F-16s, based in Aviano, in northern Italy, a special diplomatic assistance team known as CIF (Commander's In-extremis Force), based in Germany but then training nearer Libya, in Croatia, and US-based special operations forces .

But in a painstaking timelines it discloses how it took 13 hours after the attack for the first force to be deployed.

The attack started at 9.42pm local time - 3.42pm in Washington. It was brutal, and prolonged. Calls for assistance began immediately and the first notice of the attack was distributed in Washinton atr 4.05pm, with the White House situation room among those involved.

But it says, it took hours for the White House to convene a meeting to decide what to do - by which time it was 7.30pm in Washington.

'In the four hours since the initial attack on the Benghazi Mission compound, the Diplomatic Security Agents in Benghazi, with help from the team from the Annex, survived the initial onslaught, located the remains of their fallen colleague Smith, franticly searched for Stevens, escaped under heavy gunfire from the Mission compound to the Annex, avoided an ambush along the route, and arrived at the Annex only to withstand and repel additional attacks there,' the report says.

'By stark contrast, in those same four hours, principals in Washington had merely managed to identify forces that could potentially deploy to Libya and convened a meeting to discuss those forces.'

The meeting include Hillary Clinton's State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills. It should have included the then vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral James 'Sandy' Winnefeld, but he said he could not attend because there was an official dinner at his residence.

Leon Panetta, the defense secretary, had ordered deployment two hours after the attack began, but the people taking part in the White House meeting 'felt the need to "work through" the assets'.

What happened next, the report, says, depends on whether you believe Panetta - who was adamant he had ordered deployment - or a series of other witness and minutes, who spoke about '"getting forces ready to deploy" in a future tense'.

'Another summary described the deployment of assets in response to Benghazi as "likely" and "possibly" that evening,' the report says.

One senior military official testified that forces had not been ordered to deploy but to prepare to deploy.

The report calls the cause of the failure to get properly-equipped forces to Benghazi in time a 'lingering question' and says the failure '—at best illustrates a rusty bureaucratic process not in keeping with the gravity and urgency of the events happening on the ground'.

White House chose to focus on the YouTube video

Almost immediately, the White House went into spin mode, publicly blaming the carnage on local protests over an anti-Islam YouTube video that was made in America.

That turned out not to be the case, and Monday's report includes emails and testimony showing the administration knew it at the time.

Clinton said publicly as her Benghazi facilities were still smoldering that 'some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.'

But in a phone call with Libyan president Mohammed al Magariaf, Clinton correctly fingered Ansar al Sharia, al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula, as the cause.

'[O]ur diplomatic mission was attacked[.] . . . [T]here is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as-Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for,' a note-taker recorded Clinton telling al Magariaf.

Clinton also emailed her daughter during the fog of the event: 'Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.'

And she told Egypt’s prime minister a day later: 'We know that the attacks in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.'

'None of the information coming directly from the agents on the ground in Benghazi during the attacks mentioned anything about a video or a protest. The firsthand accounts made their way to the office of the Secretary through multiple channels quickly,' the Benghazi committee's majority report concludes.

In one example, a senior watch officer serving at the diplomatic security command of the State Department called the 2012 devastation 'a full on attack against our compound.'

A colleague asked him if saw or heard any protests before the shooting and bombing began, he replied: 'zip, nothing, nada.'

Families of the fallen accuse Hillary of lying to them

Clinton has come under fire from family members of the U.S. personnel killed in Benghazi, who say she personally told them the government would seek justice against the video's creator.

Democrats released a report Monday stating that Clinton never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional security at the U.S. outpost in Benghazi.

They said after a two-year investigation that the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of four Americans killed in Libya.

But the report itself argues that delays in the Obama administration's response to the deadly attacks were caused by slow decision-making and political considerations.

White House was consumed with politics, not rescue

During a senior level meeting convened at the White House just three hours into the attack – attended by senior deputies to cabinet secretaries, including Clinton's – conversations focused on how to frame the attack as a protest gone bad, not on how to ensure the safe extraction of Stevens.

'Nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began,' the report concludes.

'With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a roughly two-hour meeting at 7:30 PM, which resulted in action items focused on a YouTube video,' committee members wrote.

Other 'action items' contained 'the phrases "[i]f any deployment is made," and "Libya must agree to any deployment," and "[w]ill not deploy until order comes to go to either Tripoli or Benghazi".'

The administration's spokespersons later insisted that deploying military rapid-reaction forces based in Italy and elsewhere into the Libyan port city would have been a waste of time given the short duration of the attacks.

But some witnesses told the congressional committee that there was no way to know at the outset how many hours it might have gone on.

White House responds

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Tuesday that he still believes Republicans on the Benghazi committee saw damaging Clinton's poll numbers as their mail objective.

'That was their goal. It remains to [be] seen if that's what they accomplished,’ Earnest said.

He disputed the finding that the military was slow to respond, saying that 'this has been thoroughly debunked by previous Republican-led investigations in the Congress.'

'I'm not going to get into the back and forth because frankly Republicans have already done that. Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee have concluded that those charges are not true,’ he said.'

The congressional committees that have truly been committed to understanding the facts 'have concluded that it was a tragedy,' Earnest claimed.

'But they've also concluded that the variety of conspiracy theories that have been flowering on the Republican side of the aisle are politically motivated fantasies. And it's unfortunate that the death of four Americans would be subject to that kind of political fantasizing. But that is the state of the Republican Party these days.’

Earnest said it would be up to the Clinton campaign – not the Obama administration – to push back.

'I think Secretary Clinton is more than capable of making her own case about her judgement, her successful tenure as secretary of state and what that says about her presidential campaign,' he said. 'But ultimately that's the responsibility of her advisers.'

As for how it will affect her credibility with voters and her White House campaign he said, ‘I think voters will have to decide for themselves.’

Select Committee on Benghazi Releases Report | Select Committee on Benghazi

Benghazi lies were just standard procedure under Obama

By John Podhoretz

http://nypost.com/

June 28, 2016

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Benghazi report released Tuesday makes clear that one dreadful constant of President Obama’s foreign policy is simply this: Deflect. Muddy the picture. Question the motivation.

Blame the wrong culprit when naming the right culprit might interfere with your narrative, or if doing so might oblige you to act when you do not wish to act.

In an addendum to the report, Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo detail the fact that the administration knew perfectly well in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that it had been planned and directed by Islamist radicals as an evil commemoration of 9/11.

For example, at 11:23 p.m. on the night of the attack, Hillary Clinton e-mailed her daughter Chelsea to say, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Quedalike [sic] group”.

The next morning, she said, “We are working to determine the precise motivations and methods of those who carried out this assault.”

Sound familiar? Of course it does. After the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando by home-grown terrorists, administration officials made a point of refusing to name the enemy publicly — in this case, ISIS, which had not yet come into existence at the time of Benghazi.

On the day following Orlando, the president himself said we had yet to discern “the precise motivations of the killer,” even though everyone knew by that point he had called 911 to swear his allegiance to ISIS while he was killing people.

Two weeks after the Orlando shooting — two weeks — Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation. We will look at all motivations.”

With Benghazi, as with Orlando, the reason for these evasions is to make mystery and ambiguity a part of the narrative in order to buy the White House and the administration time and space — the time to control the story and the space to impress upon its supporters the impracticality and uselessness of responding to these acts of war.

That’s why the first administration statement on the Benghazi attacks, made by Hillary Clinton, specifically made reference to the anti-Islamic video “Innocence of Muslims,” which had just created an international scandal — but did not make reference to the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated it. It came only an hour before Hillary e-mailed Chelsea and assigned blame to al Qaeda elements.

At this point, a familiar face pops up in Section 2 of the Benghazi report, which lays out the administration’s actions in the wake of the attack.

Yes, it’s none other than our buddy Ben Rhodes, the man who bragged to The New York Times Magazine about manipulating the press to adopt the administration’s line on the Iran deal.

The report makes clear he was helping to design the administration’s response as he began the work of setting up the echo chamber in which the media would provide Obama exactly the time and space he wanted and needed.

Rhodes did something odd in his testimony before the Benghazi committee. He claimed that the sentence about the anti-Islam video in the “Statement on the Attack on Benghazi” wasn’t really about Benghazi but was about “the region.”

“It’s not intended to assign responsibility for what happened in Benghazi,” Rhodes testified. “It’s meant to describe the context of what happened, what’s happening in the region.” There had been protests in Cairo centering on the video that same day.

His questioner responds incredulously: “So everything in this document is about Libya and Benghazi except you’re saying this sentence doesn’t apply to Libya and Benghazi?”

Rhodes responds with gobbledygook about protecting Americans elsewhere. His strange claim here is telling, because it makes clear the administration seemed to want above all to mention the video in its first words on the attack to direct attention away from it or to include it in a larger list of troubles stemming from a reaction to “Innocence of Muslims.”

All these misdirections and prevarications have taken their toll.

An unambiguous response to a terrorist attack on an American facility in 2012 would have prevented the creation of the Benghazi committee in the first place.

Due to the Benghazi committee’s efforts to secure the facts of the case, the world came to learn about Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of public e-mail — an irresponsible and reckless act that more than anything else jeopardizes her presidential ambitions.

But when it comes to radical Islam and the Obama administration, the truth is always the first casualty. Hillary is hoping her presidential bid isn’t its last.

The Benghazi Debacle Should Have Ended Hillary Clinton’s Career

Instead, with an assist from the media, she’s going to get off scot-free.

By David French — June 28, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)

Do failures and lies matter any longer? If you are a prominent Democratic politician, what exactly is the level of wrongdoing that will end your career?

Reading the long-awaited report from the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the associated media coverage, I was struck by the sheer scale of the failures and the deceptions surrounding the terror attack on the Benghazi compound, and by the mainstream media’s dismissiveness. Here’s the opening paragraph of the New York Times’s story on the report:

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

And here’s the Washington Post on the report:

A final report issued by the Republican majority that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, found fault with virtually every element of the executive branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This is an extraordinary response to a report that comprehensively details one of the most shameful episodes in recent American diplomatic and military history.

Clinton’s State Department failed to adequately protect its diplomats in Libya, with the Obama administration so intent on avoiding “boots on the ground” in the aftermath of its Libyan air war that it left Americans dangerously exposed even as the jihadist threat was plainly and clearly ramping up. The report details at least ten previous terror attacks in Benghazi, including two IED attacks on the American compound, yet the State Department had decreased its security there in the months before Ambassador Chris Stevens and four others were killed.

Obama’s Pentagon failed to mobilize assets to protect those same Americans even as they endured an hours-long assault on September 11, 2012. One of the most painful elements of the report is its description of exactly how difficult it was for the Pentagon to ramp up even the quick-strike elements of the most powerful military in the history of the world. Fighters were in one location, tankers in another. Ground assets were in one place, air transport in another. It took hours for clear commands from the White House and Pentagon to filter sufficiently far down the ranks to spur actual military activity.

Then, confronted with the damage afterward, the administration lied, repeatedly. Of that there can no longer be any reasonable doubt. The report lays out in excruciating detail the contrast between the administration’s private and public statements about the attack: The private statements consistently attributed the Benghazi attack to terrorists while the public statements either directly blamed an anti-Islamic YouTube video for causing the violence or conflated the Benghazi attack with a protest at the Egyptian embassy that did appear to be connected to the video.

While Clinton can’t be held responsible for the Pentagon’s failures, her own failures and deceptions can’t and shouldn’t be addressed by a mere apology. The Benghazi attack and the subsequent collapse of Libya into a jihadist playground should have ended her career. Instead, because of the well-worn (and media-assisted) process of progressive scandal management, she looks primed for a promotion to the highest office in the land.

The pattern is familiar: When news first breaks, say what needs to be said to escape the news cycle unscathed. Next, when the truth starts to emerge, deny wrongdoing and state that any comprehensive judgment should be withheld pending a full investigation. When the investigation commences, stonewall the investigators and accuse conservatives of being “obsessed” or on a “witch hunt.” By the time wrongdoing is finally confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt, the average voter will have forgotten why the scandal was a scandal to begin with, or, if he hasn’t forgotten — and actually did withhold judgment — the waters will have become so muddied he won’t know whom to believe.

To some in the media, the very act of stonewalling is heroic. Confronting congressional investigators makes you a “fighter.” Enduring inquiries and consolidating your base makes you a “survivor.” Bill Clinton used this playbook to escape political accountability for infidelity, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The Obama administration has used it to flush the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups down the memory hole, transforming one of the most outrageous abuses of power in the modern history of the executive branch into old news in record time.

It should be acknowledged that in their efforts to outrun their misdeeds, Obama and the Clintons always get an inadvertent assist from the conspiracy-mongering right. Obsessed with finding smoking guns personally connecting their targets to wrongdoing, they help the media define scandal down. They swing for the fences, and journalists are all too happy to treat doubles and triples as signs of failure. Can’t find any records proving Obama and Clinton specifically ordered administration officials to lie about Benghazi? Well then, they must not have done anything wrong. Can’t uncover e-mails directly tying Obama to IRS abuses? The story moves to the back page, and then out of the media entirely.

So here we are. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president is largely responsible for one of the great foreign-policy disasters of the last eight years and unquestionably responsible for helping mislead the public, yet in the media calculus of our time the Benghazi report is a “win,” because it merely confirms failures we already knew about. And everyone knows that old failures are no failures at all.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

Sunday, February 07, 2016

Film Review - 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/
February 6, 2016

Paramount Pictures

Michael (Transformers) Bay has now made two feature films about real-life military attacks on US sovereign territory - in 2001 Pearl Harbor, which was enough to have you rooting for the Japs, and now 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Happily, the latter does not have much in common with the former, save for a reprise of what evidently Mr Bay regards as his signature - a rocket falling from the skies to its target, but shot from the rocket's point of view. If you object that a rocket is an inanimate object and can't have a point of view, well, it's all comparative: in Pearl Harbor, the rocket was a lot less inanimate than Ben Affleck. Here the director has a grittier and hairier cast, and makes a good-faith if not wholly successful effort to dial back the prettifying devices of blockbuster film-making.

As for the point of view, the rocket has one. But Bay doesn't. This is a visceral, sensory, pulverizing, you-are-there slab of action - all twitchy cameras, sudden edits, jerky cross-cuts - in which the context of the fireballs all around is left for another day. The director describes 13 Hours as "my most real movie", but it doesn't have to be that real to be more real than the official version. Film-making and storytelling have been part of the Benghazi fiasco since the evening of September 11th 2012, when the US Government decided to tell its own story about a film-maker whose all but unseen video had, they insisted, led to the death of a US ambassador. In the Hillary Clinton version, four Americans died at the hands of (as I put it at the time) "a spontaneous class-action movie review". Three days later, when the President, the Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to the United Nations were all still lying to the American people about what happened and why, my characterization of that night holds up better than the Government's:

As Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a "safe house," and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they've investigated Mitt Romney's press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

In the end, the court eunuchs chose to continue fanning Sultan Barack. Three years later, based on a book by five of the survivors, Bay's film belatedly provides answers to some of the basic questions the media never asked. It's not a political film at all: Hillary is never mentioned by name, and for the whole 13 hours the Government of the United States - indeed, in a more basic sense, the entire global hyperpower - is an unseen character confined to the end of a telephone that no one ever picks up. There are occasional glimpses of nearby assets - a US air base across the Med in Italy - but in this western the cavalry never come. Three years ago we were told that they couldn't have got there "in time" - so, in Hillary's words, what difference would it have made? But as I wrote:

It's easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn't like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it's more like a tennis match: Whether it's all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down.

That's the story as Bay tells it: For two-plus hours, you feel only the absence of the global superpower - as, indeed, many beleaguered Americans and American allies around the planet have felt these last years. The background is sketched efficiently enough. John Krasinski, the nice bloke from the US version of "The Office", lands in Libya hirsute and bulked up. He's playing Jack Silva, a private security contractor for whom this is just another gig in just another Krappistan. He's met at the terminal by his old Navy Seal buddy Tyrone Woods (James Badge Dale) and even on the drive back from the airport it's clear that Benghazi is a town where the Libyan government's writ doesn't run and turning left instead of right can have serious consequences for your life expectancy. When they run into trouble at an ad-hoc militia checkpoint, Woods has a well-rehearsed line to hand, pointing to the sky and telling the dimestore jihadist that every aspect of the encounter is currently being watched by the all-seeing drone. As we'll discover, the world's first drone superpower sees everything ...but doesn't do anything.

Woods and Silva work for GRS - the Global Response Staff - whose job is to provide security for the CIA operatives in the city. There are six of them, with monosyllabic nicknames - Rone, Tig, Oz, Boon - and a trait apiece: One of them is a bookish type partial to Joseph Campbell, which provides Bay with some voiceovered philosophical musings in the final moments. Otherwise, this is where the director descends to his traditional caricatures: in contrast to the hairy muscular tattooed GRS guys, the CIA types are clean-cut pocket-pen pansy-assed snooty desk-jockeys with Ivy League Master's in Nation-building Studies, all under the command of a Head of Station jobsworth called "Bob" (David Costabile) on his last posting before retirement. Because there are no girls in this story, one of the CIA agents is female, a thankless role well-played by Alexia Barlier.

The pointyheads don't want these dumb lummoxes causing any trouble. When the CIA occasionally ventures out from its crusader fort to meet with local bigwigs, Jack goes along as protection, posing as Mlle Barlier's hubby, but sneeringly instructed not to say a word. In the course of the film, Mlle Barlier's character comes to see that, when the chips are down, you need these hard men. Whereas the dweebiest of the desk-jockeys, on being instructed to grab a gun and head to the roof, responds, "He's joking, right?"

This is the CIA we're talking about, remember. They can't really be that effete and disconnected, can they? They surely can't have that little sense of their vulnerability - of their precarious toehold on a disintegrating landscape. Next door to their compound itinerant herders graze sheep and doe-eyed boys skim stones, but there seems to be a method in their comings-and-goings, as if it's the intelligence agency that's under surveillance. A mile away, inside the diplomatic compound, things are even more surreal. There's a pool, and the lobby looks like the Benghazi Hyatt, but the State Department security are rank amateurs and their local guards are unarmed and the foreigners lack the language skills ever to be entirely sure about the natives they've hired. As one American marvels, after watching his militia comrade on his cellphone, the so-called good guys mysteriously have the bad guys on speed-dial.

The "friendlies" fade into the shadows, the "hostiles" metastasize: As the night unfolds, you get the sense that everyone - the goatherds, the grease-monkeys watching TV soccer, their shrouded womenfolk - knows what's going on. Except the Americans. The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness. The world over the wall has a lazy sensuality, confident that, when the infidels with the guns and the money depart, it will be as if they were never there.

And so on September 11th US Ambassador Chris Stevens (Matt Letscher), described as a "true believer" in the new Libya, arrives for a private meeting with the mayor - at which half the town shows up. Instead of being upset by the security breach, "Bob" is more irked at a GRS guy dozing off during Stevens' happy-sappy remarks. When it all goes pear-shaped back at the compound, Bay is unsparing in showing Stevens' panic and fear at the disintegration of his illusions: He and Sean Smith are hastily shuffled into a "safe room", which, of course, thanks to the attention to detail of the money-no-object State Department, is entirely unsafe. Unable to force their way in, the invading army simply lights up the adjoining room, and the smoke under the door does the rest.

The decision to let their ambassador die appears to have been taken early on. Was it just "Bob" back at the CIA annex rushing into the yard and ordering GRS to stand down? Or did it come from higher up? Half-a-dozen brave men plus a goofy Libyan interpreter decide that, unlike the CIA, they're going to do what's right, and off they set.

The GRS guys are well-cast by Bay. The one misstep is Toby Stephens, playing Glen Doherty. The son of Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, Toby is best known as the baddie in Die Another Day, a very overripe performance even by Bond-villain standards. He enters the picture back at the embassy in Tripoli, when the diplomats are fretting that they have no assets in country. Oh yes you do, says Stephens, stepping forward and fixing his gimlet eye on the camera: "I need a bagful of money and a flight to Benghazi." His face is too strong and his presence too actorly and the line too portentous, and just for a moment the entire enterprise trembles on the brink of Robert Stack in Airplane!

Glen Doherty was a singularly brave man. He was the guy who didn't shrug "What difference does it make?" And so he made a difference: He got his flight, and he landed in Benghazi in the early hours, and made it to the roof of the compound to save American lives, and sacrifice his own. While the commander-in-chief went off to party in Vegas, and the Secretary of State put her phone on voicemail, and the UN Ambassador hit the TV circuit to peddle the official lie, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods chose to act in defiance of the government that abandoned them. Bay does not eschew the conventions of the genre, but Lorne Balfe's hitherto percussive score finds an appropriate dignity for these final scenes.

We all know how the story ends, as perhaps they did, too, in the last of those 13 hours. It was a thankless task, a charge of the Light Brigade necessitated by the absence of all the heavy power. But they did it, and their sacrifice deserves to be honored. There are other stories to tell about Benghazi - of self-serving duplicity by shameless hollow nothings unfit for public office - but Michael Bay has chosen to focus on heroism and sacrifice by men whom too many Americans have forgotten. I hope his film makes a difference.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

13 Hours Benghazi Film Nails Clinton, Obama Betrayal Without Saying a Word

Joy Overbeck | Jan 22, 2016

http://townhall.com/

In the last moments of this incandescently tragic but brilliant film, the camera lingers on an American flag, torn and blackened by fire, weighed down by chunks of the once-lavish consulate, sinking in the trash-strewn pool of the Benghazi residence where just a few hours earlier Ambassador Chris Stevens was dipping his toes.

A gut-rending symbol of how our rodent-hearted “leaders” have sunk our once-great nation; the noble flag drowned literally in the rocket’s red glare of Islamic terrorist bombs bursting in air.

Thirteen Hours: the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a war movie about the Libyan terrorist attacks on September 11, 2012 that will take its place among the iconic war movies of all time.

I sat open-mouthed, clutching the arms of my seat and spilling my popcorn as the screen illuminated in flashes from massive explosions the breath-taking heroism of the former Marines and Navy Seals defending the U.S. Benghazi assets. Their names are Tanto (Kris Paronto), Oz (Mark Geist), Tig (John Tiegen), Rone (Tyrone Woods) and Glen Doherty.

The film also illuminates with night vision goggle precision the treachery of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who did nothing to save them. Never are the secretary of state or the commander in chief (uh, Obama) even mentioned, which in itself screams volumes. Just as they were absent from duty the night of the attacks, they are AWOL in the movie itself.

We now know that Hillary Clinton spent a little time in the Situation Room that night, presumably watching the live feed from the drone that captured the life-and-death siege of first the ambassador’s residence and a few hours later, the second attack on the CIA annex a mile or so away. We know that the president wasn’t there, likely busy picking out the suit he would wear for his campaign fund-raiser in Nevada next day.

We know now that the night of September 11 Secretary of State Clinton told her daughter and the Egyptian prime minister that this was a coordinated planned attack by Islamic terrorists marking the September 11 anniversary and had nothing to do with any video. So we know that she and Mr. Obama deliberately lied when they told the grieving relatives as their loved ones’ flag-draped coffins were being unloaded on the tarmac that a video was to blame for their deaths. We know that the security for which Ambassador Chris Stevens repeatedly begged was denied, and actually down-scaled in one of the world’s most dangerous posts that most nations’ embassies and even the Red Cross had already fled.

As they saw the consulate burning in the distance, the small former special forces team assigned to protect the CIA Annex (purportedly to secure weapons from the deposed Quadaffi regime) disobeyed several stand-down orders from the on-scene CIA station chief and ran to help. They said in the film and later in TV interviews (on Fox News; the mainstream media won’t touch this) that if the CIA bureaucrat would not have delayed their leaving, they are sure they could have saved two lives. But despite furious attacks, they did succeed in rescuing many at the consulate.

After the embassy was demolished and Sean Smith and Ambassador Stevens were dead, the five-man team returned to combat positions on the roofs of the CIA buildings, defending the 25 or so CIA personnel inside against the fierce onslaught of incoming rocket propelled grenades and mortar fire from the Islamic terrorists.

In one scene, Rone (Tyrone Wood) face bloodied and streaked black with machine gun soot, climbs down to the office complex and asks one of the CIA operatives if there’s anyone she can call to get some air support – not bombs, but just a low fly-over “to put the fear of God and the USA into them.” She says she has some contacts and gets on the phone.

In fact, according to a CBS news report by investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson:

“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.”

So a fear-of-God airborne testosterone display could have been mounted yet for unknown reasons was not. The film has a short scene captioned “AFRICOM” showing a gaggle of military brass talking about a possible air mission, and then we briefly see rows of American soldiers sitting on airplane benches in full readiness combat gear. They never took off .

Not long after the debacle, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Pentagon reporters it wasn’t clear enough what was occurring on the ground in Benghazi to send help.

“(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 told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham (head of AFRICOM, the crisis-responding combat command for Libya and other African nations), Gen. Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”

So the on-site drone giving them real-time eyes-on plus the Benghazi CIA calling desperately for help with the deafening soundtrack of bombs and machine gun fire in the background simply didn’t provide enough info about what was going on? These men are in charge of the “no man left behind” ethic of the U.S. armed services. Panetta’s excuse is simply preposterous. .

Panetta also serves up a banquet of red herring by claiming those pinned down in Benghazi demanded a rescue force. They would be grateful for a bone-rattling, cockroach-scattering fly-by. But even that was too much for the Defense Secretary.

Later in the battle, Rone Woods returns to the CIA office complex to ask the woman who called her contacts for help if she’d had any response. Negative. Nobody would be coming.

That no-go decision had to be deliberate. AFRICOM’s General Ham told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on June 26, 2013, that he learned about the terrorist attack on the consulate only 15 minutes after it started. He headed down the hall to General Dempsey’s office and informed him about the onslaught. The two immediately went to meet with Panetta and the three “headed across for the meeting at the White House” according to Ham.

Their meeting with the president started at 5:00, about an hour and 18 minutes into the terrorist siege so the president knew about the attack at that time. The meeting lasted a mere half hour. Now things get blurry. According to then White House press secretary Jay Carney, Obama didn’t phone Clinton until 10 p.m. that night, more than six hours after the attack began. But Carney’s statement didn’t line up with a letter released by the White House to Congress stating that Obama made no phone calls the night of the attack. And it turns out a month earlier Clinton had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she learned of the attack on Benghazi at 4 p.m., not 10:00.

Clinton told the Senators that “we were in continuous meetings and conversations, both within the department, with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally. ..I spoke with President Obama later in the evening to, you know, bring him up to date, to hear his perspective,” she testified.

Internet sources including The Gateway Pundit and RedState have reported that both General Hamm and Rear Admiral Charles M. Gaouette, who commanded the Carrier Strike Group Three (CSG-3), then deployed in Middle Eastern waters during the attack on Benghazi, disobeyed stand-down orders from higher up and readied rescue plans. These stories are supported by the president suddenly removing Ham from duty (firing) just about a month after Benghazi, followed by Ham’s premature retirement.

Also in October 2012 after the Benghazi disaster, Admiral Gaouette was fired as the Navy announced it was “replacing the admiral in command of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Middle East, pending the outcome of an internal investigation into undisclosed allegations of inappropriate judgment.” Could Gaouette’s “inappropriate judgment” be choosing to do the honorable thing by rescuing the Benghazi warriors?

Back to the movie, the CIA roof and a hail of hell as ex-Navy Seal Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods die in a savage mortar attack. Finally the CIA survivors are saved, not by American military but by the Libyan Army’s phalanx of military trucks.

And now the woman who shrilled, “what difference does it make”, who lied to the parents of the dead, who abandoned our Americans in order to support the president’s faux hawkish re-election slogan, “G.M. is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead,” is running for president. Memo to America: be sure you have your life insurance paid up if you think Hillary Clinton will “fight for you” as her good friend Ambassador Stevens believed. And don’t you dare vote for her.

Now, What About the 13 Hours of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

Charlotte Hays | Jan 22, 2016

http://townhall.com/

President Obama takes the hand of Secretary of State Clinton as the bodies of the four Americans killed at the consulate in Benghazi are returned to the U.S.

Benghazi and its aftermath in some ways exemplifies foreign policy during the Obama years: the public never get a straight answer.

That is why the new movie, "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," is so important. It answers the question the administration refuses to: What happened that night in Benghazi, Libya as Americans fought for their lives for thirteen hours against a well-coordinated attack on September 11, 2012?

Yes, it's a movie and undoubtedly includes inaccuracies and exaggeration, but I'll gladly put it up for an accuracy contest against the bogus Benghazi talking points delivered on September 15, 2012, on the Sunday morning shows by then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

The movie is based on "13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Happened," by former Boston Globe reporter Mitchell Zuckoff, who worked with five CIA security contractors who survived the attacks. Four men died that night, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first American ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979. Kris “Tanto” Paronto, one of the surviving contractors, has vouched for the accuracy of the movie.

Directed and co-produced by action filmmaker Michael Bay of "Transformers" fame, "13 Hours" is riveting and at times almost unbearably scary. "I feel like I am in a f------ horror movie," a soldier says. I'd say it was a macho movie, given the culture of the contractors, but I went with a girlfriend and we were both entirely absorbed. The Benghazi soldiers compare themselves to the men at the Alamo, another place where help never arrived.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are never mentioned, though Obama's words about the U.S. helping to topple Libyan strongman Muammar Gadaffi, and thus giving the Libyans a chance to establish democracy, are superimposed with devastating effect over footage of a country that has disintegrated into one big arms bazaar ruled by competing militias. Apparently, Colin Powell's Pottery Barn Rule (if you break it, you own it) doesn't apply to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.

One of the most effective aspects of "13 Hours" is that it does not deal with what the contractors did not know. We know from subsequent testimony before Congress that Gregory Hicks, back at the embassy in Tripoli, who became the top U.S. diplomat in Libya upon the death of Stevens, talked to the State Department that night. But we never know what kind of conversations the CIA station chief--identified in the movie only as "Bob"--might have been having with Washington. When Bob orders the contractors not to go to the diplomatic installation to try to rescue the ambassador, we don't know on whose authority he was acting. What we do know is that the soldiers were left to fight alone for thirteen long hours, with no help from their government. Some have said that a flyover by U.S. planes might have dispersed the militants and prevented the mortar attack on the CIA Annex that came late in the action and killed two men.

The action, as you probably already know, takes place at and between a diplomatic installation and a CIA Annex a few miles away. One of the most frightening scenes is when two contractors drive through the violent streets of Benghazi between the two compounds. Why would they even have tried to save Stevens with the cards so stacked against them? "You can put a price on being able to live with yourself," says one of them. That in a nutshell is the theme of the movie.

Apparently, Washington officials, one of whom wants to be our next president, suffer from fewer moral scruples. Now that we have a compelling account of the harrowing thirteen hours on the ground at Benghazi, we deserve to know about the thirteen hours of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Will somebody just ask at a press conference, “What did you do that night? What time did you go to bed when Americans were fighting for their lives in a country we had supposedly liberated?”

At the end of the movie, one of the contractors notices that, even while being rescued, he will fly out in a Libyan plane. The Americans have still not come. This too says much about the true Obama foreign policy legacy, where so much of the world is wondering when, if ever, American leadership will show up. They’ll have to wait another year, at least.