So that is what is peculiar to me. What is clear is that support was requested, at least 3 times.
Two former seals did go assist those who were under attack. They did so against orders to stand down and in doing so ended up saving lives.
What is not clear is who gave the direct orders to not do anything at all. The closest explanation matches what you said and was given by Panetta who said,
“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, and as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”
General Ham is head of US Africa command. Dempsey is Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet Panetta did not say that specific requests for help were denied. Patraeus also has taken a stance of no requests were denied from him or anyone in his organization.
I understand special ops missions take planning and such. By the same token, I cannot comprehend the strategy of not doing a damn thing. Not a fly by? Not anything?
Ty Woods was one of the guys that went to rescue the operatives. What also does not make sense is that one of the most often quoted creeds of the military is no man is left behind. To have all of the technology and not to do anything, anything at all, simply seems very odd to me. There are 3 bases within 2 hours, Sigonella Italy, (an hour away) as well as Aviano and Suda Bay, both within 2 hours.
So again, what you said about the military chain of command makes sense yet nobody is saying the buck stops here, I am the one that said no.
Here we are 45 days after the event.
What I do believe to be true is that the White House, Panetta and others did have a feed of what was going on and were very abreast of the situation however they did not have any intelligence of it beforehand. Rightfully they were confused yet I cannot believe that they did not present options to the president.
I believe that they presented those options with a proper risk assessment. I believe one of the options was also to prod they Libyans to take action and hope that they would rescue the Americans. This was probably the most palatable decision to the president which is obviously the one he selected. We don’t know if the rescue would have worked, we don’t know if more lives would have been lost, we don’t know how the Libyan govt would have reacted.
However I guess this is what troubles me the most, that when faced with these what ifs the decision made was to stand down. Now instead of facing the music we are getting a stall tactic until after the election which I guess is understandable. However by nature Obama is not a risk taker. I think that there is a tangible point to be made and that is, an unsuccessful rescue attempt in Benghazi would have been quite damaging given the upcoming election.
