RUTHFULLY YOURS

What more does anyone need to know than that Americans are under attack before ordering a military response to suppress the attack and possibly rescue our people?

Even if the initial response isn’t exactly what you’d want it to be, even if you don’t have every asset available that you might in a perfect world, isn’t it your duty — whether you’re a lowly second lieutenant or the Secretary of Defense — to do everything you can as quickly as you can?

Of course it is, at least unless you’re President Obama and his minions. His two principal flunkies — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — had a lot of options on September 11 during the seven-hour attack on our Benghazi consulate and the CIA house about a mile away. According to a Fox News report based on several sources, the people under attack pled with the CIA for help three times during the attack and all three pleas were refused. Team Obama did nothing to save their lives.

The accuracy of the Fox report is easily derived from other facts. One element of proof that the requests were made — by people under fire — comes from Panetta’s whining. According to a Reuters report, Panetta said there wasn’t enough information to responsibly deploy forces to Libya during the attack. “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.”

Really, Mr. Secretary? Let’s set aside the fact that one or more drones were over the consulate during the attack, sending back the information Panetta says he needed. But the drone issue begs the question: Panetta cannot really believe that sending armed aircraft from our base at Sigonella, Italy — about 350 air miles away — wouldn’t have given him both the capability of suppressing the attack and whatever other information he thinks he needed. Panetta’s whine is as evasive as his actions were treacherous.

President Obama was apparently so fearful of offending some Islamic mob that he preferred to let our people be killed than send a couple of F-18s from Sigonella to Benghazi. Flight time — for fully armed aircraft at about 0.7 or 0.8 Mach — is less than an hour. The attack went on for seven hours. If the fly-guys busted Mach, they could have been there in about a half hour. Plenty of time to pop a sonic boom over the consulate which — as we’ve seen in Afghanistan many times — is enough to send the terrorists running. And — if there wasn’t time for the first flight to be armed — it would have been able to recon the situation and give the time for fully-armed aircraft to arrive about fifteen or twenty minutes later.

Obama’s fingerprints are all over this refusal to come to the aid of our people when they were under attack. The CIA — implicitly confirming the pleas for help — denies that anyone in its chain of command rejected any such request. The specificity of the CIA denial gives us another proof that the requests were made, but it carries a second aspect of responsibility for the failure to send help. CIA Director David Petraeus must have passed the requests up the chain of command and someone higher than him — the president is the only one higher than a cabinet member — denied the requests.

Clinton has to have known what Charlene Lamb — her head of embassy security — knew during the attack. (Lamb testified at a 10 October congressional hearing that she was in real-time contact with the consulate during the attack.) So must have Petraeus, because his CIA operators — former SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty among them — were making the pleas for assistance and asking permission to rush to the consulate’s defense. Woods and Doherty were told to “stand down.” As Fox reports, the two apparently ignored the orders and rushed to the consulate to help. Unable to find the ambassador, they withdrew to their CIA outpost, which then came under attack. Both were killed there.

President Obama is still fumbling and lying about the whole incident including the refusal of the pleas for help. In a Denver TV interview on Friday, Obama ducked questions about the Benghazi incident twice. He’s also saying that he ordered support for the consulate personnel as soon as he heard about the attacks.

Why, then, weren’t the available forces deployed immediately to save American lives? If no one in the CIA chain of command refused aid, the failure has to be Obama’s. No one else could have denied the real-time requests.

Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, said that those who denied the requests for help murdered his son. Woods’s anguish is understandable. His son was a hero, and paid with his life for Obama’s failure to send military force to attack the enemy that was attacking him.

Naturally, Obama and his minions aren’t owning up to their treachery and the media — except for Fox News — are burying the story.

The Washington Post and the New York Times — both of which have endorsed Obama — aren’t reporting the story on the rejected pleas for help. ABC, CBS and NBC aren’t either.

To its credit, CBS did break the story last week on the State Department emails that show Obama’s administration knew that the Benghazi attack was made by terrorists, not some mob distracted from a protest against an anti-Islamic video. The other big liberal media — i.e., most of the major media — gave little or no coverage to the CBS scoop.

As huge a scandal as the Benghazi incident is, it’s not possible for it to become an issue in the election unless Mitt Romney makes it one. So far, he hasn’t and he isn’t likely to in the final week of the campaign.

Don’t expect to hear much about Obama’s conduct of the Benghazi incident before the election or after, if he is reelected. The effect of Obama’s refusal to come to the aid of people under attack is best understood by the terrorists still walking the streets of Benghazi, and their allies around the world.

About the Author

Jed Babbin served as a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several bestselling books including Inside the Asylum and In the Words of Our Enemies. You can follow him on Twitter @jedbabbin.