Diplomat claims US forces told to stand down in Benghazi

[Freddie Stubbs]

Source: The Hill

U.S. special forces in Tripoli were prepared to fly to Benghazi on the night the U.S. mission was attacked but were told to stand down, a State Department whistleblower told congressional investigators.

The testimony by Gregory Hicks, who became the top U.S. diplomat in Libya when Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, contradicts previous testimony by Obama administration officials who said all the security assets inside the country were tapped that night. Hicks said the special forces team was ready to fly after Stevens was killed but before a second attack killed two other Americans.

After Libya's prime minister called to tell him Stevens had died, Hicks said, “the Libyan military agreed to fly their C130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements. But as the special forces team headed to the airport, Hicks said, they got a phone call from Special Operations Command Africa saying “you can't go now, you don't have authority to go now.”

Republicans on the House oversight panel released portions of an April 11 interview with Hicks ahead of Wednesday's hearing on Benghazi. Hicks is scheduled to testify along with two other State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events of the attack last Sept. 11 and the Obama administration's response.


Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/terrorism/297963-diplomat-claims-us-special-forces-told-to-stand-down-in-benghazi#ixzz2SXQtUFcj

[Cali_Democrat]

1. These fools are still stuck on Benghazi?

LOL

[blm]

2. Old news - the victims were already dead and the murderers gone by then. There was no 'rescue'

mission to launch at that point. The RW propaganda media is having a field day pretending otherwise. They know their dumbed down audience will hang their hats on every bit of distortion offered.

[B2G]

6. That's not exactly true

Hours went by between the death of Stevens and the others. Hours.

Hours we would be screaming about if a conservative was in office.

[blm]

8. Your 'facts' differ from the Pentagon timeline? Who would've been saved?

9:42 p.m. -- Armed men begin their assault on the U.S. Consulate.
9:59 p.m. -- A surveillance drone is directed to fly over the U.S. compound, but it is unarmed.
10:32 p.m. -- The Office of the Secretary Defense and the Joint Staff are notified of the attack by the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. "The information is quickly passed to Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey."
11 p.m. -- Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey meet with President Obama at the White House where they discuss the unfolding situation and how to respond. The meeting had been previously scheduled.
11:10 p.m. -- The surveillance drone arrives over the Benghazi facility.
11:30 p.m. -- All surviving U.S. personnel are evacuated from the consulate. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and State Department computer expert Sean Smith were killed in the initial assault.
September 12
Midnight to 2 a.m. -- Panetta and other senior leaders discuss possible options for further violence if it were to break out. Panetta gives verbal orders for Marine anti-terrorist teams from Rota, Spain, to prepare to deploy to Tripoli and Benghazi. Panetta also orders a special operations force team training in Croatia and an additional special operations force team in the United States to prepare to deploy to a staging base in southern Italy.
1:30 a.m. -- A six-man security team from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli arrives in Benghazi.
2:39 a.m. to 2:53 a.m. -- The National Military Command Center gives formal authorization for the deployment of the two special operations force teams from Croatia and the United States.
5:15 a.m. -- Attackers launch assault on a second U.S. facility in Benghazi. Two former U.S. Navy SEALs acting as security contractors are killed. They are identified as Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
6:05 a.m. -- A C-17 aircraft in Germany is told to prepare to deploy to Libya to evacuate the consulate personnel.
7:40 a.m. -- The first wave of Americans are evacuated to Tripoli via airplane.
10 a.m. -- A second group, including those killed in the attack, are flown to Tripoli.

[B2G]

9. Don;t play dumb.

It's well documented.

The American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya, was attacked on September 11, 2012 by a heavily armed group. The attack began during the night at a compound that is meant to protect the consulate building. A second assault in the early morning the next day targeted a nearby CIA annex in a different diplomatic compound. Four people were killed, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Ten others were injured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack#Assault_on_the_Consulate

[blm]

10. Who would've been rescued?

.

[B2G]

11. Those who were injured & killed at the Annex

Have you not read any of the reports?

[blm]

13. Are YOU reading all of the reports?

The way this is reading is wing nut exaggeration, offering interpretations to fit a preferred scenario instead of sticking strictly to facts exactly as occurred at the time.

I am no Hillary fan, but, there is no way on earth she would have been lax in this regard as it goes completely against her hawkish nature and her entire future plans for a center-right run for president. She LIKES the tougher than thou advantage for campaign politics. She would have liked nothing more than to get with Panetta and pull off a rescue mission IF it could have been pulled off as the RWers like to claim.

[B2G]

14. 6 hours went by

between the evacuation of the embassy and the attack on the annex.

Why wasn't that annex protected? Are you trying to tell me reinforcements couldn't have been put in place in 6 hours? Really?

[geek tragedy]

24. The annex was in Libya, where we didn't have a military presence.

So, yeah, deploying the US military blindly into a combat situation wasn't going to happen for about 10,000 legitimate reasons.

The annex's protection was not being known as an ops center for the CIA/military. Once its cover was blown, there was trouble.

[B2G]

15. And just curious

Is it your normal style of posting to go back and so heavily edit your posts after the fact so that the responder has to re-read them 2&3 times to figure out what the hell your point is?

Or am I just special?

[blm]

19. No - adding the timeline was to be useful to those pondering the question.

Sorry the timing on that edit perplexed you.

[B2G]

21. I thank you for providing the timeline

It proves my point.

[Bolo Boffin]

23. No, the timeline does not prove your point.

The "stand down" the wingnuts are now talking about is of people to board the plane preparing at 6:05 am. That could not have helped either the initial attack or the attack at the annex.

You are wrong. You are wrong. You are wrong.

[geek tragedy]

27. Check out the posting history.

Hint: this is par for their course, and reasoning will not work

[blm]

35. No - it doesn't prove your point.

.

[Buzz Clik]

33. +1. Our friend here is testing the water.

The time is fixed and has been fixed for months. Exaggeration is 100% dead on.

The GOP has given up trying to destroy the economy, so they are hoping for a direct hit on the President. Welcome to the run up to the 2014 elections.

[dipsydoodle]

47. Which time zone do your time stamps refer to ?

.

[John2]

16. The ultimate point,

is do you actually believe some one is trying to cover up even after the independant report from two respected investigators, and one was an admiral? The person who was once accused of car jacking needs to give it up.

[B2G]

17. I believe the jury is still out on that

It never ceases to amaze me that some people blindly believe politicians that are of the same political stripe as themselves.

Politicians are politicians. They will do whatever necessary to save their own skins. If you don't believe that, you are quite naive.

[blm]

18. And that is EXACTLY what the GOP pols are doing with this - trying to save THEIR

view of their party as owning the foreign policy and terror issue when time after time they are proven to be incompetent and incredible. This blind rush to anoint them as trustworthy here is absurd.

[B2G]

20. Then let them prove it again.

Let everyone testify until there are no more questions.

I'm not anointing anyone. But I do believe that anyone with any information pertinent to that day should testify. And they haven't all gone on the record at this point.

I really don't understand why some have a problem with that.

[blm]

36. Yeah, we want the thorough answering of questions just like Bush did for 9-11, right?

In fact, we want TWO official hearings and 5years of investigation just like Whitewater which was even worse than 9-11, BCCI, IranContra, S&Ls, CIA drug running.

[creeksneakers2]

41. Its a witch hunt

Its not an investigation. The GOP did this constantly under Clinton. They look for anything they can twist into something incriminating. The longer they go on, the further from the truth we'll get.

And as long as it gets covered on cable, there will never ever be a time when the GOP has "no more questions." The wingnuts are talking impeachment now. Nothing could possibly send the GOP back to the base to tell them that another look at the facts cleared Obama.

[elleng]

45. Seems to be what happened at hearing Wednesday,

and Dem members appreciating it.

[Politicalboi]

28. The Pentagon had 40 minutes before it was attacked

40 minutes. But no one even had to answer why our biggest defense building gets attacked. So don't say anything about screaming if it were a conservative. Lots of people believe the 9/11 commission report. The conservatives NEVER had to answer for the incompetence of 9/11, and many here are fine with that. I for one am not, but we who question 9/11 are considered nuts.

[karynnj]

34. BLM may be right - the 2 Seals who died the next morning were not at the consulate,

but at the nearby CIA annex, that at the point of that decision had not been attacked. The other question is whether they could have been reached in time.

The argument may end up being that while they could NOT have been reached in time, that was not known when the decision was made.

[Roselma]

3. CNN reporting similar, but also reporting the

following:

*****“They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it,” Hicks said. “I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, ‘I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.’ A nice compliment.”

Hicks recalled asking Phillips again if any military help was coming? “The answer, again, was the same as before,” Hicks recalled. “It's too far away, there are no tankers ... there is nothing that could respond.”

The C-130 left between 6 and 6:30 a.m., so the four Special Forces troops would not have arrived in time to fend off the 5:15 a.m. attack on the CIA annex in Benghazi.*****

So the plane left AFTER it was all over anyway.

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/06/former-deputy-chief-of-mission-in-libya-u-s-military-assets-were-told-to-stand-down/

[patrice]

4. Could someone around the CIA have been trying for a Shock & Awe 2.0?

I wonder how many assault weapons American PRIVATE arms traitors have sold to Libya over the years.

Cheneyesque, this.

Remember the kind of stuff that was the motive for outing Valerie Plame?

[SpankMe]

5. "For me,” he said, “the Taliban is on the inside of the [State Department]."

When they say stuff like this, you just know it's a severe right-winger exaggerating his way to orgasm rather than a responsible diplomat reporting a problem.

[Kingofalldems]

7. Getting more and more like fake news

Just like all the Sen. Menendez headlines feverishly posted in LBN a while back.

Who was that again?

[TwilightGardener]

22. Rescue attempt may itself have turned into a clusterfuck. Relying on the Libyan military?

If Special Forces couldn't get a ride there except by the Libyan military, then yeah, we were tapped out.

[cstanleytech]

25. I am confused.

"The testimony by Gregory Hicks, who became the top U.S. diplomat in Libya when Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, contradicts previous testimony by Obama administration officials who said all the security assets inside the country were tapped that night. Hicks said the special forces team was ready to fly after Stevens was killed but before a second attack killed two other Americans."
How exactly does that contradict it? If they were "tapped" for something else already or were supposed to be then its not a contradiction is it? Or maybe its a simple mistake much like that "Mission Accomplished" after Bush landed on that carrier was a mistake?

[leveymg]

26. Yikes. If Hicks has any credibility, this could be explosive.

[geek tragedy]

29. How? He's a Republican hack who wasn't part of the WH/State/CIA/Pentagon deliberations nt

[leveymg]

31. He was the acting Ambassador after Stevens' death. That gives him enough

credibility so that the corporate media will report his statements. It would be dangerous to expect it will be otherwise, regardless of what others with a closer role and knowledge of events have to say.

The fact that this is coming out now after the cement has dried on the official WH and Pentagon accounts is troubling. I'll wait until I draw any further conclusions.

[elleng]

43. He is quite credible, imo.

Heard some of the hearing this afternoon, and watching it now on C-SPAN.

Also, D Congressman ?Connolly, of VA, complemented him and said if anyone were to challenge or seek to harm Hicks due to his evidence, he'd have his back. (Said it more strongly.)

AND, Jackie Speier, D of CA, said she'd like to see/help him obtain a posting where he would like to be. Dems on the Committee appear to respect him.

chaffetz the only repug I've seen/heard being an a'hole. All others being constructive.

[Bolo Boffin]

30. Unless they were flying there in a DeLorean, once again Benghazi Truthers got nothing. n/t

[4bucksagallon]

32. We were sent on several "rescue missions" in Nam....

The one's I can remember clearly were to help an Army unit that was pinned down in an ambush, to find a pilot from a downed aircraft and retrieve any armament that was not destroyed, and to aid one of our own units (Marines) under siege, these usually do not go well. We were serving as a react team at the time. I can tell you I would rather be on the ground under fire than to be sent into one of those situations. Utter chaos...especially the night time missions. I give the military and the State Department the benefit of the doubt on these. I do not blame Obama, but I do blame G W Bush for 9/11. It's my opinion and I am entitled to it.

[DCBob]

37. I dont get it.

I really dont get the claim that this was a massive conspiracy by the Obama admin to downplay this for political reasons. How exactly can an incident like this be kept undercover? There were hundreds of witnesses and drone videos.. anyone with half a brain knows something like this cant be kept secret. Many involved would be risking their careers if the "truth" ever came out. It makes no sense what so ever.

Furthermore, I dont get this idea that if this attack was seen as a terrorist attack would somehow hurt him politically. Why?? Obama never said the war on terror was over. In fact it seems just the opposite. If the war on terror is over why does he keep shooting people from drones? The GOPers are desperately grasping for a scandal that simply doesnt exist.

[elleng]

44. Wouldn't have hurt him, imo.

Mistake, I think, was telling Amb. Rice to say what she said, which they've been trying to deal with ever since.

[DCBob]

46. I agree.. and in fact it didnt.

[Kingofalldems]

38. Looks like another false story posted in LBN

http://demu.gr/1014478374

Didn't you also post stories in LBN about Sen. Menendez that also turned out to be false?

[Enrique]

39. not false

the OP recounts testimony of an actual witness, as does your link.

[alp227]

40. The Guardian has a longer article

US officials blocked rescue effort while Benghazi burned, Congress told

Hicks claimed Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, telephoned him to complain that he had given critical evidence to congressional investigators without the presence of a "minder" from the state department. "A phone call from that senior a person is generally considered not to be good news," said Hicks, who said he had since been demoted. "She was upset. She was very upset."

The career diplomat also alleged he was actively discouraged by officials from asking awkward questions about why other top Clinton aides were wrongly blaming the attack on a spontaneous protest that got out of control: a briefing he described as "jaw-dropping, embarrassing and stunning". It is now thought the attacks, involving up to 60 heavily armed militia, were co-ordinated by Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated to al-Qaida, and timed to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre.

The allegations of a state department cover-up follow equally embarrassing claims that military leaders blocked efforts to dispatch special forces troops to the Benghazi consulate.

In testimony that first emerged on Monday, Hicks claims that four special forces soldiers with him in Tripoli were "furious" when they were told by superiors in Washington that they could not join a relief flight to Benghazi organised by the Libyan government in the hours after the initial attack.

Mark Thompson, a former marine who heads the foreign emergency support team, also alleged that the White House blocked his efforts to dispatch a specialist group from the US that is designed to respond to incidents such as the Benghazi attaack.

Hicks said he was told that US air force jets based in Italy could have reached the consulate in "two to three hours" but were blocked, out of fear of offending the Libyan government, and because a refuelling tanker could not be found.

[elleng]

42. Hearing on C-SPAN now.