Vice President Joe Biden claimed that the administration wasn’t aware of requests for more security in Libya before the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi during Thursday night’s debate, contradicting two State Department officials and the former head of diplomatic security in Libya.
“We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there,” Biden said.
In fact, two security officials who worked for the State Department in Libya at the time testified Thursday that they repeatedly requested more security and two State Department officials admitted they had denied those requests.
“All of us at post were in sync that we wanted these resources,” the top regional security officer in Libya over the summer, Eric Nordstrom, testified. “In those conversations, I was specifically told [by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb] ‘You cannot request an SST extension.’ I determined I was told that because there would be too much political cost. We went ahead and requested it anyway.”
Nordstrom was so critical of the State Department’s reluctance to respond to his calls for more security that he said, “For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”
“We felt great frustration that those requests were ignored or just never met,” testified Lt. Col.Andrew Wood, a Utah National Guardsman who was leading a security team in Libya until August.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) released the unclassified cablescontaining those requests.
Who is right? My money is on the State Department, and that would mean that Joe Biden is a liar.
House investigators warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to expect a hearing into their finding that that American staff at the U.S. Embassy in Libya had their request for additional security denied by Washington officials.
“Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and subcommittee chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, wrote Clinton today. They dismissed out-of-hand the suggestion that the attack ever could have been regarded as a spontaneous protest gone awry.
“In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi,” Issa and Chaffetz added (my emphasis). “The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington.”
The committee noted 13 “security threats” in Benghazi, including an attempt to assassinate the British ambassador to Libya.
And now here’s the latest development from CBS News:
The former head of a Special Forces “Site Security Team” in Libya tells CBS News that in spite of multiple pleas from himself and other U.S. security officials on the ground for “more, not less” security personnel, the State Department removed as many as 34 people from the country in the six months before the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.
Lt. Col. Andy Wood will appear this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing that will examine security decisions leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.
Speaking to CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Wood said when he found out that his own 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force were being pulled from Tripoli in August – about a month before the assault in Benghazi – he felt, “like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers. There was concern amongst the entire embassy staff.”
According to ABC News, Stevens actually wanted the security teams to remain in Libya:
U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens wanted a Security Support Team, made up of 16 special operations soldiers, to stay with him in Libya after their deployment was scheduled to end in August, the commander of that security team told ABC News. The embassy staff’s “first choice was for us to stay,” Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, 55, told ABC News in an interview. “That would have been the choice of the embassy people in Tripoli.” But a senior State Department official told ABC News that the embassy’s Regional Security Officer never specifically requested that the SST’s tour be extended past August, and the official maintained there was no net loss of security personnel…
You’ll recall that the Obama administration spread false information about the terrorist attack, saying that it was a spontaneous eruption caused by a Youtube video, and not a planned terrorist attack. This is how incompetent and deceptive they are, and yet the media is only now correcting the initial reports. This scandal should be enough to sink Obama, but as Neil Simpson points out, Democrats are not the best at following the news.
Radical leftist Wolf Blitzer fact checking a pro-Obama ad?
Let’s see:
Bridget posted this blurb which summarizes the situation for those who can’t see the video above:
The ad centers around the story of Joe and Ranae Soptic of Kansas City, Missouri. Joe lost his job when GST Steel went under in 2001, after 8 years of Bain Capital attempting to save the dying steel plant. Romney’s site addresses the claims regarding GST:
In 1993, GS Technologies, a company Bain Capital had invested in, purchased a struggling Kansas City steel plant from Armco. Prior to this investment, Armco announced plans to close the Kansas City plant if a buyer could not be found.
This investment – and $170 million in upgrades – kept the Kansas City plant competitive in a tough international market and saved the steel workers’ jobs for eight years.
In addition, the plant finally went under 2 years after Romney left Bain Capital to head up the Salt Lake City Olympics. Even if you believe the Obama campaign’s fact-checked and disproven claim that Romney left Bain in 2002, it would be obscene to blame Romney and Bain when the investment was designed to save GST Steel.
Now, the kicker that makes this the most offensive ad I have seen in a long time (although not in history, as a 2010 ad compared one GOP candidate to the Taliban). Soptic’s wife died in 2006, five years after he lost his job and health insurance with GST’s closing. When she went in for pneumonia, her cancer was so far evolved that it was untreatable, making health care irrelevent. The argument is basically that “some guy, who once worked for a company managed by the company Romney managed, lost his wife to cancer, so Mitt Romney killed her.” This is ridiculous. President Obama should immediately disown this ad, but I doubt that’s going to happen.
I’m actually surprised at CNN. I consider them less objective than Doonesbury cartoons. I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Obama campaign denies knowledge… yet they knew about it in May!
As Politico first reported, Soptic told essentially the same story in a May 14, 2012, conference call hosted by the Obama campaign. Here’s what he said then, according to a partial recording of the call passed along by a Republican official:
After we lost our jobs, we found out that we were going to lose our health insurance, and that our pensions hadn’t been funded like Bain promised they would be. I was lucky to find another job as a custodian in a local school district. They gave me some health insurance, but I couldn’t afford to buy it for my wife. A little while later she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I had to put her in a county hospital because she didn’t have health care, and when the cancer took her away, all I got was an enormous bill. That put a lot of stress on me: I thought I’d be paying it off until I died myself. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Bain kept its promise and I was allowed to keep our health insurance.
“It’s upsetting what Mitt Romney and his partners did to us,” he added.
The revelation drew an immediate rebuke from Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams, who said Obama and his campaign “are willing to say and do anything to hide the president’s disappointing record.”
“But they’re not entitled to repeatedly mislead voters,” he said.
The Obama campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even if Obama disowned the ad, it’s not going to make a difference to his rank and file – they get most of their news from the Comedy Channel anyway.
WINTERY KNIGHT 