Streetwise Professor

In the comments, So? mentions the successful Chinese landing of a J-15 jet on its new aircraft carrier as evidence of China rising.

It is an advance for China, definitely. But a baby step when you consider the complexity of carrier operations, especially at a true operational tempo, with 120 sorties (takeoffs and landing) per 12 hour flight day, sometimes surging to 190 per day. The ballet of the deck is an amazing-and amazingly dangerous-thing. Especially when you start doing it with live ammunition hanging from wings and waiting on deck, and especially especially when you do it day after day and crews become fatigued.

The US Navy has been doing this for close to a century. The accumulated experience and knowledge will take the Chinese a generation to match. (Only four navies-the US, Japan, the UK, and France have operated carriers in a serious way.)

And by the time China catches up with that, the US will have moved on. It is already moving on. For on virtually the same day China landed a manned jet on a carrier, the US loaded an X-47B Unmanned Aerial Vehicle onto the USS Harry Truman for flight testing:

So while China takes its first steps into the 20th century doing what the US (and the UK) first did in 1945-land a manned combat jet on a CV-the US is moving into the 21st by testing unmanned combat jet on a CV.

So who is really making history? And is a gap closing, or opening?

In any world crisis, it is said that the first question any American President asks is: “Where are the carriers?”

In Russia, it is: “Where are the tugboats?”

The decrepitude of the Russian navy is so pronounced that every deployment is accompanied by a salvage tug, just in case (and the case is quite likely) the sortied combat ships break down at sea.

Two examples.  A Russian anti-piracy deployment in the Gulf of Aden:

Led by the Udaloy class destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov, the task force also includes the Irkut tanker and the Alatau rescue tug boat.

And it’s not just the Navy that needs help:

Salvage tug SB-36, a part of the squadron of the Russian Navy in the Gulf of Aden, met in the open ocean in distress schooner famous Russian traveler Fyodor Konyukhov and now accompanies her to the port of Salalah in Oman. On Wednesday reported RIA Novosti news agency, citing the press service of Defense Ministry.

Second example: the totally-totally!-benign deployment of Russian ships to Gaza:

“The detachment of combat ships of the Black Sea Fleet, including the Guards missile cruiser Moskva, the patrol ship Smetliviy, large landing ships Novocherkassk and Saratov, the sea tug MB-304 and the big sea tanker Ivan Bubnov, got the order to remain in the designated area of the Eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea for a possible evacuation of Russian citizens from the area of the Gaza strip in case of escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict”, the spokesperson said.

I swear to God, every freaking time I read a headline about deployment of Russian Navy vessels, I ask: “Is there a salvage tug bobbing along after the cruiser or destroyer or whatever?”  And every freaking time I click the link, the answer is: “YES!”

Sorry.  It just cracks me up.

When the Petreaus resignation originally broke my take was that the administration had tried to blackmail him into backing up its official line on Benghazi, but he had refused and resigned instead.  That seemed courageous.

I am now of a different opinion.  Given the lack of concrete information, this is speculative, but my current speculations run as follows.

First, the Benghazi and Petreaus-Broadwell strands of the story were and are for the most part completely independent, and that the administration didn’t use the latter to try to dragoon Petreaus to stay on the reservation regarding the former.

My take is that AG Holder and FBI Director Mueller would have just sat on the investigation of Broadwell and Petraues hadn’t the wacked out FBI agent gone telling tales to Congressmen.  They didn’t really care about Petraeus’s personal life, and judged that it was not a security threat.  Once the story had escaped into the wild, however, all bets were off.  They definitely managed it so that it would not go viral until after the election, but I now doubt that Petreaus’s resignation and the revelations had anything to do with his impending Benghazi testimony.  They just didn’t want his resignation to create turmoil immediately before the election.

(And by the way.  Why in hell did the FBI even care about some nasty emails sent to some diva?  If you or I received some “back off, varmit” emails, and went to the FBI, would they really launch a full-scale federal investigation?)

Second, insofar as Benghazi is concerned, it is evident that the annex in that city was engaged in a variety of highly sensitive covert activities.  For one, attempting to scoop up weapons that could flow to Islamists/terrorists, in Syria and elsewhere.  (Note: those who believe that the CIA was smuggling guns to the Syrian opposition are logically challenged.  They “reason” as follows: 1. The CIA was collecting weapons in Benghazi.  2. Weapons were shipped from Libya to Islamic extremists in Syria.  Ergo, 3. The CIA was shipping weapons from Libya to Islamic extremists in Syria.  Er, no.  It’s far more plausible that concerns about weapons going to Islamists in Syria and elsewhere caused the CIA to try to stem the flow, and that’s what they were doing in Benghazi.)  For another, there are reports from Jennifer Griffin claiming that “multiple sources” confirm that the CIA was holding prisoners at the Benghazi annex.  Indeed, Broadwell made the same claim in a speech at the University of Denver on the same day Griffin first made a rather ambiguous reference to prisoners at the site: interestingly, this was after Broadwell had been questioned by the FBI. (Warning shot across the bows of the administration? Dunno, but this can’t be coincidental.)

Evidently, the CIA was trying desperately to get the people it held there out of the facility.  Given the events that transpired, this is totally understandable.  The facility was obviously terribly vulnerable.

There is considerable outrage over Petraeus’s testimony before the Joint Intelligence Committee, during which he allegedly endorsed the MoVid story.  Take note: the source of this information is a statement by a member of the committee, not a video or transcript of Petreaus’s testimony.  Thus, people are jumping to conclusions regarding the entirety of Petreaus’s testimony.

Take this with considerable skepticism.  Here’s what makes most sense to me.  Revelations about the activities at the annex would have been explosive, especially given that they would have been in violation of an Obama executive order.  A secret CIA facility would also have been an obvious target for attack, especially if it was interfering with the operations of local jihadis, and was indeed holding some prisoner. Meaning that a failure to anticipate an attack, or to be prepared for it, would have been extremely embarrassing.

So my conjecture is that Petraeus gave a frank appraisal of what happened, and what the CIA was doing in Benghazi.  He and the Committee agreed that this could not be disclosed, so they went with the story du jour-the MoVid-to obscure the inconvenient truth.  Given that this is a joint committee, such an understanding could explain the bipartisan efforts to paint Broadwell as a crazed seducer/stalker, rather than a smart and distinguished USMA grad, triathlete, and Harvard PhD.  (I won’t hold the WooPoo and Harvard connections against her.)

As an aside, Krauthammer’s claim that Petraeus gave misleading testimony (a) in order to support the administration line, because (b) the administration had him in a compromised position, doesn’t make sense, precisely because of the evidence Krauthammer cites to support it.  Krauthammer cites in support of this view the fact that Patreaus’s alleged testimony (which again, we have only been told about by an Intel Committee member) diverged from that of Panetta.  But this story would require that Panetta was going rogue, because that is the only reason he would have diverged from the administration line.

So where does this leave us?  Well, we should leave the Petreaus-Broadwell story behind.  This should be about Benghazi first, last, and foremost.   In particular, if the CIA was running some highly sensitive operations out of the annex there, the lack of preparations for an attack become even more outrageously negligent.   The place was in Indian country, and if the reports are correct, it was doing things that were highly inconvenient to the jihadi Indians in the neighborhood.  Meaning that an attack was likely, not merely possible.  Further meaning that the facility should have had better defenses, and more importantly, robust backup at the ready.  But none was at hand, with fatal results.

This situation demands thorough Congressional audit-which in turn demands Petreaus’s testimony.  The outcome could be explosive, because it potentially implicates Obama’s actions in Libya going back into 2011, and because it could reveal that the Candidate Who Ran on Closing Gitmo (and who issued an EO banning detentions) is the President Who Perpetuates the Policies of the Evil Bush.

Prior to the election, I feared that the worst outcome would be that Benghazi would not be resolved before 11/6; that Obama would win; and that his second term would be consumed by a bruising battle over the  festering issues of the before, during, and after of 9/11/12.  Immediately after the election, I believed that would not in fact happen, because it appeared that the Republicans were content to bury the matter in the aftermath of their bruising defeat.  Now I think it is a very real possibility, though it will unfold in a way that I-nobody, actually, could have anticipated before Petreaus’s resignation.

Another long, national nightmare?  It could be.

An Iranian SU-25 tried-unsuccessfully-to down a US MQ-1 Predator in international airspace in the Persian Gulf. This information was not released at the time, November 1, because the Predator was on a highly classified mission.  But the news comes out today, 2 days after the election.  What, did the mission suddenly become less sensitive in the last 8 days?  Was there some discontinuity that occurred on, say, late-Tuesday night?  Wonder what that could be.

In another strange coincidence, on Wednesday morning Boeing announced large layoffs as part of a massive restructuring of its defense division.  Recall that Lockheed had faded its plans to layoff 123,000 workers until after the election under pressure from the administration.

OK.  Back to Benghazi.  Two major stories.

The first is the mystery of Obama’s actions-hell, his location-on the afternoon and evening of 9/11.  The Pentagon has told its story.  The CIA has given us its explanation.  The White has given us . . . the execrable flack David Axelrod (whom I’ve been onto since living in Hyde Park in the ’80s).  Axelrod assures us that Obama did everything that could be done:

David Axelrod was asked this morning on Fox News Sunday about the decision not to deploy military forces to Benghazi the evening of September 11. His response: “The president convened the top military officials that evening and told them to do whatever was necessary and they took the steps that they thought, they took every step they could take.”

But as the Weekly Standard notes, Obama’s involvement in all this was quite peripheral: certainly the White House has provide no evidence whatsoever of Obama’s continued involvement with the decision making (in the way that it has tried to tout his involvement in the OBL raid):

What did or didn’t the president do on the evening of September 11?

The White House has chosen not to answer questions. One has to presume we’d have answers by now if those answers showed a president engaged in managing the crisis. If President Obama had convened meetings, if he had called senior State Department or Defense Department or CIA officials to the White House, if he had held a teleconference from the situation room, one has to assume we would know about it. One therefore has to assume he did none of these things.

Here’s what we know the president did on the evening of September 11. After returning to the White House, he seems to have presided over a previously scheduled 5:00 p.m. meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey. Apparently the ongoing situation in Benghazi was one topic discussed. It was at this meeting, one assumes—”the minute I found out what was happening,” as Obama has said—that the president gave his “directive” to “make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to.” There seems to be no actual written record of this directive, so it was presumably a spoken directive to Secretary Panetta and national security adviser Tom Donilon (who, one assumes, was at that meeting as well).

That meeting went until about 6:00 p.m. About an hour later, President Obama placed a call to Prime Minister Netanyahu designed to dampen down the political flap over his refusal to meet with the prime minister at the upcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting. That call went from about 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., and was followed by a press release giving a read-out of the call. So the president was presumably doing nothing about Benghazi during that stretch.

After that … nothing. There’s no evidence the president did anything more than get occasional updates from Tom Donilon or other White House staff. On Fox News Sunday, David Axelrod said of the president, “Every conversation that needed to be had was being had between him and his top security officials” and “he was talking to them well into the night.” The formulation suggests the president was talking on the phone with White House staffers rather than meeting with them in person, and it suggest a president who was being updated rather than a president in charge.

The reticence of the Most Transparent Administration of Leakers in History is pretty telling.

The second revelation is the release of perviously unseen video of a Sixty Minutes interview with Obama on 9/12-hours after the attack and mere minutes after his appearance in the Rose Garden discussing the assault.  In the interview, Obama pointedly refused to characterize the attack as terrorism.

This raises serious questions about CBS.  Why was this tape released only now, at the last minute before the election, and then just by posting it unobtrusively on the CBS website?

This portion of the video would have been particularly newsworthy, and relevant to the public’s deliberations about the election, in the immediate aftermath of the second debate when Obama (with sick-making cheerleading from Candy Crowley) claimed he had called the attack terrorism in his Rose Garden remarks.

Did CBS give the White House control over what portions of the interview would be released?  If not, why did CBS sit on this crucial information until it was too late to matter?

That last question is rhetorical.  I know the answer.

In a revealing display of the inverted reality that characterizes the New York Times, it has a story that blames the confusion surrounding Benghazi on CIA Director David Patraeus’s “quieter style.” Really.  I’m serious.

But since an attack killed four Americans seven weeks ago in Benghazi, Libya, his deliberately low profile, and the C.I.A.’s penchant for secrecy, have left a void that has been filled by a news media and Congressional furor over whether it could have been prevented. Rather than acknowledge the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi, Mr. Petraeus and other agency officials fought a losing battle to keep it secret, even as the events there became a point of contention in the presidential campaign.

An intelligence agency that has “a penchant for secrecy.”  Whoever heard of such a thing?  The nerve of those people!

You can read the story forwards and backwards, in English, Mandarin, Russian or Xun, and not find a single word blaming Obama or the White House or the Pentagon for “silence” that has left a “void” concerning what happened in Benghazi before, during or after 9/11.  If you’re confused, if you have questions, blame Patraeus and the CIA.

So, in TimesWorld: It is the responsibility of the unelected head of the CIA to tell the world about what it knows about what happened in Benghazi, but the elected chief executive-and Commander in Chief (I know he is! I’ve seen the bomber jacket!)-has no such responsibility, even though he is ultimately responsible for the decisions made.  Or not made.

Got it. Supersecret intel agencies should tell all.  Presidents can keep mum, especially those who preside over The Most Transparent Administration Ever.

But we haven’t mined all the comedy gold in this vein!  Times reporter Scott Shane contrasts Patraeus’s quiet style with that of his predecessor, the “effusive” Leon Panetta, now defense secretary.

Uhm, with the exception of his BS formulation of the Panetta Doctrine (Don’t Commit Forces If There is Any Uncertainty), Leon the Effusive has suddenly morphed into Leon the Dumb.  Why, pray tell, has moving from the CIA to the Defense Department suddenly caused Leon to lose his voice?  Why isn’t Formerly Effusive Leon being criticized for leaving a “void” that sows “confusion” on Benghazi?

And we haven’t even gotten to the King of the Personal Pronoun who loves the sound of his own voice, but now is suffering from episodic laryngitis which apparently just interferes with his ability to say “Benghazi.”

There are other nuggets of idiocy in this article in about every paragraph.  I encourage you to read it for a sick laugh, but the silliest stuff attributes Patraeus’s alleged PR missteps to his military background.  The most idiotic comment comes from the smarter of California’s two senators (as scary as that is):

“I think he’s a brilliant man, but he’s also a four-star general,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Four-stars are saluted, not questioned. He’s now running an agency where everything is questioned, whether you’re a four-star or a senator. It’s a culture change.”

Er, as I remember it, he was a pretty effective spokesman-on and off the record-when he was a four-star.  He routinely testified in front of Congress and appeared in the media.  I also remember that he took tremendous crap from assorted politicians.  Want to talk questioning?  His patriotism was questioned by Senator Feinstein’s party and Move On fellow travelers: remember the disgusting “Patreaus=Betray Us” campaign?  As I recall, even Hillary joined in on that.   (And a quick web search confirms that at the very least she weaseled and pointedly refused to distance herself from that scurrilous campaign.  To her credit, Feinstein did, voting to condemn the Move On ad-Hillary did not vote to condemn it.)

If you want to see the distilled essence of the New York Times, read this piece. Political hackery dressed up as erudite analysis.  An Obama creature willing to peddle the most outrageous reality-challenged inanity in order to cover for its liege lord.

Multiple stories provide a magical timeline from Benghazi on 9/11/12 intended to exculpate Obama from any responsibility for what went on.

Examples include Reuters, Bloomberg, the WSJ.  I could go on.  After being a non-subject for days, all of a sudden Benghazi is THE STORY for the MSM.  Because now they have a narrative that absolves their hero from blame.

Except it doesn’t.  At all.

The basic story is that the CIA made heroic efforts to save Ambassador Stevens and the rest of the US people in Benghazi.  But their efforts failed.

And Obama is not responsible for that failure:

Responding to accusations aired on Fox News and picked up elsewhere that officials in Washington had refused to approve military strikes or rescue efforts, the official said no one in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA or any other organization second-guessed decisions made in Benghazi, and there were no orders to anyone providing support to stand down.

Such bullshit.  First, no one credible has accused anyone of second guessing decisions made in Benghazi.  Straw man.  Second.  Stipulating the negative (there were NO orders to stand down), what was the affirmative?  That is, what WERE the orders from the WH?

We read paragraph after paragraph about what the CIA did.  We read nothing about what Obama did-or didn’t do.

This is like Where’s Waldo: Where’s Obama?  Isn’t that kind of the point?

Seriously.  Where was he?  Simple question.  No need for an investigation.  Could be answered instantly.

But no. We get these stories about the CIA.  We get the tragedy, but the prince is nowhere to be found.

Remind me again.  Do we have a Defense Department?  A military?  What was the DOD, the military, doing when the CIA was trying desperately to improvise?   Did they do nothing?  That’s what the stories imply.  If they did nothing-why?

I’m waiting for the answers.  MSM-not so much.  Their curiosity has apparently been slaked by this revelation.

When you testify in court, the oath says “Do you swear to tell the truth, the WHOLE TRUTH, and nothing but the truth?”  This is not the whole truth.  It is a selective, quarter truth at best.  It leaves out the most important participants and details.  And partial truths can be more misleading that outright falsehoods.

As is the case here.

I said before this is meant to be exculpatory.  Stipulating for a moment-I know, I know-that it is the whole truth, it is anything but exculpatory.  Because if the only thing that was happening was that the CIA was improvising to retrieve a desperate situation that was careening from bad to worse, that means that Barack Obama was MIA.  He did nothing.  He left it to the CIA and did not strain every muscle to bring to bear every element of US military power that could possibly have saved some of those who died.

So, the choice tonight is: (1) Barack Obama was MIA, and sat by passively and left it to the CIA to deal with a total clusterf*ck, or (2) he consciously decided not to deploy US military assets to attempt to retrieve the situation.

Either way: Derelict in his duty as Commander in Chief.  And BTW, I know he’s CIC because “Barack Obama, Commander in Chief” is embroidered in a patch on that butch bomber jacket he’s donned of late.

The narrative-obviously pushed by the White House-contains some interesting facts intended to be exculpatory, but which are really anything but.  For instance, the Super Secret Source denies that the mortars that eventually killed the two ex-SEAL CIA people had been laser designated by anyone in the annex.  But SSS does acknowledge that the the defenders of the complex DID point a laser at some attackers.  Which means that there were eyes on the enemy.  Expert, trained eyes.  Which blows to hell Panetta’s “no real time intel” defense.

I said before that the CIA people were improvising-valiantly so.  Tragically so.  How’s this for improvisation?:

The officers attempted to rally local support to reinforce militiamen hired to guard the compound and obtain heavier weapons, and when they were unable to do so within minutes, they still risked their lives by going to the aid of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues in the main part of the compound, the official said.

What?  They’re under attack, and they have to approach the locals and say: “Hey, can I borrow that 50 cal?”  Seriously? (Locals, by the way, that were highly likely to be in sympathy with the attackers.)

And think a moment about the import of “rally local support.”  Is that like, I dunno, community organizing?  That sounds right down Obama’s alley.  But again . . . he’s nowhere to be found.  Where’s a crack community organizer when you need one?

It gets worse:

U.S. military, landed at the Benghazi airport, where they began negotiating for transportation into town.

So, the most powerful military in the world is reduced to negotiating for heavy weapons and transportation from the locals while its people are under attack.

There are three parts to the Benghazi story.  The criminal negligence in preparation.  The actions at the time of the attack.  The coverup afterwards.

The image of Americans under attack negotiating under fire for weapons and transport speaks volumes about the complete lack of preparation.  The fact that the response to the attack appears limited to local improvisation has damning implications for the actions of Obama and the DOD at the time of the attack.  This incomplete story is a part of the coverup.

In other words, this story hits the trifecta.

In sum.  This is intended to absolve Obama from any responsibility.  To focus attention on the CIA.

But Obama’s absence from the story only begs the question of what he was actually doing at the time.  Again: What did he know? When did he know it? What did he do about it.

The stories answer the second question: the DOD and WH were informed of the attack around 4PM ET.  Other than that, Obama’s actions or inactions are a complete and utter mystery.

A mystery that could be solved instantaneously, and a mystery that a real media would be demanding to solve.

But not ours.  After ignoring Benghazi for days when numerous leaks portrayed Obama in a very damning light, they now all trip over themselves to run this leak-a press release, really-front and center because in their little minds it absolves Obama.

But just because he doesn’t appear in this story doesn’t mean that he’s off the hook.  If he really wasn’t a player (and no, that wasn’t a reference to his campaign buddy Jay-Z), then he was utterly derelict in his responsibilities.  If he was a player, what plays did he call?  Why?

We need to know.  Now.

PS.  Why did it take 51 days for this story to get out?  Hell, why did it take almost a week since the original allegations of a failure to act were first made for this story to appear?  Has it taken them that long to figure out what to say?  I could imagine, given the need to negotiate an official line that the WH, State, the CIA, and DOD could buy into.  And the inference that I draw from the fact that the WH and DOD are totally missing from this narrative is that they are hiding because they have something to hide.

The lame-and anonymous-defense of the failure to come to the defense of those under assault in Benghazi continues.  Yesterday another anonymous official (or the same-how could we know) offered this condescending justification of the failure to dispatch an armed drone to Benghazi at the height of the attack:

“While some may think that armed drones could have made a difference in Benghazi, that’s altogether unclear,” a senior defense official tells Fox News. “You need good intelligence to drive the use of armed drones. It’s not like you can just send hellfire missiles into a relatively crowded area when you don’t know precisely where the enemy is.”

One big problem with this ex post rationalization.  The drone dispatched was unarmed.  Dispatching it armed with Hellfires would have preserved the option to use them if that Predator, or other sensors, or other sources of information, or the ex-SEALs on the spot had provided precise information on where the enemy was.  Indeed, there are reports that one of the people defending the consulate annex was in fact designating targets with a laser.

But by putting up the Predator with no weapon on board, that information could not have been acted on.  Whoever dispatched that drone made it impossible to use it to attack the enemy.  We were unarmed-and hence unable to act if the information to use the arms came into our possession-by choice.

In other words, whoever ordered that Predator to be dispatched unarmed wasn’t going to take yes for an answer.

And a question.  This administration uses drones to launch attacks quite promiscuously, and brags about it.   There have been civilian casualties that have resulted from these attacks.  They have, at times, made attacks on “relatively crowded areas” in Yemen and Pakistan.  What’s different about those cases?

Returning to the “we didn’t receive any requests for aid,” there are leaked reports that those on the ground in Benghazi were “begging for help.”  That makes sense: it makes no sense that those under attack wouldn’t be screaming for help, though that’s merely a common sense inference.  I of course have no idea whether it’s  true  that there are recordings of their pleas.  There is a leak war going on, with anonymous sources exchanging fire.

Obama says he is all about ending wars.  Well, this is a war that Obama could end in an instant, by telling us what he knew and what he did, and ordering others to do the same.

But instead, The Most Transparent Administration in History (TM) in history is doing Nixon proud.

In his televised speech announcing US military action in Libya in 2011, Obama embraced the concept of “responsibility to protect,” the doctrine that evolved post-Rwanda and post-Bosnia that the US and other nations had a responsibility to intervene to prevent humanitarian crises:

For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom.  Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges.  But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.

. . . .

Last night, NATO decided to take on the additional responsibility of protecting Libyan civilians.

. . . .

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and -– more profoundly -– our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.  Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries.  The United States of America is different.

Would that Obama’s “responsibility to protect” had extended to besieged Americans in that same country 18 months later.

An anonymous senior defense official in the Pentagon has denied that DoD rejected requests for military assistance from those under attack in Benghazi:

“The Pentagon took action by moving personnel and assets in the region shortly after it learned of the attack on the Benghazi consulate,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There was no request made for military intervention in Benghazi. To be successful, such an operation, if requested, would have required solid information about what was happening on the ground. Such clarity just wasn’t available as the attack was unfolding.”

Three comments/questions.

First, why is this coming from an anonymous source?  Why don’t Panetta or Dempsey-or Obama-make this statement in public?  If they can back that up, why don’t they say it publicly?

Second, this stretches credulity to a breaking point.  ”There was no request.”  Does this anonymous individual expect us to believe that two CIA agents who were also ex-SEALs, while defending a US government facility and numerous civilian employees against an attack by a much larger force equipped with heavy weapons would not make a request?  They just figured: “Well, we’re on our own.  Might as well not even bother asking for help.”

Spare me.  They would have been requesting help loud and clear and often.

I just find it completely incredible that they didn’t ask for help.  Assuming that they did, for the Pentagon not to receive the request, someone in the communications chain between those in Benghazi and the Pentagon would have had to have decided not to pass on the request, or there would have had to have been a communications breakdown.  I also consider these alternatives highly unlikely.

Thus, I consider it virtually impossible that there was no request.

Third, note the repetition of the “we needed more information, more clarity” theme that Panetta advanced as a military principle last week.  It’s no more plausible now that it was then.  It’s also a weasel formulation: we didn’t get a request, but if we did, we wouldn’t have responded anyways.

I called BS on this “principle” last week, and I’m not alone.  From Blackfive:

Got an email from the retired former Delta operator in the Benghazi post.  And yes, he mis-spells the SecDef’s name on purpose.

This is about doctrine, specifically the Obama Administration’s doctrine, and how it doesn’t work in the real world:

Leon Penetta is Either a Dumbass or a Liar

The Secretaryof Defense, in his most determined way, continues to try to protect the President from the fiasco in Benghazi.  So desperate to shield the President he announced what will be forever remembered as the Penetta Doctrine:

“(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, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”

Of course, in the circles that I ran with, it will be forever labeled “The Dumbest Shit I Ever Heard Doctrine”.

Exactly. But that’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.  And they will for the next 7 days.  At least.