Why is it fallacious to understand that Ambassador Stevens could not have been too overtly concerned for his own personal safety on the the day and evening of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. He could have met with the Turkish ambassador on some hospital funding somewhere else much more secure.
It appears that there was quite a bit of security available a mile away at the CIA annex who cleared the compound within forty five minutes of the start of the attack. I am not saying Stevens is to blame because only the attackers are to blame as Susan Rice said. I’m saying Acewiza’s line of attack also has holes in it under just the slightest bit of scrutiny.
What do we know now? There is no careless indifference in that remark by Secretary Clinton. She has a valid point. What difference does it make if the CIA first assessed a small crowd had gathered outside the consulate compound moments before heavily armed extremists showed up and attacked. And that intelligence was found to be hastily assembled to provide talking points for Congress and the Admin. It was Congress that asked for it I believe.
So what difference does that initial assessment error by the CIA make is a very valid question that Clinton asked. I wish you could answer it rather than disparaging who asked it.
I’m sorry but you literally don’t know anything about aviation. There is so much wrong with what you just said I’m not sure where to begin. There is nothing at all required other than fuel and a crew.
being on standby doesn’t jack up the price. If it’s for charter then pilots are paid to be available to fly and useful fuel loads are maintained.
This is a rather strange thing to suggest. Do you think every plane and crew serves the same purpose? SAC pilots versus part time National Guard cargo pilots? The readiness of a plane and crew is mission specific. Some have the crew living nearby to launch on alert, some gather dust waiting on crew training schedules. And yes, I know what it takes for the military to get a plane up because I work next to them at dual-use airports. They put their pants on the same as everybody else and their readiness is certainly equal to civilian readiness if that is their purpose.
Cough, Osama Bin Laden. You are of course entitled to your opinion but that has nothing to do with readiness.
I find it odd that you think the people who defend us can’t operate an airplane as quickly as civilians do as if it’s some kind of magic.
To be fair, you could, of course take a plane off with minimal warning.
You aren’t going to have a briefed, equipped and ready special forces team with the clearance to enter a sovereign country with minimal warning, however.
It’s baffling, that you, even now, aren’t able to understand how utterly, and laughably wrong you are.
That makes no sense at all. You just made a statement about how awful it would be to put soldiers on another country’s soil. If the Chinese landed troops 10 years after 9/11 that’s OK? What’s your feelings on cruise missiles?
And why would you not be able to take off with an equipped and ready special forces team? And consider I already cited that there was an ops team who had to stand down and was pissed off by it.
You have zero understanding of aircraft, the nature of a special ops group, or the fact that we routinely bomb the fuck out of countries without filing a flight plan.
The Air Force hasn’t used the SAC designation in about 20 years.[sup]*[/sup] But please continue to share your expertise in military aviation with us.
And for that matter, when they did, SAC was mostly concerned with heavy bombers and missiles, so probably not who you’d call on to deliver a special forces team.
You must have missed the “without knowing what’s going on first” bit. The Bin Laden raid was thoroughly planned and intel’d out the arse, relied on men and materiel that were brought in from all over just to get it right, and who trained extensively for the specific mission they were about to jump into. As well, the decision not to get Pakistan in the loop on that specific one was pondered, reasoned, thought out.
You seemed to be equating both situations when they were apples and bicycles, hence my quip.
As for violating sovereignty in general, there are times where this is called for, where the goal of the mission is important enough (i.e. shooting Ben Laden). Sometimes they even ask.
It is emphatically not something that is done whenever you feel like it because America fuck yeah, my way or the highway, lead follow or get out of the way or whatever idiotic tough guy slogan you might think of right now. Especially not when you’re trying to build a friendly rapport with the new guys in charge, who happen to like you a lot right now on account of helping blowing up all of Qaddafi’s toys but could forget that in a hurry should you happen to fuck them over or blow up four blocks of a major city of theirs out of the blue.
No. No you don’t. As Neil Stephenson once wrote, the military is a machine geared to deliver large amounts of materiel over larged distances first, generate enormous amounts of paperwork second, and shooting people a distant third.
Every mission flown by the Air Force (or the Navy, Marines, whatever) has a flight plan and is planned beforehand. It might be done in a rush some times, routine a lot of others, but military assets are not just thrown blind because they happen to cost a fuckton of money. Oh, and there are, y’know, soldiers in them that might could die, too. That’s a concern, at some point of the OODA loop. Not sure which precisely, but it’s gotta be in there. I am assured of this.
The military simply doesn’t fly by the seat of its pants (not since Custer anyway :)). When men are sent into combat, they aren’t ever told “go out there in that general direction and DO SOMETHING !!!”.
You seem to have trouble grokking that notion, I’m not sure why.
After the first hour of the attack Stevens was missing and Sean Smith was dead - the other four Americans were rescued and taken to the CIA annex which had a heavy machine gun on the roof. There was a four hour lull in the fighting as Libyan heavy reinforcements and transportation were being move into Benghazi to extract the Americans as safely as possible.
The lull in the fighting was being watched by the CIA on the scene. Woods and Dougherty were killed during an eleven minute mortar barrage of four shots.
There was no defensive plan for incoming mortars or rockets, but that is on the CIA side not the State Department. Few Complaints by conservatives against what Petraeus did during this assault on CIA property.
I have been an avid supporter of Petraeus by the way. But it is a double standard accompanied by huge
Why is it fallacious to understand that Ambassador Stevens could not have been too overtly concerned for his own personal safety on the the day and evening of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. He could have met with the Turkish ambassador on some hospital funding somewhere else much more secure.
It appears that there was quite a bit of security available a mile away at the CIA annex who cleared the compound within forty five minutes of the start of the attack. I am not saying Stevens is to blame because only the attackers are to blame as Susan Rice said. I’m saying Acewiza’s line of attack also has holes in it under just the slightest bit of scrutiny.
hypocrisy that the right so strongly attacks Clinton so fiercely but are silent about the CIA role in all this.
And the CIA put the small protest at the consulate in Susan Rices talking points that she repeated verbatim.
When does biased opinion give way to a solid consideration of all the settled and confirmed facts?
What if the what ifs that rely little on facts bored people and no one bothered to ponder them? I think we’d be better off should that come to be.
There were two teams in Tripoli. One of them was sent to Benghazi, and arrived at the CIA annex just after 5 am, at which time the mortar attack began. The other team, four men under Lt Col. Gibson, were left in Tripoli to guard the embassy there. That’s the team your cite referred to, because Greg Hicks claims they were ordered not to board the plane to Benghazi, and that Gibson was upset over it.
Lt. Col. Gibson denies being told to stand down, and "acknowledged that, had he deployed to Benghazi, he would have left Americans in Tripoli undefended. He also stated that, in hindsight, he would not have been able to get to Benghazi in time to make a difference, and as it turned out, his medic was needed to provide urgent assistance to survivors once they arrived in Tripoli,” the statement said.
So, under this plan, there are four more men who reach the CIA annex at 5 am and come under mortar fire, and the embassy in Tripoli is undefended. Nothing is gained.
…firstly, you are incorrect. Secondly, knowing or not knowing about aviation is irrelevant to the cite that states it takes six hours to get a team in the air. Here’s a clue: you need more than fuel and a crew.
Being on stand by isn’t free. It costs money. And you pay much more for a charter flight than you would for a normal flight.
I didn’t suggest it. This is how your cartoon version of the US Military works. This is your suggestion.
Cough, BENGHAZI!
What on earth does your answer even mean?
I wasn’t talking about readiness. Chinese citizens were killed in a terrorist attack on US soil. Would you object to the Chinese dropping troops and Armoured Personal Carriers into New York City to protect its citizens and its embassy?
As you have just explained: charter flights are different from armed extraction missions. A charter flight just has to have a pilot available to fly and make sure useful fuel loads are maintained. It isn’t just about “getting the bird in the air.” You are dropping troops into another country. The things you need to do in order to do that take longer then half an hour, unless of course you use some kind of magic.
Why are you ignoring the cite I gave in which the commander of the special ops team you keep talking about told the House Armed Services Committee that it turned out better that he and his team stayed in Tripoli? It’s like you are intentionally ignoring facts as they are presented to you.
Then why don’t you send a message to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a career aviator, and explain to him that he’s fucking it all up; because he, too, says that the emergency response force must be in the air in six hours. I’m sure General Amos, with his 42 years of military and flying experience, really needs to be straightened out by a guy on the Internet who says that he’s doin’ it wrong.
:rolleyes: doesn’t change anything I said. Some aircraft are on standby and some are not. The difference is whether or not a crew is available. If the United States was attacked do you think the response time is 6 hrs? Every military base would be ashes before a plane got off the ground. The response time is measured in minutes, not hours. The mission in Benghazi would have been pretty straight forward. Insert as soon as possible and extract the people under attack.
Why would I have to call up the Marines and question their mission specs? 6 hrs is their call up response time for this group within the marines. They are not a strategic bombing group, or a heavy lift group or an engineering group. All operate under different mission statements and response times.
Wait – which is it again? That military bases ought to be able to launch aircraft within 30 minutes because that’s how your charter company works; or 6 hours is okay because that’s within the requirement?
And are you ever going to acknowledge that the commander of the special ops group you’ve mentioned several times in this thread actually testified that it was better that he stayed in Tripoli? Because it seems like you’re pretending that he never said that.