Obama Ducks Questions On Denying Help To Benghazi
“We can say with confidence that the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi,” CIA spokesperson Jennifer Youngblood said today in response to reports that CIA agents at the embassy were demanding help throughout the attack. “Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”
That’s an interesting phrasing. Nobody at the CIA told the personnel in Benghazi to stand down. So if the CIA didn’t, then who made the call?
Something to remember as President Obama tonight, in response to questions about why help wasn’t sent, makes it sound like he wasn’t made aware of the attack in a timely manner.
“Well, we are finding out exactly what happened,” the president again said. “I can tell you, as I’ve said over the last couple of months since this happened, the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we’re going to investigate exactly what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can bring them to justice. And I guarantee you that everyone in the state department, our military, the CIA, you name it, had number one priority making sure that people were safe. These were our folks and we’re going to find out exactly what happened, but what we’re also going to do it make sure that we are identifying those who carried out these terrible attacks.”
Obama’s re-election campaign has made much of his foreign policy prowess, but undermining that directly is Obama’s claims not to have been aware of the situation in Libya. Isn’t that exactly the sort of “3am phone call” Obama said he was ready to handle when he was first elected?
Apparently the phone was ringing, but he wasn’t answering.
Tags: Barack Obama, benghazi, election 2012, libya
