U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens Declined Security In Benghazi

[Straight Shooter]

U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens — one of the four people killed in the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack at in the U.S. post in Benghazi, Libya — twice declined a senior U.S. military official’s offer to have added security assistance, according to a McClatchy News report.

McClatchy News reported Tuesday that two unnamed government officials told them that it’s still unclear why Stevens would turn down the offer.

In the weeks before the attack, Stevens met in Germany with Army Gen. Carter Ham, then-head of the U.S. Africa Command, and Ham told Stevens he could provide him more military security. But Stevens declined the offer.

“He didn’t say why. He just turned it down,” an unnamed defense official told McClatchy.

Conservatives have heavily criticized President Barack Obama’s administration — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — for their handling of the Benghazi attack, in part because of what they say was a lack of security at the post.

One of the most outspoken critics, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), told McClatchy that he found it “odd” that Stevens wouldn’t want additional military assets.

“That is odd to me because Stevens requested from the State Department additional security four times, and there was an 18-person special forces security team headed by Lt. Col. Wood that Gen. Ham signed off on that the State Department said no to,” Graham told McClatchy.

He added: “The records are very clear that people on the ground in Libya made numerous requests for additional security that were either denied or only partially granted.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/report-stevens-declined-security-91406.html

I'd be really interested to know why he turned down the security.

 

[xfire]

I remember hearing this soon after the attack happened and it was explained something along the lines of it wasn't Chris Steven's style to hide behind walls, that he was a "hands on" kind of ambassador, and that he felt his work was to be out among the people. Makes sense, it's a shame these right-wing clowns are politicizing the tragedy of his death.

 

[Philbert]

I remember hearing this soon after the attack happened and it was explained something along the lines of it wasn't Chris Steven's style to hide behind walls, that he was a "hands on" kind of ambassador, and that he felt his work was to be out among the people. Makes sense, it's a shame these right-wing clowns are politicizing the tragedy of his death.

Well, Bozo, maybe since there were numerous requests for additional security made before (everyone notice how these are completely forgotten by Misfire the Clown?) and this one example is hearsay from other people, could it be that security and a garrison of troops would be different, onsite security forces can be there but not an in your face military presence.
It seems so easy for you agenda driven clowns to quickly throw away large amounts of data and seize on 1 instance of an ambiguous reported conversation and immediately pass off the Benghazi Fuckup/Coverup as Right Wing conspiracy. Seems the needs of the weak and lame transcend the truth.

“That is odd to me because Stevens requested from the State Department additional security four times, and there was an 18-person special forces security team headed by Lt. Col. Wood that Gen. Ham signed off on that the State Department said no to,” Graham told McClatchy.

 

[xfire]

Well, Bozo, maybe since there were numerous requests for additional security made before (everyone notice how these are completely forgotten by Misfire the Clown?) and this one example is hearsay from other people, could it be that security and a garrison of troops would be different, onsite security forces can be there but not an in your face military presence.
It seems so easy for you agenda driven clowns to quickly throw away large amounts of data and seize on 1 instance of an ambiguous reported conversation and immediately pass off the Benghazi Fuckup/Coverup as Right Wing conspiracy. Seems the needs of the weak and lame transcend the truth.

Still mad for getting repeatedly kicked in the nuts, eh? Still no response as to who you voted for.

 

[Philbert]

Still mad for getting repeatedly kicked in the nuts, eh? Still no response as to who you voted for.

Like you've been waiting forever for my reply? Poor baby...
Asshole, I'm not telling you who I did or didn't vote for, giving you my cell number, or my bank account number. Maybe if you hold your breath until I do tell you?

I've never been kicked there, but I see you are still fixated on me as a homosexual love interest. Once again, there are places on FOs where you will find willing gay partners. I am so not interested in your closet homoerotic fantasies.

 

[xfire]

I'm not telling you who I did or didn't vote for

Why not, ashamed? Your butthurt is shining through.

 

[Straight Shooter]

I remember hearing this soon after the attack happened and it was explained something along the lines of it wasn't Chris Steven's style to hide behind walls, that he was a "hands on" kind of ambassador, and that he felt his work was to be out among the people. Makes sense, it's a shame these right-wing clowns are politicizing the tragedy of his death.

That's also what I've heard. He was doing some important work over in Libya and they kind of gave him some leeway to do his job, but some people were calling him a cowboy because he apparently put alot of people in danger because he was very "hands on"

 

[Sam Fisher]

 

[Philbert]

Why not, ashamed? Your butthurt is shining through.

Are you holding your breath? Maybe I WILL share my private info just cause you asked...

Now my butt is your main focus? Misfire, you are truly a creepy clown.

- - - Updated - - -

Even a stopped watch is right occasionally...

 

[xfire]

Are you holding your breath? Maybe I WILL share my private info just cause you asked... Now my butt is your main focus? Misfire, you are truly a creepy clown. Even a stopped watch is right occasionally...

I had forgotten all about you until you addressed me in a thread I hadn't even posted in. Uh, yeah, it's pretty apparent to anyone paying attention who is focused on whom. You're of no concern to me, but like Sam Fisher, you just keep screaming out for attention.

 

[Sam Fisher]

 

[Sam Fisher]

By the way, Obama is 45 minutes late to his Rose Garden Press Conference.

 

[xfire]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/the-scandals-are-falling-apart/

The scandals are falling apart

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.

White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.



But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.

So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be.

3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.

Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again.

The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself.

That perception, too, seems to be changing. Mike Allen’s Playbook, which is ground zero for scandal CW, led Thursday with a squib that says “the West Wing got its mojo back” and is “BACK ON OFFENSE.” Yes, the caps are in the original.

The smarter voices on the right are also beginning to counsel caution. ”While there’s still more information to be gathered and more investigations to be done, all indications are that these decisions – on the AP, on the IRS, on Benghazi – don’t proceed from [Obama],” wrote Ben Domenech in The Transom, his influential conservative morning newsletter. “The talk of impeachment is absurd. The queries of ‘what did the president know and when did he know it’ will probably end up finding out “’just about nothing, and right around the time everyone else found out.’”

I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals.

And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

 

[Sam Fisher]

boy locked in refrigerator, eats own foot

 

[Sam Fisher]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/the-scandals-are-falling-apart/

Democrats in Triage Mode on White House Scandals



http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/democrats-in-triage-mode-on-white-house-scandals-20130514

 

[xfire]

Democrats in Triage Mode on White House Scandals

How's that LANDSLIDE!!! working out for you?

 

[Philbert]

I had forgotten all about you until you addressed me in a thread I hadn't even posted in. Uh, yeah, it's pretty apparent to anyone paying attention who is focused on whom. You're of no concern to me, but like Sam Fisher, you just keep screaming out for attention.

So, you're my bitch, and come when you're called?
Got it.

Which of my manparts are you gonna post about next?

 

[Sam Fisher]

 

[Jack Davenport]

While this may be true, the question remains why is this information only being disclosed now that the heat has been turned up considerably. Seems like that is something that would have been talked about during the debates and when the incident first occurred.

 

[xfire]

So, you're my bitch, and come when you're called? Got it. Which of my manparts are you gonna post about next?

You're face is a bitch. Who did you vote for?