It's beside the point that the above video, which John Batchelor features in his latest post (Benghazi and the Swing States) is a political ad. The ex-special forces men who speak are describing the debacle that is today's America's military and civilian command -- an issue that goes far beyond the U.S, presidential election and any one political party.
Read Belmont Club's October 27 Paranormal to understand how the Obama administration has been replacing the role of Commander-in-Chief with Assassin-in-Chief. Building on Greg Miller's extremely unsettling October 23 investigative report for the Washington Post (Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists), BC's Richard Fernandez takes the reader by the hand and gently explains that the Star Chamber approach to dealing with America's enemies has pretty much replaced the concept of war, which places the burden of defending Americans on the President and various unelected White House officials.
As to how the Star Chamber approach has been working out, this October 26 report from the Washington Post about the reign of terror militant Islamists have established in eastern Libya will get you in the ballpark fast. But moving along, the U.S. Department of Defense has been philosophical about learning that war is obsolete, as witness SecDef Leon Panetta's answer when asked during his October 25 press briefing about why there wasn't a military response during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi:
We -- we quickly responded, as General Dempsey said, in terms of deploying forces to the region. We had FAST platoons in the region. We had ships that we had deployed off of Libya. And we were prepared to respond to any contingency and certainly had forces in place to do that.Perhaps unfortunately for General Ham he said something that flatly contradicted Mr Panetta's statement. He told a U.S. Member of Congress, Jason Chaffetz, about two weeks before Mr Panetta presser that he hadn't been consulted. Rep. Chaffetz said on Fox News Sean Hannity show on Friday night that Gen. Ham told him that "nobody asked him to deploy military forces to Benghazi."
But -- but the basic principle here -- 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. And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, General Ham, General Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.
In other words Gen. Ham, the head of AFRICOM, who is also the military's top expert on the situation in Libya, was not consulted about whether forces should be placed "at risk" in that situation. Or rather he was the head of AFRICOM; on October 18 President Obama nominated Army Gen. David Rodriguez, who "was the key architect of the successful campaign plan that we are now implementing [in Afghanistan]” as Mr Panetta explained, to replace him.
Actually the basic principle of war is that you throw everything you can into a fight when the lives of those you're sworn to protect are on the line. By adhering to the principle, former Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Chris Doherty were the crucial factor in saving almost 40 Americans from being massacred during the Benghazi attack -- even though they had to disobey repeated commands from the CIA to stand down.
Woods and Doherty were killed while defending those Americans but they didn't go down without fighting until their very last breaths, as eyewitnesses and sources who spoke with the witnesses told Jennifer Griffin. In her latest investigative report for Fox on the Benghazi attack (to be rebroadcast tonight at 10 PM EDT), she said the witnesses told her:
The machine gun that Woods and Doherty shared on the roof of the annex was caked with their blood while they kept firing, even after they were hit.
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