"Spontaneous" Terrorism

Even as Libyan defence forces assigned to aid American diplomats who had come under fire at a safe house away from the American Consulate in Benghazi were insisting that the attackers were co-ordinated and very well armed and effective, killing two U.S. military personnel during the attack away from the consulate, the U.S. State Department was going on endlessly about a mob offended by an anti-Muslim video.

There was the first-hand account of a Libyan general at the scene, a man who had been abducted a day earlier by Islamists then released, who had himself warned of the presence of Islamists whose goal was to attack the American consulate.  His account disagreed wildly with that of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The White House must have engaged in its own instantaneous interpretation of what had occurred, knowing it was about to come back and kick them in the head.  They persisted in declaring that the attack was an unfortunate side-effect of mass protests in the Muslim world against an American-Egyptian Copt-produced film mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

It would be only a matter of time before it was revealed how spectacularly the State Department had failed in heeding its own intelligence reports and the reports coming out of the Libyan Embassy courtesy of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, fearful of reports that al-Qaeda was preparing to attack, and pleading for additional security measures to be put in place.

It was not just he who asked for additional security.  Each such request was turned down as unrequired, even as the anniversary of 9/11 loomed.  It was an issue of gross incompetence in a security area that was unforgiving of neglect and incompetence, yet this administration's cavalier dismissal of intelligence and an ambassador's plea led to the disaster that followed.

"I made the best decisions I could with the information I had", claimed Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary for diplomatic security of her decision to decline approval of additional U.S. security.  The State Department had turned to training Libyans to protect the consulate, insisting they would perform as well as Americans.  In the event, they fled the violence.

"Yes sir" she responded when asked directly, "I said personally I would not support it [the requests for additional security].  "We were training local Libyans and army men" for security services reflecting a policy brought in to U.S diplomatic facilities world 'round.  This response did not sit well with Lt.-Col. Wood who headed a 16-member military force in Libya.

His own troops' skills, he insisted were "way above the skill level of local [forces] armed with a pistol.  We were fighting a losing battle, we weren't even allowed to keep what we had", he testified in disagreement with the State Department.  And he was more than vigorously supported by the top security official in Libya earlier in the year.

Eric Nordstrom testified "There was no plan and it was hoped it would get better."  It was, moreover, "abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident.  How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?"  He was so exasperated he informed a colleague that "for me the Taliban is on the inside of the building", in a classic rephrasing of setting the fox to guard the henhouse.

"There is no question that the security was not enough to prevent that tragedy from happening", intoned White House spokesman Jay Carney gravely.  This is the newly rephrased opinion of the Obama administration which formerly had denounced the Innocence of Muslims as the guilty force behind the consulate attack, condemning the video producer, not the attackers.

But it is definitely not meant as a mea culpa.