The Secretary of Defence told Obama that the American consulate in Benghazi was under attack.
Then: Nothing.
By William Kristol and Peter Wehner
We've both had the honor to work in the White House.
We've seen presidents, vice presidents, chiefs of staff and national
security advisers during moments of international crisis. We know that
in these moments human beings make mistakes. There are failures of
communication and errors of judgment. Perfection certainly isn't the
standard to which policy makers should be held.
But there are standards. If Americans are under attack, presidential
attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president
must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On
Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya,
President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and
commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.
President Barack Obama shakes hands with outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Thanks to the congressional testimony
of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey late last week, we know they met with
President Obama on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. in a pre-scheduled meeting, when
they informed the president about the attack on the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi. The meeting lasted about a half-hour. Mr. Panetta said they
spent roughly 20 minutes of the session briefing the president on the
chaos at the American Embassy in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi, which
eventually cost the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, security
personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean
Smith.
Secretary Panetta said the president
left operational details, including determination of what resources were
available to help the Americans under siege, "up to us." We also
learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr.
Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed,
Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at
all with anyone in the White House that evening—or, for that matter,
with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
That's not all we discovered. We now
know that despite Gen. Dempsey having been informed of Ambassador
Stevens's repeated warnings about the rise of terrorist elements in
Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to
possible trouble. It also seems that during the actual attacks in
Benghazi, which the administration followed in real time and which
lasted for some eight hours, not a single major military asset was
deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.
And we learned one other thing: Messrs.
Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a
terrorist attack. This didn't prevent President Obama, Secretary
Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice
from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that
followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said
there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the
violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to
ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the
nation afterward.
Why the deception? Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the
true account of events undercut the president's claim during the
campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the
killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what
happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president
and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by
Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not
only didn't convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn't even
bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans
under attack.
This is an embarrassment and a
disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately
ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night? And that he has
resolved, and instructed his senior staff, to take care that he not be
derelict in his duty as commander in chief ever again?
Mr. Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, served
in the George H.W. Bush White House. Mr. Wehner, senior fellow at the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the George W. Bush White
House.
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