This is news to me but may not be news in regard to Benghazi:
Pentagon Press Secretary George Little confirmed this account to reporters on Wednesday. The decision was made because it was believed "there was nothing this team could have done to assist during the second attack in Benghazi."
In an interview with RealClearDefense, a Pentagon spokesman elaborated on the rationale behind the order to remain in place.
Immediately following the second attack in Benghazi at approximately 5:15 a.m., U.S. personnel quickly made their way to the airport having realized their original position was vulnerable. According to DOD spokesman Maj. Robert Firman, all remaining U.S. personnel from the Benghazi compound were at the city's airport before the C-130 flight was to leave Tripoli sometime around 6 a.m.
If this timeline is true (and I have no reason to doubt it)--and if it is true that authorities really knew that the crisis was over--then this team really couldn't have made it in time for any potential missions.
This does not address my concerns over why we didn't march (or fly) to the sounds of the guns when the crisis broke--and which the State Department's tiny reaction force in Libya did (to the shame of the military people told not to go)--in case the crisis dragged out longer. I am confident that the consulate was toast and nothing we could have done once the attack started could have saved the situation. But the annex held out longer.
Let's be clear. We had no way of knowing overnight that the annex people would escape in the morning, yet we did nothing.
After 8 months of denying there is any issue with Benghazi, the media is starting to sense something is wrong. But they still don't have it right (tip to Instapundit):
There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come to haunt Hillary Clinton, the first Secretary of State to lose an ambassador in the field in more than three decades, if she runs for president in 2016.
But the obvious Republican effort to turn this inquiry into the Democratic (Obama) version of the Iraq intelligence scandal that has tarred the GOP since the George W. Bush years -- led by that least-credible of champions, the almost-always-wrong Darrell Issa -- is just not going to amount to much.
One, the fact that the cover up has been transparently wrong doesn't mean there wasn't an attempt to cover up the fact that terrorists struck us on 9/11/2012 by claiming there was a spontaneous (and justifiable!) violent reaction to a crappy Internet trailer of a crappy Internet movie that nobody in the Middle East ever saw.
Two, my main concern isn't that there was incompetence on display. My main concern is that when we sent nothing, what was displayed was a politically calculated refusal to act like we are at war with jihadi killers when jihadi killers inconveniently attacked our diplomatic (and CIA) outposts in Benghazi.
This is really perplexing to me given that our president--to his credit--is not shy about killing jihadis with drone strikes. Was Benghazi yet more collateral damage from his adminsitration's efforts to make those drone strikes a domestic law enforcement issue?
Our enemies haven't stopped waging war on us. We tried to hide our eyes from that fact and it didn't work in Benghazi--or Boston, for that matter. That's another difference, at this point, that figuring out what happened matters to all of us.
