During her 2008 primary campaign for president against Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton ran a TV commercial that implied that she had more experience than Obama to answer a crucial call at 3 AM to confront a foreign policy crisis. It turns out that when one of those phone calls actually came in the middle of the night from Benghazi, Libya, apparently neither Obama nor Clinton were around to answer the phone.
In testimony a U.S. Senate committee this week, departing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta claimed he had no contact at all with either Obama or Clinton during the critical hours when Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans were killed on Sept. 11th.
Neither the secretary of defense nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke to the secretary of state during the 8-hour attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. At a Thursday hearing in the Senate, Republican Ted Cruz of Texas asked both Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, "In between 9:42 p.m., Benghazi time, when the first attacks started, and 5:15 am, when Mr. Doherty and Mr. Woods lost their lives, what converations did either of you have with Secretary Clinton?"
"We did not have any conversations with Secretary Clinton," Panetta responded.
"And General Dempsey, the same is true for you?" Cruz asked. Dempsey confirmed this.
Panetta says that the night of 9/11, he did not communicate with a single person at the White House. The attack resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.Obama did not call or communicate in any way with the defense secretary that night. There were no calls about what was going on in Benghazi. He never called to check-in.
Panetta said he had a pre-scheduled briefing with Obama at 5 PM on Sept. 11 and both the consultate in Benghazi and a mob around the Embassy in Cairo were discussed but Obama left operational details "up to us." The kindest interpretation of this fantastic tale from Panetta is that either he is telling whoppers or Obama was beyond derelict in his own duties. A cabinet officer, even as high ranking as the Secretary of Defense, is not at the very top of the chain of command and he does not get to decide by himself whether or not to call in military force or to violate the air space of another country to save American lives. So the "up to us" fantasy is a non-starter. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was so concerned about the safety of her people in Benghazi that she never called Panetta or the CIA to check in during the night?
Something about Benghazi has never added up. First Obama tried to blame an anti-Islamic movie on You Tube for weeks and only very late in the game acknowledged that the attack on the Behghazi consultate was an pre-medidated organized terror attack. Obama promised internal investigations would get to the bottom of what happened but that never happened until Congress got involved. Now that we have official testimony on the record from both Clinton and Panetta, it is almost impossible to believe the testimony describes what actually happened. Clinton has now already abandoned her post and Panetta leaves today. How convenient.
