Did Obama Watch While They Fought for their Lives?

Did Obama Watch While They Fought for their Lives?

americanthinker.com

They fought for their lives for seven hours.  9/11/ 2012.  Benghazi. The White House watched.  No help was sent and they died. 
Four Americans died in the jihadi attack on our consulate in Benghazi.  Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, two retired SEALS who were working as civilian security specialists in Benghazi, learned that Ambassador Stevens and nine other people at the consulate were under attack andrushed to their defense.  The fourth man was Sean Smith, father of three, an Air Force veteran, working for the State Department in Libya. 
The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and our military monitored the battle in real time starting with the first phone calls directly from Benghazi.
A small military force from Tripoli was dispatched and was able to rescue some personnel hiding in other buildings.  Ambassador Stevens remained missing, as did these three men.  The fire-fight raged on.
The shocking news of October 22 was that a drone ordered in from Tripoli sent back images of the attack in real time.  The battle was sent on streaming video direct to the Situation Room in the White House.  Within two hours, emails from Benghazi reported that Al Qaeda in Libya was claiming responsibility. 
President Obama, our Commander-in-Chief, had military options available to try and save our men.  He could have had the drone armed with Hellfire missiles.  He could have scrambled fighter jets from Sicily to drive off the attackers.  He could have dropped in Special Forces. He had seven hours to take action.
He did nothing.  Doherty and Woods died in the last hour of the attack. 

RUSH: It's so devastating you can't find it anywhere. You can't find it outside of a little blurb on CBS. You can't find it anywhere after Reuters publishes it. Fox has got it. I've got it. Fox had it last night. This whole Benghazi thing is blown wide open, and nobody's talking about it.

The U.K. Daily Mail, unlike most of our politically corrupt media, is not working for Obama's re-election, so it is still reporting news:

It is the latest development on the deadly attack on September 11 after it was revealed that American drones were in the skies above the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
Defense department officials considered sending troops in to rescue the ambassador and staff, according to CBS News, but ultimately decided not to. They would have been able to watch the attack on-screen as it unfolded.

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS: "Sending the military into another country can be a sensitive and delicate decision. CBS News has been told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did seek clearances from Libya to fly in their airspace, but the administration won't say anything further about what was said or decided on that front."
Former Assistant Defense Secretary Bing West told America Live:

For the United States military to say that they were 480 miles away and they couldn't do anything, and they couldn't move one aircraft in 8 hours? I'd say it's time to relieve a lot of people in the chain of command... If your ambassador has been either killed or captured, and is missing at the hands of terrorists, you do not ask any country for "Mother may I?" before you come across the border to save your own.

Bing West has more to say, on the pages of National Review:

At 5 p.m., President Obama met with Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Panetta in the Oval Office. The U.S. military base in Sigonella, Sicily, was 480 miles away from Benghazi. Stationed at Sigonella were Special Operations Forces, transport aircraft, and attack aircraft - a much more formidable force than 22 men from the embassy....
Fighter jets could have been at Benghazi in an hour; the commandos inside three hours. If the attackers were a mob, as intelligence reported, then an F18 in afterburner, roaring like a lion, would unnerve them. This procedure was applied often in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Conversely, if the attackers were terrorists, then the U.S. commandos would eliminate them. But no forces were dispatched from Sigonella.
By about two in the morning, the American embassy received word that the ambassador was dead....The fight began at 10 p.m. and petered out at dawn when the Libyan militia came to the aid of the Americans.

Bing West concludes: "It is bewildering that no U.S. aircraft ever came to the aid of the defenders. If even one F18 had been on station, it would have detected the location of hostiles firing at night and deterred and attacked the mortar sites. For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve."
At some point, President Obama went to bed.  Whether it was before or after the last men died, we don't know.  He had a fundraising trip to Las Vegas to get up for the next morning.  In the morning, President Obama skipped his national security briefing, as he had skipped so many others, forty percent of them to be exact.  Then President Obama flew off to do his primary job - fundraising. 
In the second Presidential debate, Obama tried to silence Romney's questions on Libya by a show of outrage.  How dare Romney question his leadership on Libya?
The U.S. Military does not abandon our men, but they would not act in these circumstances without an order from the Commander in Chief. 
Did Obama stay up into the night in the Situation Room, watching the attack in Benghazi in real time, as he was proud to boast he had watched the take-down of Bin Laden?  Who did he confer with about how to intervene to save our people?   Why did he decide to do nothing?

Military sources tell CBS News that resources at the three bases include fighter jets and Specter AC-130 gunships, which the sources say can be extremely effective in flying in and buzzing a crowd to disperse it.... Add to the controversy the fact that the last two Americans didn't die until more than six hours into the attack, and the question of U.S. military help becomes very important.

Maybe Obama wasn't in the Situation Room.  This is how Obama described events that night during the second Presidential debate:

I know these folks, and I know their families. So nobody's more concerned about their safety and security than I am.
So as soon as we found out that the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team, and I gave them three instructions. Number one, beef up our security and - and - and procedures not just in Libya but every embassy and consulate in the region.

Why was Obama on the phone with his national security team instead of in the Situation Room with the highest levels of the CIA, Defense, State and our military?  Why did he fly off to fundraise in Las Vegas the next morning?
As former U.N. Ambassador Bolton said on Greta van Susteren:

But I tell you, one thing I've not understood about the way this played out on September the 11th and the day after, is why the entire top levels at the administration weren't on red alert over this. I can't speak for what happens inside the Obama administration, but I tell you, any administration I'd have been in, the president and his top advisers would have been on this immediately around the clock.

"They made zero adjustments in this. They stood and they watched and our people died, "said an outraged retired CIA officer, Gary Berntsen on CBS, who led missions targeting bin Laden and responding to the Kenyan embassy bombings. 
 
Sean Smith
 
Glen Doherty
 
Tyrone Woods
The details of the Benghazi 9/11 attack have been inexorably emerging despite White House efforts -- supported by the disinterest of the mainstream media -- to delay their report to the public until after the Presidential election.   The Senate Intelligence Committee has been badgering Obama for information for weeks, and getting nothing but stonewalling.  

We got pushback, both from the White House and the intelligence community, early on. We couldn't figure it out. I mean, that was really strange - because they never do that.

Former CIA agent Claire Lopez told Glenn Beck, "They saw it in live time.  They knew what was happening...Only local assets ...were sent to help them."
Based on her twenty-year career as an operations officer, Lopez believes James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and General David Petraeus are all aware of what really happened in Libya.

Lopez told Glenn that she had seen agents come under heavy fire in the past, but there were always people and assets who assembled to come to their aid. "I have never seen a situation where a facility was under attack like that and nothing happens."

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton told Greta Susteren on Fox News:

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, according to what we can piece together, at 4:05 local time in the United States ... there was.. an e-mail, ...said, U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi under attack. What we have been told is that during that time is that President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Panetta at some time that evening or that afternoon were in the Oval Office together.

Obama reportedly canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible political harm to himself if the mission failed.

Some lawmakers are asking why U.S. military help from outside Libya didn't arrive as terrorists battered more than 30 Americans over the course of more than seven hours. The assault was launched by an armed mob of dozens that torched buildings and used rocket propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.
CBS News has been told that, hours after the attack began, an unmanned Predator drone was sent over the U.S. mission in Benghazi, and that the drone and other reconnaissance aircraft apparently observed the final hours of the protracted battle...

Why did we send an unarmed drone to observe and send back streaming video instead of arming it with Hellfire missiles?  Or if it was armed, why weren't the missiles fired?
Rush Limbaugh thinks it was politics.  President Obama's re-election campaign has few accomplishments to point to, so Rush believes they felt it imperative to keep up the myth that Obama had destroyed Al Qaeda by killing bin Laden.  Keeping up the myth meant ignoring the real and growing expansion of Al Qaeda.  A full blown military intervention doesn't go with their preferred story that an insulting video inflamed a spontaneous mob.
Rush:

I heard K. T. McFarland on Fox this morning.  She's the former national security adviser for George W. Bush.  She said that Al-Qaeda is in 30 countries now.  They're not decimated. They're not on the run. ... the people on the ground in Cairo were shouting, "We're all Osamas, Obama, we're all Osamas."  Meaning, Obama, like you say, was bragging about getting bin Laden.  Twenty-one times they mentioned it and bragged about it at the Democrat convention.  And these protesters in Cairo were saying, "Yeah, well, we're all Osamas, Obama." So, you know, Obama's crowing has come home to roost. 

Everything was sacrificed to the goal of acting as if the jihadi war against America was inconsequential. Libya was to be 'normalized.' Not by doing the actual work of stabilizing the country, but by our Administration refusing to station Marines there to protect our ambassador.  The attack on our embassy was normalized by treating it like a spontaneous demonstration, nothing you would scramble a Specter AC-130 for. 
Ambassador Bolton thinks Obama is blinded by his ideology.  

BOLTON: Some say, of course, there's a cover-up going on and that the administration's lying. I'm afraid there's actually a more disturbing explanation. The president's ideology has put a screen over his consciousness. And when the real world tries to intrude on it, it can't get through. Because after all: The War on Terror is over, Al-Qaeda's been defeated, the Arab Spring has brought democracy to Libya. And a terrorist attack that brutally kills four Americans is wildly inconsistent with that ideology and worldview. The president can't process reality, and his aides can't get through to him.

Perhaps our President truly believes Islam is a religion of peace, and only provocative American behavior causes attacks on us.  There is no danger, because there is no resurgent jihadi movement at war with western civilization, just some criminal fanatics that can be dealt with on an individual basis.  If you truly believe that, then it almost makes sense to note the Libyan dislike of armed Marines guarding our ambassador and use unarmed locals instead.  Forcing Stevens to do without military protection was apparently the State Department's idea of diplomacy.  According to State Department Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, testifying at the October 11 congressional hearings on the Benghazi cover-up, "In deference to sensitivity to Libyan practice the guards at Benghazi were unarmed."
Yet Rush's theory that the lack of security in Libya was about electoral politics is supported by Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 
Congressman Issa believes that Clinton and Obama were directly involved in operations in Libya.  'These critical foreign policy decisions are not made by low or mid-level career officials -- they are typically made through a structured and well-reasoned process that includes the National Security Council and the White House,' Issa wrote in a letter to Obama. 

The letter claims that Obama had a political motivation in rejecting Stevens' security requests, since the president was eager to show improving conditions in Libya after the U.S.-led international operation that toppled Libya dictator Moamar Gadhafi.

The scandal now has erupted far beyond why our Libyan embassy was left so vulnerable to a jihadi attack on 9/11/12. 
Our President chose to let these four men fight for seven hours and die alone in that Benghazi compound.  How and why did Obama decide not to help them?