The deaths of four U.S. state department employees – including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens – in Benghazi, Libya, has turned into a real mess for the Obama administration. News reports out this week say that in spite of multiple pleas for more security personnel, the State Department removed as many as 34 people from the country in the six months before the Sept. 11 attack. This came from Lt. Col. Andy Wood, the former head of a Special Forces site security team in Libya. He told it to CBS News and also appeared at a House Oversight Committee hearing this week. Wood told CBS when he heard his 16-member team and a six-member elite force were being pulled out of Libya about a month before the attack, he felt “like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers.” He told the State Department he needed more, not fewer security people. The response from the State Department was that Wood needed to do more with less. Wood told CBS he was not given a reason. This makes no sense to me. Why, with a Special Forces guy all but begging for more security personnel in Libya, would the administration tell him to do with less? Ambassador Stevens himself wanted a security support team, made up of 16 special operations soldiers, to stay with him in Libya until after their deployment was set to end in August, a team member told ABC News. But a State Department official, when questioned by ABC News, said the embassy’s regional security officer never specifically requested that the team’s tour be extended. CNN reported this week that Eric Nordstrom, a one-time regional security officer in Libya, told the House Oversight Committee that he requested additional manpower for the facility, but was rebuffed. “I said, ‘... you know what makes it most frustrating about this assignment? It’s not the hardships. It’s not the gunfire. It’s not the threats. It’s dealing and fighting against the people, programs and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me,” Nordstrom testified. Nordstrom also testified that he verbally asked for significantly more help – 12 agents – but the answer was no. “(The) response to that was, ‘You’re asking for the sun, moon, and the stars,’” Nordstrom said. Nordstrom said that attitude made the Benghazi incident predictable. Nordstrom left Libya in July and continues to work at the State Department for diplomatic security, according to CNN. “For me and my staff,” he said, “it was abundantly clear that we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. And the question that we were to ask again is, ‘How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?’” Beyond that, The Daily Beast reported that in a dispatch sent the day he was killed, Ambassador Stevens described how militias keeping the peace in Benghazi threatened to quit over a politic feud. And just two days before the attack on the consulate, the leaders of the Libyan militias who were supposed to keep order in the city threatened to withdraw their men. From The Daily Beast: The brinksmanship is detailed in a cable approved by Ambassador Stevens and sent on the day he died in the attack. ... The dispatch, which was marked “sensitive” but not “classified,” contained a number of other updates on the chaotic situation on the ground in post-Gaddafi Libya. While the cable doesn’t make a specific plea for more support, it does make it clear that security is deteriorating. And it doesn’t say anything about the anti-islamic movie that the White House initially blamed for the attack on the consulate – a movie that had been bouncing around on the Internet since June.Now, surely the administration had access to all this information, plus evidence that up to 100 attackers came from multiple angles with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. The administration has since changed its assessment, but how could it have initially come to the conclusion that this was a “spontaneous” protest event? Beyond that, how could the administration trot out U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on five different Sunday news shows to push that narrative on Sept. 16 – five days after the attack – even though all the evidence the administration had pointed to a terrorist attack? All this in an election year in which polls show Democrats – for the first time in decades – holding an edge over Republicans in the handling of foreign policy. It seems to me there could be a few scenarios at play here. Maybe the administration initially and deliberately covered up or ignored all the evidence of a terror attack because it didn’t fit the White House foreign policy narrative. That is, if we are nice to extremists they will stop hating us and killing us. Or perhaps the adminstration truly trusts its narrative and believes – despite evidence to the contrary – that the attack was not about terror and was solely motivated by the anti-Islam video. Or maybe – given that the State Department seemed reluctant to afford extra security – the administration just didn’t think Benghazi, Libya, was that dangerous. The problem for the White House is that none of those scenarios bodes well for President Obama’s foreign policy credentials or his re-election hopes.
