CIA Rapid Response Team told to STAND DOWN

swpa19 · 10-26-2012, 10:52

http://www.humanevents.com/2012/10/2...ns-under-fire/

Old Dog New Trick · 10-26-2012, 11:21

This gets more interesting by the week. At some point the flood gates are going to spill over and anyone in the way will get washed downstream.

MtnGoat · 10-26-2012, 12:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Old Dog New Trick

This gets more interesting by the week. At some point the flood gates are going to spill over and anyone in the way will get washed downstream.

Not before NOV, MSM will control it and only report what is needed. They will take the key point that THEY WANT to point out and hit those talking points up.

Like TR said, this is nothing but a real life Wag the Dog unfolding!!! Hell, I bet there really is a Hollywood producer on President Obama team just to deal with this.

Stargazer · 10-26-2012, 13:15

Where is Gen. Petraeus in all of this?

Go Devil · 10-26-2012, 14:07

It is time to stop using tinfoil references.

JSMosby · 10-26-2012, 17:16

Where is Gen. Petraeus in all of this?

Since you asked....DCIA Petraus responds

dadof18x'er · 10-26-2012, 17:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stargazer

Where is Gen. Petraeus in all of this?

for what it's worth..........http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...us_657896.html

**The Reaper** · 10-26-2012, 19:27

This is all George Bush's fault.

Somehow.

TR

Stargazer · 10-27-2012, 08:31

Thank you for the link.

I am not sure what his comments mean... whether he is indicating requests were denied by another party or discounting that the requests occurred as reported. So much smoke being blown in all directions. Unless you are familiar with these type of operations, it's hard to see your way to the truth. Nonetheless, even someone as unfamiliar with these operations as I am, can sense things do not add up.

Clearly, the narratives that came from the WH were intended to divert focus. Further, I have no doubt that those in the CIA Annex would have a plan to send out distress calls. What I don't know is where that call would go. These individuals are highly trained professionals... they would have followed a plan. Where would they call? CIA, central line that would send calls out to???

BrianH · 10-27-2012, 09:06

So the overall implications seems to be that the President intentionally allowed these people to die.

Sounds like there is a lot that we don't yet know about what facts and assumptions the commanders, at all levels, were working with.

**The Reaper** · 10-27-2012, 09:56

Well, it looks like someone who knows what they are talking about finally stepped up and explained it to the civilians.

Not going to get into a discussion about Rush, but the facts the caller is laying out are correct and accurate, IMHO.

TR

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks. I wanted to speak to the question of when the president knew and why Secretary Panetta refused to support the CIA annex request either to move to the consulate or to reinforce.

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/10/26/obama_regime_denied_requests_for_help_from_cia_her oes_during_benghazi_attack>

Within a few minutes of the consulate being under attack -- I'm a retired lieutenant colonel special operations planner for 15 years -- the personal security detail for the ambassador notified the communications room in Tripoli who then, on the top secret side, sent a message to the White House Situation Room that the ambassador was in peril, okay? And they did that by code word and it would have been within minutes of the attack commencing.

The White House Situation Room has a list of what's called Essential Elements of Friendly Information. That's the military's acronym for it, but they would have a similar thing, a critical information list.
Certain things go right to the person that's standing next to the president, both military and civilian leadership. So he would have known within minutes or it's supposed to be informed within minutes because an ambassador is a four-star equivalent, very high, very important person, you know, represents the president and essentially is the president's -- you know, is the surrogate of the president in that country. So the White House cannot deny that the president knew immediately.

RUSH: They are. They are.

CALLER: Well, it's a bald-faced lie, you know. I'm giving you some inside baseball information --

RUSH: Look, I believe you. You're talking about watch desks. That tells me you know what you're talking about.

CALLER: Well, it's even a little more frustrating than that. So when that message, that code word goes out, flash traffic, that an ambassador is in peril, okay, the --

RUSH: We have heard this. In our parlance, the way we heard this, Doug, was essentially the panic button was hit. That's how this was explained to me the first time. Somebody who knew what they were talking about referenced this as a panic button essentially was hit, and that once that happens, everybody that receives it knows what's going on. There's no doubt about it. So that's pretty much true, right?

CALLER: Right. But it's even more detailed than that, Rush. What it means is when a code word goes out, there's standard operating procedures.
The geographic combatant commander that's responsible for Libya would have been part of that message traffic, and his CINC's In-Extremis Force, which is, you know, a Special Forces unit --

RUSH: Okay, let me stop you there for another question, because what a lot of people have been told, the excuse that has been offered, in fact, from Condoleezza Rice on Greta Van Susteren a couple nights ago the impression is, "Well, there's so much traffic coming in, there's so many e-mails, so many cables, so many memos, it would take somebody hours to sift through it." What you're telling me is that there are systems designed to penetrate all that in a real emergency?

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/10/24/e_mails_show_obama_knew_what_happened_in_benghazi_ as_it_happened_took_no_action_to_save_lives_and_th en_lied_about_it>,

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/10/26/obama_regime_denied_requests_for_help_from_cia_her oes_during_benghazi_attack>

CALLER: Well, there's three networks, Rush. The e-mails that have been released are unclassified e-mails. On the top secret side, a flash traffic message from the embassy Tripoli to the White House Situation Room, it's like an IM. I mean, it's immediately responded to. You have to acknowledge receipt of it. Okay? So it's immediate. It gets to the person, the watch officer sitting there, boom, flashes on his screen, he has to acknowledge receipt. And then there's a protocol for who he then sends it to. He physically turns to someone, the senior guy on watch, "This is a critical element of information. POTUS needs to hear this," and that's what would have happened.

So no one in the White House can deny that -- well, they can deny it, but the fact is the protocol says someone marched their happy little ass up to the senior guy standing next to POTUS and said, "Sir, ambassador in Libya is in peril." And if he was missing, that is even a higher precedence.

And then the chain would have also gone out automatically to the geographic combatant commander, AFRICOM, and he would have then turned to his special operations commander and said, "I want the In-Extremis Force, you know, strip ready in five minutes." And evidently they were strip ready in Sigonella and they would have the assets to penetrate the airspace, you know, an MC-130 papa, which is a C-130 specially equipped with electronic countermeasures. They didn't need permission to enter Libyan airspace, okay?

I'm giving you a lot of Inside Baseball stuff, and maybe putting myself in a little peril by doing it, but the In-Extremis Force, they would have been chomping at the bit to do this. It was turned down, POTUS, at his five p.m. Eastern time meeting with the principals, that's when he put the kibosh on everything. It was a conscious act. It has to be because, you know, the In-Extremis Force is required to be prepared to do In-Extremis non-combatant evacuation operations for its geographic responsibility, the entire continent of Africa. So there's always somebody ready to go, and the aircraft are always prepared to go.

It's maddening to say that there was not intelligence. An intelligence guy is not a decision-maker. He's just some analyst dude that tells the decision-makers this is what we know. Well, the decision-makers who are so risk-averse now need perfect intelligence. They would have had to have, you know, in the calculus of this, to know that, whatever the attacking force was, if I put 15 or 50 or a hundred operators on the ground, you know, they'll have success. No one knows that. In soft planning, you plan to fail half the time.

RUSH: What about the story we've been told that not only was there so much traffic coming in that it was impossible to find the right stuff, which you've now explained, but they're also telling us that the president wasn't told for a while, and even now, as recently as today, they're saying that the three most recent e-mails -- it sounds like we're talking about -- flash traffic's not e-mails, right?

CALLER: Flash traffic is digital from station to station.

RUSH: Right. So they're misleading us left and right. They're trying to say, "Well, the president --" They will not explain. They will not tell us what happened to the three e-mails and why he didn't get them or why he wasn't told or when he knew or what. They're basically portraying the president as removed from all this.

CALLER: Well, the bottom line is a flash traffic saying that the ambassador is in peril, or, worse, missing, you know, the protocol is for someone to physically contact with a person in the chain that's supposed to determine what happens next. Now, I wasn't in the Oval Office so I can't --

RUSH: Let me ask you, the question came up yesterday that I couldn't answer, and I need to ask you, just from what you're saying. This is unreal, but let's assume they can't find POTUS, let's assume he's just not engaged. Who has trigger authority on a response to something like that?

I mean, you say we don't need permission to send a C-130 in there to disrupt. Who orders it in there, in a situation like this? Who has the authority to order the C-130s wherever they are, Italy, wherever they are, to take action? If you can't find the president -- is the president the only guy that can give that order?

CALLER: No, sir. Okay? Basically in the absence of permissions, okay, you have standing orders. And one of the standing orders to geographic combatant commander is to observe life of American citizens --

RUSH: Exactly. Precisely.

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/pages/static/join>

(Cont.)

**The Reaper** · 10-27-2012, 09:56

CALLER: And he's a four-star, you know, he's in Germany. AFRICOM headquarters is in Germany, and their op-center would have been monitoring this in real time, 'cause it's part of their geographic responsibility.
And they would have been going through the different permutations of courses of action of who can get there the quickest. Now, in their geographic area they have Combined Joint Task Force, Horn of Africa, which is in Djibouti. I served there when it was the Joint Special Operations Task Force Crisis Response Element, and we have responsibility for all of CENTCOM and AFRICOM in Africa because at the time there was no AFRICOM.

And we had the capacity to get from where we were in Djibouti to Benghazi in about three hours, four hours, depending on what we wanted to take.

Now, if we wanted to go in there with a lot of operators, and at the time we had about a hundred operators, it would have taken us probably five hours.

RUSH: Okay, Doug, you're sitting out here, you obviously are intimately familiar with all this. So what's going through your mind, A, in real time when you hear about this, and then in subsequent days when you hear the excuses or explanations that have been offered for why no action was taken? I mean, I may be putting you on spot and you can't share that with us, but I gotta ask you.

CALLER: It stems from Desert One, Rush, it stems from the failure of Desert One during the Iranian hostage rescue. And what commander wants to repeat that, you know. Now, at the lieutenant colonel level, at the colonel level of the In-Extremis Force of all these different headquarters, State Department, everybody was saying, "Let's go! Let's get boots on the ground and kick these people's asses and get our people." But who makes those decisions? It's POTUS, V POTUS, State, and Def. And they had a five o'clock Eastern time meeting, and they said no. You know, we're willing to have the consulate overruled and the embassy overrun -- (phone connection goes bad)

RUSH: The fact that they're afraid of replicating Carter's boondoggle, that's not gonna fly with a lot of people.

CALLER: Well, sir, I hate to break it to you, but the people that are-four-stars right now, okay, were young officers, and they saw what happened to the leadership, okay? I'm not saying on the Special Ops side. You know, Special Ops guys --

RUSH: But I mean there are alternate explanations. There are political campaign explanations that people have conjured up to explain why Obama would not want any military activity taking place there in order to make sure that an image is created for his campaign: We're defeating Al-Qaeda.
They're on the run. We got bin Laden.

CALLER: All those memes, you know, are probably in play, but mostly it's just incompetence and not understanding the principal of you don't leave anybody behind, okay?

RUSH: Doug, look, I know you've stuck your neck out here and you obviously know your stuff intimately well and I really appreciate your call. It's fabulous to get your input and knowledge on this. Somewhere, somebody refused to make a gutsy call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Doug in San Antonio, Texas, kind of blows Leon Panetta out of the water, and Leon Panetta, we had a sound bite earlier, he said, "Well, we didn't have enough intel. We didn't know enough going on." My guess is that we knew everything, we knew it all. That's what he was basically telling us. We probably had those C-130s -- and we talked about these yesterday, these C-130 Hercules equipped to go in and disperse crowds, buzz low, disperse crowds. They're an hour away in Italy. It's a seven-hour operation. They probably are able to get the video feed in the cockpit knowing what's going on.

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/10/24/what_explains_obama_s_libya_lies>

We are United States of America. We are the world's lone remaining military superpower. All of these things that we're being told we're not capable of doing, we didn't have the right intel, none of that is true.

We're the United States of America. We have capability beyond that which anybody can conceive, a civilian, anyway. It's why it's kept secret.

And the story that has been used to explain this is -- they've willingly said that they're incompetent. They've not used the word. They've willingly said that we're inept. "Well, there were so many e-mails coming in."

We find out that there's a special code, flash traffic, it's got top secret code words, you get one of those, it flies to the top, response is required. It has to be walked up to the next person in command. Of course there are procedures like this in place.

It isn't like you sitting at your computer being inundated with e-mails at five in the afternoon or IMs and not knowing what to do. There are systems here, and they worked. They were in place. This was somebody who refused to make a gutsy call. This is why the families are upset. They find out what's going on, because they know the role of the president is to defend and protect the people who are in harm's way in this country, and that did not happen here. You heard him say that there's a lingering fear that's resulted in a defensive posture over the failed Carter effort in the deserts of Iran in 1979 to get the hostages out then, even though there have been many successful missions since. But if you doubt that, as some of you might have been hearing him, "Wait a minute, there really --"
Remember, now, there are two kinds of generals.

There are warrior generals and there are politically correct corporate climb-the-ladder generals and admirals and what have you. And if you find this hard to believe, "Well, I do, Rush, because it's the military." The military is politicized just like anything. Remember the GOP. What is the primary reason the Republican Party is afraid of a conservative presidential nominee? Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat. It's what informs them to this day. They can't get over that. They don't see the Reagan landslides of '80 and '84.

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/10/23/flashback_reagan_emphasized_peace_restraint_on_hos tages_in_1980_debate>

They see Goldwater '64. There are plenty of establishment types that do. So what Doug was telling us here is you got enough people in the chain of command who still have lingering fears over the debacle of Jimmy Carter's rescue attempt in 1979. That sounds hard to believe, but believe me, this guy knew what he was talking about. There can be no doubt about that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Gypsy · 10-27-2012, 10:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Old Dog New Trick

This gets more interesting by the week. At some point the flood gates are going to spill over and anyone in the way will get washed downstream.

Hopefully including Obama.

I am so very angry that our fellow Americans were abandoned.

Stargazer · 10-27-2012, 11:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Post

Thank you very much. That answered my question.

I read that Gen. Petraeus in a closed door meeting, followed the administration narrative that it appeared to be a response to the video. I hope that is an inaccurate account of his statement. IMV, it will bring his credibility and judgment into question.

**Team Sergeant** · 10-27-2012, 11:50

Having served in one of the CINC's In-Extremis Force and having been a Special Forces Communications Sergeant with a Top Secret clearance I will also vouch for what that individual is saying to Rush is true.
That Ambassador was left out to die and something could have been done to stop it, and we would have killed a large number of muslims that night.

This is the reason we spend billions on CINC's In-Extremis Forces around the world, the dogs of war were standing by.....

And Rush is an idiot fir bringing up Carter's "boondoggle" that's apples and oranges. Operation Eagle Claw was planned for half a year and was a mistake of the plan was services related and a screwup by the Joint Chiefs. The CINC's In-Extremis Force already have plans on what actions they will take in just about any crisis. This one would have included killing a lot of armed muslims.

Now who did the administration save? I know, without a doubt.

TS