[The Reaper]

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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