Nothing. That is what President Barack Obama did on the night of
September 11, 2012, as terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi and killed four Americans, among them Ambassador Christopher
Stevens. President Obama’s inaction was revealed in testimony before the
Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday by outgoing Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey.
Under direct questioning
by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Panetta admitted that he had no
communication with President Obama after their “pre-scheduled” meeting
at 5:00 p.m. EDT. The attack on the consulate had already been under way
for 90 minutes at that time. Neither the president nor anyone else from
the White House called afterwards to check what was happening; the
Commander-in-Chief had left it “up to us,” said Panetta.
Panetta’s testimony directly contradicts
President Obama’s own claim to have issued “three directives” as soon
as he learned “what was going on” in Benghazi. As he told a Denver
reporter in October:
I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure we are
securing our personnel and that we are doing whatever we need to. Number
two, we are going to investigate exactly what happened and make sure it
doesn't happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can
bring them to justice.
That same claim was subsequently repeated by other Democrats, including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel,
who came to the president’s defense. But if those directives were
indeed given--and proof has never been produced--they were given long
after the attack, not while the attack was going on, during which time
the president did nothing.
Read More: Breitbart
MOPTI, Mali (AP)
— Deep inside caves, in remote desert bases, in the escarpments and
cliff faces of northern Mali, Islamic fighters are burrowing into the
earth, erecting a formidable set of defenses to protect what has
essentially become al-Qaida’s new country.
They have used the bulldozers, earth movers and Caterpillar machines
left behind by fleeing construction crews to dig what residents and
local officials describe as an elaborate network of tunnels, trenches,
shafts and ramparts. In just one case, inside a cave large enough to
drive trucks into, they have stored up to 100 drums of gasoline,
guaranteeing their fuel supply in the face of a foreign intervention,
according to experts.
Northern Mali is now the biggest territory held by al-Qaida and its
allies. And as the world hesitates, delaying a military intervention,
the extremists who seized control of the area earlier this year are
preparing for a war they boast will be worse than the decade-old
struggle in Afghanistan.
“Al-Qaida never owned Afghanistan,” said former United Nations
diplomat Robert Fowler, a Canadian kidnapped and held for 130 days by
al-Qaida’s local chapter, whose fighters now control the main cities in
the north. “They do own northern Mali.”
Al-Qaida’s affiliate in Africa has been a shadowy presence for years
in the forests and deserts of Mali, a country hobbled by poverty and a
relentless cycle of hunger. In recent months, the terror syndicate and
its allies have taken advantage of political instability within the
country to push out of their hiding place and into the towns, taking
over an enormous territory which they are using to stock arms, train
forces and prepare for global jihad.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM, operates not just in
Mali, but in a corridor along much of the northern Sahel. This
7,000-kilometer (4,300-mile) long ribbon of land runs across the widest
part of Africa, and includes sections of Mauritania, Niger, Algeria,
Libya, Burkina Faso and Chad.
Read More: Associated Press
