The Beng­hazi Affair: Tri­lat­eral Policy Failure Or Success?

The August Forecast & Review
October 1, 2012


Many people, including this writer, have been fol­lowing the after­math of the ter­rorist attack on the U.S. Con­sulate in Beng­hazi, Libya. The White House is tight-lipped and the major media refuses to inves­ti­gate or report new find­ings. Con­gress is demanding emails, doc­u­ments and videos.
There is little doubt that the 7-hour attack was care­fully mon­i­tored by State Depart­ment per­sonnel, the Pres­i­dent and his National Secu­rity Advisers in the Sit­u­a­tion Room, and that someone issued an order to nearby mil­i­tary com­mands to “stand down” during the heat of the attack. The rest of the story is a miss-mash of con­flicting accounts.
One promi­nent ques­tion in my mind is whether or not Beng­hazi was an orches­trated effort to throw Obama under the bus and thereby kill his chances at reelec­tion. A second pos­si­bility is that the Beng­hazi oper­a­tion could not come to the light of day because it was a black-ops arms-running center between Libyan and Syrian rebels. A third pos­si­bility is that National Secu­rity per­sonnel were so incred­ibly inept that they froze under crisis cir­cum­stances and were somehow unable to act. And of course, there could be a mix­ture of motives and means.
According to ABC News,
“the White House has dis­closed that Pres­i­dent Obama was informed about the attack on the diplo­matic out­post in Beng­hazi at roughly 5pm by his National Secu­rity Adviser Tom Donilon as he was in a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen­eral Martin Dempsey.”
My par­tic­ular interest here is Tom Donilon, member of the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion and Obama’s point man for all national secu­rity issues.

No comments: