In fact foresight was required, the same foresight the British and Red Cross used when they abandoned the area. Why didn't Hillary close Benghazi at that time also? The answer would appear to be the pretense that all was well in Libya after getting rid of Qaddafi. That pretense continued with the claim that it was all about an internet video.
[So I'm not sure what the point is here.QUOTE] The point is that Hillary lied and people died. Why would she have ZERO first hand knowledge of one of the most dangerous areas of the world on such a memorable date?? Did she not know the British had left? The Red Cross? Do you sincerely believe that those dozens of emails asking for help never reached her desk?
Well i certainly hope the electorate doesn't compound that failure by making this lying incompetent their President.
"Hillary lied, people died!" I think you're onto something there.
Another sign of dereliction that hasn't been mentioned much has to do with al-Zawahiri's call to arms that appeared a full day before the attack. The U.S. had killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan and longtime Al Qaeda big shot, in a drone strike in North Waziristan a few months earlier. Now, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, the head of Al Qaeda had put out a message on a well-known jihadist website, acknowledging al-Libi's killing at the hands of the Americans, and calling on Libyans to avenge him. Surely that message was known to U.S. officials the minute it appeared. It's inconceivable that, eleven years after the 9/11 attacks, it was not the job of some group of people in the fifteen-plus U.S. intelligence agencies, translators of Arabic among them, constantly to monitor every known jihadist website and report what they saw.
Could any sentient adult consider who it was that had sent out this call for revenge, the date he had sent it out, the nationality of the person to be avenged, and the nation that had killed him, and not conclude it meant Americans in Libya would be at risk the next day, September 11? Thanks largely to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, Qaddafi had been ousted, and Libya was chaotic. And what part of it was more so than Eastern Libya--Cyrenaica? Where could trouble be more likely to occur? That area had long been notorious as a hotbed of jihadists, which is just why the U.S. had been using drones during the summer of 2012 to conduct reconnaissance of jihadist camps near Derna, 150 miles or so east of Benghazi.
And yet, with a full day to respond to a very clear threat, apparently nothing was done. There was more than enough time to have flown in another couple drones and a few Hellfire missiles by cargo plane to the base being used for the Derna reconnaissance, which was probably near the coast in the far west of Egypt. That would have been a basic precaution, just to have
some force on call in the area. Drones can also watch events on the ground when they are armed, and it would not have been any big undertaking to have one circling over Derna, and a second one over Benghazi on the eleventh, with a spare or two to relieve them.
