DISGRACEFUL COMPARISON BY OBAMA OF CAMPAIGN STAFF TO MURDERED CONSULATE STAFF

[Peggy Hall]

President Obama compared his campaign volunteers to the murdered consulate staff in Libya at a Wednesday stump speech in Las Vegas:

“And obviously [our] hearts are broken for the families but I wanted to encourage those folks at the State Dept. that they were making a difference,” Obama told volunteer leaders in Las Vegas, according to the pool report. “The sacrifices that our troops and our diplomats make are obviously very different from the challenges that we face here domestically but like them, you guys are Americans who sense that we can do better than we’re doing… I’m just really proud of you.”

 

Obama's attempts to use the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans on Tuesday as a motivational source for his campaign volunteers comes in the light of an increasing number of reports that Obama himself was derelict in his duty as Commander-in-Chief to adequately defend the workers at the American consulate in Benghazi.

Though the State Department had for several weeks received numerous credible warnings that embassy attacks might be coming in several volatile Middle East countries on the eleventh anniversary of 9-11, few preparations were made for that contingency. President Obama himself, in fact, skipped several intelligence briefings in the week preceeding the 9-11-12 attacks in Egypt and Libya.

The porous nature of defenses at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya presented a particularly inviting target for Islamic militants. Though the American embassy itself is located in the capital city of Tripoli, much of Ambassador Stevens's work was conducted in Benghazi, since that was the headquarters of the rebels who successfully overthrew Libyan dictator Khadafi in 2011.

Despite the strategic significance of the American consulate in Benghazi, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton failed to provide a ... for the usual contingent of U.S. Marines to provide security for American diplomats who staffed that location. Instead, security within the consulate walls was provided by third-party Libyan nationals, who were described by CBS News as complicit in facilitating the radicals' murder of Ambassador Stevens.

The Washington Guardian reported Wednesday that as far back as February of this year the State Department acknowledged that "it lacked funding for some security improvements" at the Benghazi consulate and other embassy locations around the Middle East:

The congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting issued a strong warning in 2009, saying the State Department’s reliance on lowest-priced contractors was jeopardizing security.

“Lowest-priced security not good enough for war-zone embassies,” the commission wrote in a stinging report that urged other factors such as capability be considered in awarding security contracts...

The Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group that focuses on contracting, has raised repeated concerns about the contracting of embassy security operations and last year urged that the task in volatile region be in-sourced to State Department employees. 

The mainstream media has largely ignored President Obama's dereliction of duty in failing to provide adequate security at the American consulate in Benghazi. Instead, they've displayed bias in favor of his re-election by parroting Obama Administration criticisms of the his opponent Mitt Romney's comments on the week's Middle East violence.