http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/ccrzea2<\/a><\/b>). The committee will hear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut out her department\u2019s counterterrorism experts from any input on the night of the attacks. \u00a0They will also hear that everyone in the State Department in a position to know did know that Ambassador Chris Smith and his entourage were, as Pruden puts it, \u201cunder attack, not under protest.\u201d \u00a0And there will be testimony that in the aftermath Mrs. Clinton\u2019s office conducted a concerted campaign to remove any reference to Islamicists and terrorists from all talking points. \u00a0Perhaps the representatives will also learn how the administration came to finger some poor, fringe Internet filmmaker to serve as their stand-in for al Qaeda as the cause of the attacks.<\/p>\nThere is much at which to be alarmed here. Apparently Mrs. Clinton\u2019s reason for lying about the terrorist character of the affair and for her now famous (and in its way brilliant) diversion \u2014 \u201cWhat difference does it make anyway\u201d \u2013 when she testified on the incident some months ago was politics. \u00a0The administration had built its case for reelection around Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s soundbite on the eve of the Democratic Convention, \u201cGeneral Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.\u201d Acknowledging that the Benghazi attacks, which occurred only a few week before the election, were the work of al Qaeda or a related group would have demolished the second half of their case.<\/p>\n
So the motives for lying about the character of the attack are clear enough. \u00a0But what about the failure to send help that night? \u00a0To me, that lapse suggests something more than politics. Here is a bit of ancient history to explain.<\/p>\n
On the second floor of what is now call the Eisenhower Executive Office Building \u2013 that big grey wedding cake of a structure to the immediate right of the White House \u2013 there was when I served on President Reagan\u2019s staff a plaque in front of an always locked door. \u00a0Its inscription honored a man whose name I had never heard before or have never heard since. \u00a0He had, it told passers by, developed protocols regarded as indispensible for dealing with global crises.<\/p>\n
In other words, at the highest levels of national security, things are thought through in advance. \u00a0You don\u2019t make up crisis management as you go along. \u00a0Sure, no one anticipated that attack on that night in that way. \u00a0But we have had numerous of attacks on our embassies and diplomats over the decades.<\/p>\n
My point is that again and again in recent months we have seen evidence that this administration has no protocols for dealing with any global crisis whatseoever. \u00a0Not that this all that surprising. \u00a0It would fit the administration\u2019s self-absorbed style arrogantly to reject all lessons of the past. \u00a0If the Bushes followed a procedure \u2013 even more contemptible, if Ronald Reagan followed a procedure \u2013 we will reject it, forget about it, drop it down the memory hole.<\/p>\n
For example, what was going on with President Obama\u2019s \u201cred line\u201d comment about chemical weapons in Syria? \u00a0OK, he overstepped his talking points, as we have been told (is this an instance of protecting the boss or blaming him?). But didn\u2019t anyone then ask, if Syria now does indeed use chemical weapons, what will our red line be? The failure here was not the comment \u2013 or not just the comment. \u00a0It was the follow-up. \u00a0What was the protocol?<\/p>\n
Again and again the administration appears to have no regular procedures for acting on national security matters or recovering from missteps. \u00a0Take the Fast and Furious scandal. \u00a0This wasn\u2019t just a Justice Department fiasco. \u00a0Whatever Attorney-General Eric Holder and others in his clown car intended, they ended up making a series of significant weapons shipments to the deadliest enemies of the democratic country and ally with which we share our southern border. Since then, it has been all cover up, no follow up. \u00a0What did the president and his administration do to make amends to the Mexican government and help them deal with the mess Mr. Holder and company had created? \u00a0Where was the protocol?<\/p>\n
Aggressive control of the record is a Clinton crisis protocol, developed over years of cleaning up after Bubba\u2019s crude affairs. Mrs. Clinton\u2019s \u201cWhat difference does it make\u201d outburst \u2013 calculated to render the record irrelevant \u2013 was an example. But that protocol was for protecting the politician and her boss.<\/p>\n
What are this administration\u2019s protocols for protecting the nation? \u00a0Does it have any?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on Benghazi. In case you\u2019ve missed all the scuttlebutt, Wes Pruden, editor emeritus of the\u00a0Washington Times, has an excellent curtain raiser in his paper this morning (http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/ccrzea2). The committee will hear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut out her department\u2019s counterterrorism experts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[147,79,148,12,60],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-issues","tag-benghazi","tag-foreign-policy","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-obama"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}