Republicans still keep insisting there is something fishy about the Benghazi incident. Whatever might be the circumstances surrounding that event, these things seem quite simply clear to me.

Short of a fortified Green Zone, it is not possible to fully protect our Embassies from attack by a mission team or a mob, much less to defend the hundreds of outlying offices like the one in Benghazi.

The reason there were no intelligence assets protecting those heroes is because THEY WERE the intelligence assets, and the meeting was a contact between the two Navy vets on CIA mercenary payroll, and the high-ranking State Department guy, far from the Embassy itself. They thought the 9/11-anniversary action would be at the Embassy in Tripoli and they were hiding out in Benghazi, laying low without making a show of additional security. By any reasonable definition of the word, they were conducting operations as our civilian spies. This is SPOOK business, whatever they were doing, and the administrative, jurisdictional, security, and international relations issues are all highly classified, and carry very large consequences if revealed.

If President Obama had (as the rightniks still squawk he should have) chosen to immediately move without regard for those issues, and he had given orders for US drone bombers, A-10's, tanks, or troops to defend those people from anyone, whoever we thought was making that attack... we would now still be fighting another endless war against people who would be right to wage it, and Mr. Obama would correctly have been impeached for the domestic and international crime of invading a country and personally initiating a war without even asking Congress, like some tin-horn Fascist. They would be right about that, if he had been so foolish as to have done that.

Some might even go so far therefore as to say the President knew exactly what he could not do, and what he had to do, and it took a lot of courage to know they were likely going to be lost. But then... that is also true of the President permitting the same risk to every soldier who is out there, and whom he cannot act to save, and whose lives are expended daily.

As for what it is that smells so fishy, the truth is clear. These are fish that swim in dark deep water, and it is illegal to know what those people were doing over there. It would be treason to reveal that, even if you were The President. These sharks of the covert services world and their fathers and grandfathers have been doing it many years, and Barack Obama would not be the first President to be swallowed up trying to swim in those waters if he started making waves.

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POSTPUBCO // // THE ANTI-CYCLOPS PAPERS