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Originally Posted by FancyFeast5000
Do you really expect anyone else posting here to have the kind of background and extensive intense experience you do? I can still feel the furious and cold wind from your post blowing my doors off. You sent out a lot of energy whether you acknowledge it or not.
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Look, didn't you just spend 11 years and $11 TRILLION doing the whole Blow Up The World Tour thing?
How's that working out for everyone? Didn't work out so well for Stevens.
That was a consulate. It could have easily been the Sears Tower in Chicago; or a baseball play-off game -- imagine 15,000 to 20,000 people getting barbecued by a giant JP5 fireball; or it could have been your daughter's/grand-daughter's school.
You wasted all those troops and all that money, and you're no safer now than you were 11 years ago.
This is not just an administrative failure to provide adequate security --- this was an intelligence failure as well.
Is that why the administration tried to cover this up from the very start?
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Originally Posted by FancyFeast5000
You've posted that you are now a disabled Vet. I'm very sorry to hear that.
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Enjoy your oil.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FancyFeast5000
However, your posts about these political issues have a bitterness and harshness to them, and you are probably very well justified to feel that way.
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That's probably because people, uh, like politicians and bureaucrats, keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. I have no tolerance for either, or fools, and even less tolerance for those who engage in fear-mongering.
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Just a clarification, Daniels and Sebast were at the main vehicle gate -- which ran along Mac Dinh Chi -- and not the main gate on Trong Nhat (road/avenue).
I'm reading a hand-drawn map with hand-written notes I made about 22 years ago on a yellow legal pad which faded with age (so I scanned it quite a few years ago to save it). The info comes from an oral history of Tet Offensive which served as a basis for a monograph about the defense of US Embassy Saigon written by Mary (Maria?) Himes, who was an historian (a DA civilian). We looked at that when we were drafting doctrines for rear area combat operations (the issue of diplomatic missions came up).
I mentioned that because there are a few parallels between the attacks in Saigon and Benghazi.
Security is first and foremost, a deterrent factor. You should consider that security was the reason that the Ambassador/consulate/embassy was not attacked previously, and that the removal of security encouraged and enabled the attack at Benghazi.
Many people hold the bizarre belief that no amount of security would have prevented the attack or the death of the Ambassador. Not true at all, and you can see that about 2 dozen Marines and Army MPs defended the Saigon Embassy against a battalion of Viet Cong who were similarly armed. Granted (for those who don't know) a VC battalion was organized more like a Soviet airborne battalion so you're talking 3 line companies of about 75-80 troops.
But you should also know that the Marines were armed with .38s -- as in .38 caliber (and no not .357) as in .38 caliber revolver. That's all the Marines had during the initial wave of attacks.
Talk about a bad-hair day. 250 people are trying to kill you and all you've got is a 6-shot revolver.
Marine Sergeants Harper and Soto did all the right things at exactly the right time. Harper secures all of the gates and exterior doors in the NORODOM Compound and Soto secures the gates and exterior doors on the generator building and the chancery building -- where there's an helipad on the roof and an arms room inside. If that doesn't happen, the VC get into the chancery building and it all ends very badly, because they control the helipad so there's no evacuation of civilians or wounded Marines, and the Marines can't get to the arms room.
The arms room took 2 direct hits by B-40 rocket and multiple RPG hits. The walls of the arms room were fairly sturdy so none of the Marines were severely injured and they were able to arm up with M-16s and grenades. There was also an L-shaped ambush in the parking lot situated in the middle of chancery and generator buildings, the servants quarters, and the NORODOM Compound. That goes back to Harper -- if he doesn't secure the exterior gates and doors when he does, he probably never gets to because he'd have to fight through an ambush to back to them. Okay, at 0-dark-thirty in the morning not a lot of civilians are in the OSA building and the other office building on the NORODOM Compound, but that's not the point.
That begs the question how did the VC know where the arms room was located in the chancery building, and how did they know to set up an ambush in the parking lot? Someone on the inside was feeding them information.
Same in Benghazi.
Someone knew the Ambassador's schedule; knew that he'd be in Benghazi; knew that his visitors would leave at a certain time; and they waited for the Ambassador be alone or away from others at the time of the attack --- someone on the inside was feeding information.
It would seem many here have no interest in knowing who was doing that.
One other thing. The Song River ran by there so the streets -- Hong Thap Tu, Ba Trung, Trong Nhat and Mac Dihn Chi all run northwest/southwest and northeast/southeast. The northeast wall of the embassy compound was bounded by Mac Dinh Chi, the southeast wall by Trong Nhat -- and the breech in the wall was there catty-corner to the British Embassy Compound, and then the southeast wall of the French Embassy Compound (with the NORODOM Compound sandwiched between the US and French Embassies, the southwest wall of the French compound bounded by Ba Trung and the behind the US Embassy running along Hong Thap Tu was a Vietnamese police compound.
That's right. The Vietnamese police compound sat against the northwest wall of the US Embassy.
How long did it take the Vietnamese police to travel 50 feet to help defend the US Embassy?
About 6 hours.
That goes back to the failed-State thing.
What did the ARVN government control? Uh, the presidential palace and a couple of bars, dance clubs, strip clubs and houses of ill-repute. Aside from that, not much. It's a lot like Afghanistan where the Karzai government controls the presidential palace, a few blocks around that and a few areas in Kabul Province, but nothing else, and like Libya, where the "government" controls Ghaddafi's former palace and that's about it.
The Tet Counter-Offensive was a brilliant victory that resulted in the complete annihilation of the Viet Cong. As former Defense Minister Nguyen Vo Giap said in his memoirs, the Viet Cong were reduced to less than a battalion of cadre, they never engaged US forces after that, and they were ready to throw in the towel and negotiate a peace treaty with the US....until they discovered US media propaganda hailed Tet as a brilliant victory by the North. Anyway, after Tet, the ARVN government [finally] had control over nearly all of the South.
So what did our politicians and bureaucrats learn from the attack in the failed State of South Vietnam on the Saigon Embassy? Apparently nothing. And what did they learn from the prior attacks on the failed State of Afghanistan on Bagram Air Base (and elsewhere)? Apparently nothing as well.
People can say what they want, but this is not a political issue. This is an issue of National Security.
It represents a failure of foreign policy in Libya. What is the policy and why is the US government dealing with a group who is not even in control of Libya?
It represents a failure of bureaucracy. People who had experience with failed States working in Afghanistan are begging for security because they see Libya as a failed State, and they are ignored, while the State Department seemed more concerned about rushing a charging station to US Embassy Vienna. The State Department didn't know they're dealing with a failed State? Read the
unclassified reports -- no one is in control Libya.
And it represents a failure of intelligence. If they can't prevent an attack on a consulate how are they going to prevent another attack on US soil? It doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Is al-Qaida the enemy or not? Because if they are, the enemy, then they had best start doing a better job of monitoring them.
Bitterly...
Mircea
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