Congressional Hearings Show Obama Treading Dangerous Global Path

 

There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday's testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were attacked and murdered in Benghazi.

This is a vivid contrast with those photos we've seen of the president and his leading advisers watching the video of the attack on Osama bin Laden.

At a 5 p.m. meeting, when it was first known that Stevens was under attack, Obama did issue Panetta and Dempsey a directive to do whatever they could to protect him. And then left the matter, in Panetta's words, "up to us."

After the meeting, according to White House records, Obama did have a one-hour phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a phone call The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol has called "non-urgent, politically useful."

But he apparently wasn't curious about what was happening in Benghazi. He wasn't too concerned either the next morning, when after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years he jetted off on a four-hour ride to a campaign event in Las Vegas. I don't think you have to be a Republican partisan to consider that unseemly.

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