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Belmont Club

by Richard Fernandez

In Benghazi

September 19th, 2012 - 5:39 pm

The Washington Guardian has more details on the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

The two former SEALS, Tyrone Woods, 41, and Glen Doherty, 42, were not employed by the State Department diplomatic security office and instead were what is known as personal service contractors who had other duties related to security, the officials said.

They stepped into action, however, when Stevens became separated from the small security detail normally assigned to protect him when he traveled from the more fortified embassy in Tripoli to Benghazi, the officials said.

The two ex-Seals and others engaged in a lengthy firefight with the extremists who attacked the compound, a fight that stretched from the inner area of the consulate to an outside annex and a nearby safe house — a location that the insurgents appeared to know about, the officials said.

The officials provided the information to the Washington Guardian, saying they feared the Obama administration’s scant description of the episode left a misimpression that the two ex-Navy SEALs might have been responsible for the ambassador’s personal safety or become separated from him.

“Woods and Doherty weren’t part of the detail, nor were they personally responsible for the ambassador’s security, but they stepped into the breach when the attacks occurred and their actions saved others lives — and they shouldn’t be lumped in with the security detail,” one senior official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the State Department.

One can only hope the families of the deceased SEALs don’t get a form letter from the President signed with an electric pen.

A State Department spokesperson corrected herself and acknowledged that protection for the consulate had been provided by a British firm employing Libyan nationals.

QUESTION: You also said there was no contract with a private security firm in Libya, and yet apparently some British security guards were hired. Is that your way of saying you didn’t contract with a firm but you did hire individual security guards?

MS. NULAND: Thank you for that, because there was an error in what I said. The external security, external armed security, as we have been saying, outside of the perimeter, was fully handled by the Libyan side. There was no contract – contracting out of that. There was a group called Blue Mountain Group, which is a private security company with permits to operate in Libya. They were hired to provide local Libyan guards who operated inside the gate doing things like operating the security access equipment, screening the cars, that kind of thing.

According to Breitbart, the firm had been selected because they were amenable to State Department Rules of Engagement which specified that the guards have no bullets in their guns. If so it was understandable that they took to their heels. Who wouldn’t? However, the SEALs, not being part of the “robust” security cordon around the consulate, may have a had a few magazines between them and made the best of it.

Well here’s to the Libyan guards with no bullets
and the SEALS who had only a few.
It was tough to hold back hundreds,
But if Hillary only knew!

She had a perfect plan
Which had they known they wouldn’t have ran.
But of what avail is a Libyan rube
Against hatred from YouTube

Nah, let’s let Rudyard Kipling do it. He’s much better.

There were thirty million English who talked of England’s might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four!

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with “the scorn of scorn.”
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

Shame? No. There’s none of that any more.

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