Stunner: 'The Security People Just All Ran Away'

From The Independent’s breaking story, which focuses on the U.S. failure to heed a 48-hour warning of threats to the embassy:

According to security sources the consulate had been given a “health check” in preparation for any violence connected to the 9/11 anniversary. In the event, the perimeter was breached within 15 minutes of an angry crowd starting to attack it at around 10pm on Tuesday night. There was, according to witnesses, little defence put up by the 30 or more local guards meant to protect the staff. Ali Fetori, a 59-year-old accountant who lives near by, said: “The security people just all ran away and the people in charge were the young men with guns and bombs.”

Wissam Buhmeid, the commander of the Tripoli government-sanctioned Libya’s Shield Brigade, effectively a police force for Benghazi, maintained that it was anger over the Mohamed video which made the guards abandon their post. “There were definitely people from the security forces who let the attack happen because they were themselves offended by the film; they would absolutely put their loyalty to the Prophet over the consulate. The deaths are all nothing compared to insulting the Prophet.”

Note he does not say: “They believe the deaths are all nothing … “, I take it from Buhmeid’s wording that he agrees.

No matter though, the statement is a farce. If the guards hold this belief, that they would just as soon turn their guns on the embassy should an American utter a blasphemy, then the Americans would have been dead long ago. (The existence of the embassy itself could be construed as blasphemy!) The film would not have been the final straw for all 30 guards at once, at the proper time for the start of the attempted breach.

The guards were involved with the raid. They left their posts on the signal. Say something about this act of war, President Obama — as the alliance with al-Qaeda elements in Libya was your decision, your folly. You extended a hand, foolishly, and they took the whole body.

Sandmonkey, a PJ Media contact in Egypt, tweeted the following earlier today. I told him I wasn’t ready to buy it yet, but if this is how events occurred in Benghazi, I am certain he sources are good regarding what happened in Cairo:

.@shadihamid @robertdanin @tobycraigjones My contacts within the embassy confirm that all security vanished 4 pm before the demos started.

— السيد مانكي (@Sandmonkey) September 13, 2012