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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Fox News within the last 35 minutes, ladies and gentlemen, has broken a story that will shake this country down to its core. Well, the portion of the country paying attention to this, which is, to the chagrin of the regime, quite a large portion. President Obama has demonstrably failed here in his most basic responsibility, to keep Americans safe who are in harm’s way. This is a major breaking story.

CIA operators were denied three requests to go help those under assault in Benghazi. “Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the US Consulate and subsequent attack several hours later was denied by US officials — who also told the CIA operators twice to ‘stand down.'”

Not only were they denied permission to go in and help, they were told specifically not to. They were told to “‘stand down’ rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11. Former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were part of a small team who were at the CIA annex about a mile from the US Consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack.

“When they heard the shots fired, they radioed to inform their higher-ups to tell them what they were hearing. They were told to ‘stand down,’ according to sources familiar with the exchange. An hour later, they called again to headquarters and were again told to ‘stand down.’ Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the Consulate, which at that point was on fire.” They went anyway. They defied the order to stand down.

Here first is Jennifer Griffin from Fox News just moments ago.

GRIFFIN: Sources who are on the ground in Benghazi during the attack tell Fox News that in fact there were three separate requests to aid not only the attack that was occurring at the consulate and to try and help with that attack, but also requests for outside help, outside military help to help once there were gunfires [sic] and firefights at the CIA annex. Those requests, we’re told, came from higher headquarters. They were told to stand down.

RUSH: Again, Woods and Doherty and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate. They went anyway to try to help. Leon Panetta — this is yesterday in Washington at the Pentagon — the defense secretary in a Q&A, and the reporter said, “There was, in fact, Mr. Secretary, a drone over the CIA annex, and there were intelligence officials fighting inside the annex. I guess the big question is, with those two combined assets, why there wasn’t a clear intelligence picture that would have given you what you needed to make some moves? For instance, flying some F-16s over the area to disperse fighters or dropping more Special Forces in. Why didn’t you do anything?”

PANETTA: We were prepared to respond to any contingency and certainly had forces in place to do that, but there’s a basic principle here. The basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place. And, as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground — or in that area, General Ham, General Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.

RUSH: This is unbelievable, folks, because this is the secretary of defense last night. We know the State Department was watching live video of this. We know the CIA station chief, and we know that the State Department both had sent cables, e-mails, warnings to the White House Situation Room in the first two hours. We learned yesterday that the White House knew what was going on at the moment it was happening. We know that of the four Americans dead, two of them died in the last hours of what was a seven-hour assault.

Now we are told that the CIA told these heroes to stand down three different times, to not go in, to not do anything, and Panetta is saying, “We didn’t have any intel.” That argument’s blown out of the water. We did have the intel. We had the video. We knew that there was not a protest that spontaneously erupted into an attack. We knew it was premeditated. We knew who it was. We had the group that claimed credit for it, Ansar al-Omar Sharif, or whatever the name was. They went out and claimed credit for it. The leader of the attack is all over Middle East TV bragging about it.

The regime maintains they didn’t have enough intel to mount any kind of a defensive move. So everybody’s scratching their heads now. The more we learn about this the worse everybody looks. The president of the United States said that he would keep these families posted. He said he would keep the nation up-to-date. That has not happened. Woods and Doherty and at least two others ignored the orders from the CIA to stand down and they went over there anyway. They went to the consulate when it was on fire. “Shots were exchanged. The quick reaction force from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained –” there were a total of 30 people in there. “They evacuated those who remained at the Consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight. At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied.”

Now, last night, before I knew this, there was a release of another series of e-mails last night that just enraged everybody further when they found out about it. What in the name of Sam Hill is going on here? And then you go back and you remember that these people involved kept trying to blame this on a video. They kept trying to blame it on a video and the guy who did the video for weeks, well, multiple days, over seven days, and look at all that’s known now. And so the questions are quite natural. Why were these people told to stand down three times? Why were requests for help denied? Well, Panetta says, (paraphrasing) “We didn’t have enough intel to know what level of force to send in. You gotta be very, very, very, very, very careful.”

Now, there’s an answer to this, and when you explain it to people, it’s very difficult for them to get their arms around it because they can’t conceive of high government officials thinking or acting this way. Now, the John Bolton answer is, if you really want to know why this happened the way it did, you have to understand the Obama ideology. The Obama ideology is that they create, as liberals, a bubble, an alternative universe or reality in which they live, in which everything’s hunky-dory. For example, they passed the stimulus bill, and that’s it, that’s all you gotta do and jobs will come back. You have a program to help people with their underwater mortgages, do the program, it’s done. Okay, we’ve done that. You got a problem with jobs, you get Thomas Friedman and a couple other eggheads that don’t know what they’re talking about, and have a two-hour seminar at the White House on a Friday afternoon, announce after two hours it’s done, and then you fix jobs, and then you move on.

In the case of Libya, well, we took out bin Laden. That’s always been the left’s definition of victory in the War on Terror. That’s how they always held Bush out. “You can’t say you won anything here. Bin Laden’s still alive. You shoulda gone after bin Laden. You gotta get bin Laden. That’s how the War on Terror’s won.” Well, guess what? (imitating Obama) “I got bin Laden. I did. I came off the golf course and I ordered the trigger to be pulled, three times.” So Osama’s gone and so is Al-Qaeda. They’re on the run. That’s Obama in the campaign, “Al-Qaeda on the run.” You know, when Obama took office, Al-Qaeda — this according to KT McFarland yesterday on Fox. Obama took office in 2009, Al-Qaeda basically was in two countries. Today they’re in 30.

They’re on the run, in Obama’s bubble, in Obama’s world, they’re on the run. He took care of them. He took out bin Laden. He also took out Khadafy. Oh, that’s really great. We’ve got democracy springing out in the Middle East, he thinks. No, we don’t. We’ve got the Muslim Brotherhood spreading Sharia and Islamic supremacy all over the Middle East. We don’t have an outbreak of democracy. In Obama’s bubble, according to Bolton, we got great things happening there. We got rid of Khadafy. We get rid of Mubarak. I’m loved. Middle East loves me. Americans love me, taking care of bad guys. Well, this Benghazi thing, that can’t happen. No, because there’s no explanation for it, not in our bubble. Why, we got bin Laden.

And you start explaining this to people, “Naw, naw, naw it can’t be.” It can be, if you understand liberals, and it’s not hard. The hardest thing about it is accepting what you know. And in this case, War on Terror, vanquished it. We got democracy springing up, the Libyans love us, in Obama’s world. So this has gotta be America’s fault. That’s another part of the ideology. Ergo it’s this filmmaker. It’s gotta be America’s fault. So you go out with that explanation. Do you know, we have learned at the casket ceremony we saw at Andrews Air Force Base, Mrs. Clinton promised one of the fathers of the dead that they wouldn’t rest until they got the guy who produced the video and put him in jail? Not that they would find whoever had actually killed him. Not promise to uncover whoever did this and bring them to justice. No, no, no. Mrs. Clinton said we’re gonna get this video guy. You watch us. You can be sure that we’ll take care of this guy, and this guy that did the video, we’re gonna get him in jail.

Guess what? He is in jail, without bail. He doesn’t get out ’til three days after the election. Folks, to describe it as outrageous doesn’t quite cover it. So, once again, same questions we asked yesterday. What in the world’s going on? Is this just gross malfeasance and incompetence, or is it out-and-out lies? We have Bolton’s explanation, the bubble. You can’t send the CIA, you can’t send in military response, you can’t, because it’s not warranted. This is not really happening. The Libyans didn’t even give us permission. We asked for permission and we weren’t told whether they granted it. But in the middle of a presidential campaign, and never doubt that campaign considerations factor the greatest, factor the largest, in even these kinds of decisions. That’s what people are figuring out.

That’s what people are having a tough time getting their arms around. It’s a campaign making all these decisions. You can’t have war break out in the Middle East in the middle of a reelection campaign. You can’t have Americans killed by real enemies. It’s gotta be because of a filmmaker in America. Otherwise the campaign might be harmed. Folks, don’t doubt me. I know it’s hard to believe this. But you heard Panetta. We didn’t have enough intel. They not only had intel, they were watching it take place. They had real-time video. We’ve got two dead heroes who defied orders three times to stand down. And it’s even worse when we learn what one of the fathers was told by Vice President Biden. Did you hear about the cue ball reference?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: On this Libya stuff, folks, I want you to all be aware, I have heard all the conspiracies, the theories. I’ve heard that Stevens was supposed to get kidnapped, that was the plan. And that he was gonna be exchanged for the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, and the SEALs didn’t go along with it and everything got screwed up. I also heard Stevens was running guns, yes, through Turkey to the rebels in Syria and that Hafez al-Assad’s kid, Bashar al-Assad, heard about that, didn’t like it, of course, and got hold of the rebels in Libya and they took the ambassador out.

Folks, some of that may be true. We don’t need it. We don’t need this to have an outrageous story. All of these explanations are to satisfy people’s curiosity. Why didn’t Obama do anything? Now it’s gotten even worse. We’ve got three separate requests from the CIA annex turned down, not just turned down, people told to stand down. So you put a theory out, “Well, that’s ’cause the ambassador’s supposed to get kidnapped, Obama’s in on this, it’s his idea.” That’s an explanation that some people can believe, because it’s harder to believe that you’ve got a president that would put campaign considerations first. I’m telling you, he would. The campaign, I can’t prove any of this, but I know these people, and I know that the campaign is in charge of these kinds of decisions.

Everything, the whole last four years has been run through the prism of Obama’s reelection. Everything is. It’s been an unending campaign, sort of like Clinton’s eight years were, or six. The last two years were survival for Clinton, but, regardless, it’s not hard at all to believe that the regime would filter everything through the campaign and decide that we really can’t have an outbreak of war in the Middle East and attack on America, not after the convention where Obama said 21 times we killed Osama and Al-Qaeda’s on the run, so forth. Other things are entirely possible with this bunch. I’m not discounting ’em. I say you don’t need them to have enough reasons to know that this is unacceptable. This behavior is totally unpresidential, it’s unacceptable, it’s outrageous, and, for whatever reason, the president of the United States is failing in his most basic responsibility. That’s to keep Americans safe who are in harm’s way. For whatever reason, he’s not following through.

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