Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth (7 page)

The proposed military budget cuts $128 million from the Tomahawk missile program for fiscal year 2015, and money to support the Tomahawk program is eliminated altogether for fiscal year 2016. In other words, the world’s most advanced cruise missile is being removed from our arsenal. The budget for another effective weapon, the Hellfire missile, has been eliminated entirely for 2015. We won’t need the missile base at Malmstrom at all once the administration gets finished eliminating our most effective military weapons.
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The fact that these cuts of critical weapons came as a shock to legislators and military experts shows you that they don’t understand that this administration is out to neuter our military and our capability of defending ourselves against attack.

I’m only getting started telling you about what I see as the incalculable damage this administration is doing to our military.

Firing generals in wartime is a very rare occurrence, but that hasn’t prevented this administration from conducting a wholesale dismissal of our military commanders. The number of officers relieved of their command is extraordinary. During the eight years of the Bush administration, only once did the position of commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan change. Under the current administration, there have already been five.
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In 2009, Gen. David McKiernan, the Afghanistan commander of the ISAF, resigned. One source explained the reason for McKiernan’s resignation this way: “He [McKiernan]
had demanded competency from an incompetent Democrat [Obama].”

Another source explained that he was “fired” because he was too “old school.”

In other words, he was a patriot who might well have stood in the way of the ongoing dismantling of the U.S. military.
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The officer who replaced McKiernan as ISAF commander didn’t last long in the job. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was not old school. He was young and had fresh ideas about how to conduct the war against a terrorist enemy. McChrystal’s mistake was making his contemptuous opinion of Barack Obama known in a
Rolling Stone
magazine article, “The Runaway General.”

McChrystal made the mistake of telling what he saw as the truth about Obama.

He explained that in their first face-to-face meeting the president didn’t even know who McChrystal was, let alone anything about the general’s war record.
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In the article, McChrystal also correctly described the administration’s chief national security advisor, James Jones, as “a clown.”
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It’s understandable that McChrystal had to be dismissed, but his dismissal raises a much deeper concern about the administration’s relationships with the country’s top military officers.

As the news about the president’s inability, even his unwillingness, to deal fairly with military commanders began to reach the public, the White House felt the need to respond. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told the
Washington Post
that the president appreciated candid military advice “above all else.” In his public statement, McDonough explained that the president maintains “close, and in some instances warm,
relationships with his military chiefs.” One general recently returned to the States after serving in Afghanistan had a different view, saying that the White House would rather the military be seen and not heard.
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Perhaps the most obvious example of how what I see as the decimation of our military is making us a pawn to the world’s leftist movement is the murders in Benghazi. I would be remiss if I didn’t explain how that night fits into what’s happening with our military.

Do you remember the general whom Obama appointed to replace McChrystal?

It was David Petraeus.

Petraeus lasted nearly two years before he resigned. By the time he left government service, Petraeus had graduated to the position of head of the CIA.

The alleged reason he resigned?

He had been involved in an extramarital affair.

The administration had known about Petraeus’s dalliance with the woman who wrote his biography since he was vetted to assume the position of CIA director. The administration had known about his affair for months before he resigned.

Two of America’s most experienced military commanders also lost their jobs in the wake of the Benghazi murders. Gen. Carter Ham and Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette were relieved of duty because they tried to intervene and prevent the loss of four Americans’ lives.

The first eyewitness to the Benghazi attack, a security guard who worked at the compound helping to protect American personnel, has made it clear that the State Department had known for a long time that an attack on the consulate in Libya was inevitable, yet few steps were taken to fortify the compound or to otherwise secure it.
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Here’s what former assistant secretary of defense Frank Gaffney believes happened on the night of September 11, 2012, based on the available evidence: The Obama administration appears to have been involved in a gunrunning operation that was being managed by Ambassador Christopher Stevens out of the Benghazi consulate. Stevens is alleged to have been coordinating the delivery of military weapons, including as many as twenty thousand Stinger missiles, to rebel fighters involved in the overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. After Gadhafi was ousted, Stevens was said to be further coordinating a massive transfer of weapons to rebels in several Middle Eastern areas, including Syria. Many, if not most, of the rebels were affiliated with al Qaeda.
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The Obama administration appears to have been supporting terrorism through providing weapons to the very Islamists the United States is supposedly fighting against in the war on terror. If this is true, the administration certainly feared that Stevens would make details of the gunrunning public.

Was that the reason why, when the attack on the Benghazi compound began, the decision was made not to send help?

Contrary to the Obama administration’s official story, Gen. Carter Ham, then the commanding officer of the U.S. Africa Command, was receiving live communications from various intelligence assets that provided real-time details of what was
happening on the ground. In addition, there were dozens of CIA operatives on the ground in Benghazi who could have been used to rescue those in danger.
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Ham began organizing a Special Forces team to intervene in Benghazi immediately after he received news of the assault on the Benghazi ambassador’s compound.

Even though he received the order to stand down—likely from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who may have been receiving his orders from Valerie Jarrett
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—Ham went ahead with his rapid response plan. In order to stop him, one source says that the administration had the commanding general apprehended. Ham was informed that he was relieved of his command, which stopped his attempt to save American lives.
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In making preparations to intervene, Ham had been communicating with Rear Admiral Gaouette, commander of Carrier Strike Group Three. Gaouette, who like Ham had received the desperate requests for help from Stevens and his team, was also preparing the assets under his command to intervene and save the lives of those under attack in Benghazi.
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I think that Gaouette was relieved of his command because he wouldn’t stand down and watch Americans die, as he may have been ordered to do.

Ham, the general in charge of military assets in North Africa and one of the men who could have saved the four lives that were lost in the Benghazi massacre, told a Republican congressman that he had not received any requests for military intervention in Benghazi.
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After an official investigation, Gaouette, too, was disciplined, ostensibly because he had been accused of using profanity in a public setting and making at least two racially
insensitive comments, officials familiar with the investigation said.
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No mention was made of Benghazi.

Is it possible that Obama may have recognized that these two decorated military officers were patriots who put duty to their country first? Might he have thought that their refusal to deny help to Americans in Benghazi would have denied the administration the ability to cover up the fact that it was supplying weapons to “rebels” who were often fighting on the side of al Qaeda? Might the president have been thinking that patriots like Gaouette and Ham would stand in the way of his power grab if it became necessary?

There were other casualties on the night of the Benghazi attack.

David Ubben, a diplomatic security agent, was in Benghazi on the night of the terrorist assault. Ubben acted heroically on that night.

Early in the evening he went back into the burning Benghazi consulate several times in an effort to rescue Sean Smith, one of the four killed. When he finally found him, Smith was already dead from smoke inhalation. Smith had also reentered the consulate several more times in an effort to locate Ambassador Stevens, but he was unsuccessful.

As the attack progressed, Ubben joined Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty on the roof of the CIA annex as they tried to defend the building against dozens of terrorists who were attacking it.

The mortar that killed Woods and Doherty also shattered Ubben’s leg.

Fox News reported the incident this way:

David Ubben waited for twenty hours after he was hit on that rooftop with Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty. His leg was shredded. We know that he had been recovering for ten months afterward at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He was defending the U.S. consulate, and yet no medical assets were sent to the scene to help him. How could this be?
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What wasn’t reported at the time was what the commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces was doing.

First, the president was getting a good night’s sleep as the attack raged on.

When he woke up on the morning of September 12, 2012, he flew to Las Vegas to make a campaign appearance—although the attack was still not resolved.
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In the wake of the Benghazi murders, Rep. Frank Wolf accused the administration of operating a gunrunning operation that sent weapons captured in Libya to Syrian rebels. In the wake of these accusations, the military has been ordered to conduct polygraph tests as often as once a month on dozens of people who have knowledge of what happened on the night of the Benghazi murders. The polygraph tests are almost certainly done to determine if those people have told others what really happened. It’s very likely that this is the administration’s way of intimidating anyone who’s tempted to speak out against the decisions made at the top of the administration.
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A year and a half later, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a report that said, “White House officials failed to comprehend or ignored the dramatically deteriorating security situation in Libya.” The White House statements to the contrary were exaggerations. Despite warnings from embassy and other personnel close to the
situation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was recommending that security personnel be reduced leading up to the Benghazi murders.

When the attack occurred, U.S. forces that might have intervened were not ready, and there was no clear description of how a response might have been launched if needed.

In other words, neither the State Department nor the Department of Defense had taken the “deteriorating security environment in Libya” seriously.
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The report explains all this, but it leaves out the most important aspects of the Benghazi failure. My view is that even despite the lack of preparation and the underestimation of the chance of an attack, those who did try to mount a counteroffensive to save our personnel were forbidden to take action.

They were forced to stand down.

Americans died.

In January 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its bipartisan report on the Benghazi terrorist attacks. It contained information so shocking, I can’t believe it hasn’t been the focus of an investigation. The report said that “as many as fifteen individuals supporting the investigation or otherwise helpful to the United States have been killed in Benghazi since the [September 11, 2011] attacks.”
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Fifteen people who helped us in Benghazi have been killed since then?

Are we supposed to believe that those deaths are not somehow connected to the fact that these people helped us on that night? Are we supposed to believe that their deaths are just a coincidence?

Or do you think that their identities might have somehow gotten into the hands of our jihadist enemies and that
those who helped us are being systematically eliminated by terrorists?

The purging of our own seasoned military commanders may well go beyond what happened in Benghazi.

As I’ve said, it is likely that there is a contingent in the U.S. military that wants to see President Obama ousted. In addition, though, some of the most powerful men and organizations in the world are also in favor of ousting Obama. They would love to see the president marched out of office.

Is it possible that the president has for the past several years been appointing his own handpicked military officers to second-in-command positions in many areas of the military? Might they be put in place in order to monitor how the commanders are handling their jobs and to report any threats their commanding officers might present to what many see as an ongoing takeover of the U.S. military by the current administration?

Obama seems to be continuing his purge of the military in order to avoid the kind of refusal to obey his orders that occurred on the night of the Benghazi attack. But his purge has other implications.

The president’s weakened military faces new threats from around the world. I’ll deal at great length in the next chapter with the threat that Russia poses for us as it annexes Crimea and advances its takeover of bordering countries. For now I want to explain to you the threat we face as Iran and China up the military ante in the Middle and Far East.