[seacapt]

Since this issue did strike close to home I'm glad the findings were released before this forum closed. Although the committee spreads the fault around and singles out nobody , as I stated in the old thread Ms. Clinton as SOS could have requested a Marine Corps. Embassy Detatchment for the mission. Instead she and the Pres opted for a political play by hiring Libyan security armed with flashlights.
Benghazi Review Finds 'Systematic Failure' by State Department - Yahoo! News
I hope she enjoys her retirement. She'll have secret service protection for the rest of her life , it would be fitting to replace them with the type of security Stevens had.

---

Last edited by seacapt; 12-19-2012 at 04:30 PM.

[Nesster]

Hillary Clinton’s fishy concussion—Editorial - NYPOST.com

Murdoch/NY Post's take on Hillary's illness and concussion

Hillary Clinton’s head fake
Last Updated: 12:28 AM, December 18, 2012
Posted: December 18, 2012
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was set to face a grilling from Congress this week over the terrorist attacks in Benghazi when she started channeling the late poet Shel Silverstein.

“I have the measles and the mumps / A gash, a rash and purple bumps,” said Clinton, in effect, informing the House and Senate (with regrets!) that she was suffering too many maladies to testify as expected about the Sept. 11 attack in Libya.

America’s top diplomat was to provide her first public answers regarding the murder of US Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Now that won’t happen.

Hillary ClintonClinton’s story beggars belief: While traveling in Europe, she contracted a stomach virus . . . which made her dehydrated . . . which made her faint at home . . . which caused her to fall and hit her head . . . which gave her a nasty concussion.

So Clinton’s deputies will appear in her stead before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday to explain the State Department’s failures.

That is not nearly enough.

We’ve chided the Obama administration in the past for its lack of transparency — but this looks like one of the most transparent dodges in the history of diplomacy.

And if Congress allows the secretary of state to wriggle free from scrutiny in the last days of her tenure (she may be gone from Foggy Bottom before the next round of congressional hearings in 2013), it will be a shame on that body as well.

So it’s clear that Clinton needs to testify.

And the Republicans, at least, seem to realize it.

“We still don’t have information from the Obama administration on what went so tragically wrong in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four patriotic Americans,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, when Clinton reported her noggin-bump. “This requires a public appearance by the secretary of state herself.”

Thursday’s hearing covers the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, the squad of DC luminaries who’ve been investigating the attack since October and who delivered their findings to Clinton yesterday.

The report may shed some light on the attack, but it behooves Clinton to explain why the administration spent weeks misleading the public by pinning blame for the strike on an obscure YouTube video.

No, she owes the public true accountability — not a paper press release from some former bureaucrats.

And that requires her to testify before Congress, before the public.

Nothing else will suffice.

[les3547]

She'll have secret service protection for the rest of her life, it would be fitting to replace them with the type of security Stevens had.

Don't you get tired of having (and sharing) such nasty thoughts? What? Do you think Hillary purposely tried to hurt others, and so now deserves revenge of the sort you suggest? It is telling that you can ignore the incredibly good job she's done to obsess about her relative few mistakes. People in high places in charge of so many dangerous situations can make errors that cost lives, it doesn't make them deserving of hatred. I wonder how well you'd do.

[jeffkrol]

commity ..............??????????


really??????

Although the committee spreads the fault around and singles out nobody.

... I place it smack dab on Hilliary's bum...funny..........

Never let facts get in the way of a good witch hunt I say...................

Bravo......

[Parallax]

It is telling that you can ignore the incredibly good job she's done

I'm not arguing here Les, just curious. Can you name 3 things she's done, not just been in the position when they happened but actually done, that would qualify by general standards as "incredibly good"?

[les3547]

I'm not arguing here Les, just curious. Can you name 3 things she's done, not just been in the position when they happened but actually done, that would qualify by general standards as "incredibly good"?

Day-to-day competence and a grueling work schedule just isn't enough for some people. What does she have to accomplish to escape the sentence of doing without security protection? Do you think she deserves the nasty comment made here even if she has not single great achievement, or makes a mistake that costs lives? It drips of hypocracy when one hear's barely a peep about the thousands of lives lost and trillions spent on a trumped up illegal Iraq war to secure oil and make war contractors rich—talk about incompetence—yet here we have to listen to more ugly contempt over an honest miscalculation of the dangers in Libya.

As she prepares to leave the national stage after a 20-year run, Clinton is winning bipartisan respect at home and admiration abroad for her role as the nation's 67th secretary of State.

From her first days on the job, Clinton refused to take the advice she said she received from a predecessor: Don't try to do too much. "It seemed like a wise admonition, if only it were possible," she said at the time. Her in-box, she said, included two wars, conflict in the Middle East, threats of violent extremism and nuclear proliferation, global recession, climate change, hunger and disease. Later, she was handed an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Japan and Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt's Tahrir Square.

Her solution: Get the State Department involved in everything. She created an emphasis on economics, insisting that deputies and embassies go to bat for U.S. businesses operating overseas. She started a global counterterrorism forum to boost countries' abilities to fight terrorists. She linked her department to the Pentagon, trading staff members and ideas as part of a "smart power" initiative linking diplomacy, development and defense. She worked to advance Internet freedom around the world and use the latest technologies to aid U.S. diplomacy.

Clinton has been perhaps the administration's central player, outlasting many of her counterparts and forging key partnerships with Obama's two Defense secretaries and two national security advisers. She and Obama, once rivals for his job, have meshed as sober, careful and pragmatic policymakers.
Perhaps more than anything else, Clinton has reached beyond heads of state to town halls, local TV, social media, women's groups and the young people who represent more than half the world's population. While working behind the scenes in Beijing for Chen's freedom and before the cameras to advance U.S.-Chinese relations, she took time to attend a "People to People Exchange" session and a demonstration of clean cook stoves to prevent widespread deaths among the world's rural poor.

"You really have no choice," she said about her hectic travel schedule. "Even though we live in the age of so-called virtual reality, where I could do a videoconference with anybody in the world in government, I could even be satellite-beamed into a personal appearance somewhere … nothing substitutes for showing up."

Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat who has worked for both Clinton and Obama at the State Department and the White House, cites Clinton's outreach to average citizens as a "signature of her stewardship … I wouldn't underestimate the impact of that over time."

Geographically, Clinton's top achievements have come in Asia. She broke with tradition by traveling there instead of Europe on her first trip in February 2009 to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. She has been at the forefront of Obama's effort to re-establish the United States as a Pacific power and block China from dominating the important military and economic travel lanes in the South China Sea.

Clinton played a leading role in Libya, lining up Arab partners for the military effort to oust Moammar Gadhafi and serving as an invaluable intermediary to prevent the coalition from fraying. "Without America's cajoling, hand-holding and occasional arm-twisting, that coalition never would have come together or stayed together," she said recently.

Speaking in Qatar days after the Arab Spring sprang roots in Tunisia in January 2011, Clinton issued a prophetic warning to the region's autocratic leaders. "Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries' problems for a little while, but not forever," she said. "If leaders don't offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum."

Clinton has worked with allies to isolate Iran, economically through tough sanctions and diplomatically at the United Nations. With Obama in 2009, she helped to rescue a Copenhagen summit on climate change from failure, eventually leading to an agreement by developing countries to help reduce carbon emissions. She was instrumental in getting Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff election in 2009 that gave him more credibility, but the relationship remains rocky.

On the road, Clinton combines a diplomat's cool with a mother's warmth. The exhaustion that comes with having traveled 777,721 miles over the equivalent of 70 full days and nights shows only with occasional absent-mindedness. Signing the guest book at Kolkata's Victoria Memorial, she turns to a reporter for help.

"I have no idea what day it is," she says. "I've lost track of time."

Little wonder. Clinton missed an entire Tuesday, flying from Washington to Beijing. She flew on consecutive days to Dhaka, Kolkata, New Delhi and back to Washington. The transcontinental flights were interrupted only by naps in her private suite and tarmac strolls during refueling stops in Alaska, Japan and Germany.

"She seems to be living in an airplane," says Barkha Dutt, a popular TV news anchor at NDTV in New Delhi. "And yet not once does she show signs of any flagging energy."

Since taking office, Mrs Clinton has visited 95 countries (see map) and logged some 730,000 miles, sometimes cramming more than a dozen meetings into a single day. This marathon came hard after the titanic Democratic presidential campaign of 2008. “I've had an extraordinary 20 years. I've been really at the highest levels of American political life,” she told The Economist in a recent interview, “I need a little time to reflect, step off the fast track I've been on.”

Evaluating her record is a complicated business. The job of a secretary of state has at least three parts: implementing foreign policy, acting as America's global ambassador and running the behemoth that is the State Department. But in the first and most visible of these—foreign policy—it is the president who takes the lead.

That has been especially true of this administration. By some accounts, Mr Obama has been the most hands-on foreign-policy president since Richard Nixon (see article). When America is at war, Washington's centre of gravity tilts even further towards the White House and the Pentagon and away from the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

Moreover Mrs Clinton started her job in unusual circumstances. With the victorious presidential campaign team ensconced in the White House and a defeated one at State, she needed to quell any lingering suspicions between the rival teams by showing a perfect loyalty. Not once in three years has she quarrelled in public with Mr Obama, and only once—during the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—did the wires between the State Department and the White House become seriously crossed.

That is commendable, but compounds the difficulty of assigning credit and blame for foreign policy. She says she has had no difficulty meeting the president on “anything, any time”. By the end of 2011, by the State Department's count, she had taken part in nearly 600 meetings at the White House. But on some hot issues she has stood on the margins or run things at arm's length. Mr Obama gave Joe Biden, his vice-president, the lead in Iraq. “Af-Pak” strategy was delegated to her friend, the late indefatigable Richard Holbrooke; and a special envoy, George Mitchell, was given charge of reviving negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Not until the archives are opened will historians know reliably what big issues, if any, she and Mr Obama fought over. But on most big decisions there has been little cause to fight. She and the president had a shared view of America's global predicament after George W. Bush left office. She says now that it was “painful” when she started to make her phone calls to hear how much perceptions of America had changed. There is self interest in this: her husband preceded Mr Bush. But in Asia in particular allies were anxious about the superpower's willingness to stay engaged. It was time to bring some “old-fashioned balance into our relationships”.

That is why Mrs Clinton became the first secretary of state since Dean Rusk in 1961 to make her first overseas visit to Asia. The so-called “pivot to Asia” was as much an invention of the White House as State's, but it is Mrs Clinton who has put in the long hours to revitalise neglected alliances and plug America back into the heart of Asia's multilateral organisations.

This was not all glamorous work. She admits knowing nothing of the Association of South-East Asian Nations' Treaty of Amity and Co-operation before planning a trip to Jakarta to signal America's intention to accede. “But it was a way of saying: look, we know we're the biggest most influential power still in the world, and intend to remain so. But we also know that we have to begin networking more effectively with a lot of other people and institutions.”

On that first of more than half a dozen Asian trips, Jeffrey Bader, the White House's director for East Asia until leaving last year, was struck by the shrieks of approval Mrs Clinton elicited along her motorcade route or in hotel lobbies. At a university in South Korea, he says, thousands of star-struck girls greeted her as “the ultimate woman's role model”.

Certainly no previous secretary has enjoyed Mrs Clinton's advantages in the second part of her job, as America's ambassador. Already a celebrity, she knew many of the world's leaders before starting out. It may help, too, that she is not a lawyer, general or professor, like previous secretaries of state, but a politician who has seen at first hand the high politics of the White House and the low politics of the Senate and the campaign trail. At a time when people everywhere are demanding a say in how they are governed, she thinks it is an advantage to be able to say to nervous leaders in fledgling democracies: “Mr President, I've won elections and I've lost elections; I do know how you feel.”

As for running the State Department, no woman who came within a whisker of being president was likely to leave the behemoth at Foggy Bottom unreformed. Borrowing an idea from the Pentagon, she launched its first quadrennial strategy review. The aim, she said in an article for Foreign Affairs, was to develop “a more holistic approach to civilian power”.

America's ambassadors were instructed that diplomacy was no longer a matter of talking only to other governments: they were to see themselves as CEOs of multi-agency missions, reaching out to the whole of society. In the 21st century, she said, “a diplomat is as likely to meet with a tribal elder in a rural village as a counterpart in a foreign ministry, and is as likely to wear cargo pants as a pinstriped suit.” In umpteen meetings with “civil society” around the world, she has led by example.

Also new is an emphasis on “economic statecraft”, an attempt to co-ordinate everything from pushing China on its exchange rate, to promoting free trade, to defending intellectual property, to luring inward investment and helping American firms find markets and opportunities overseas. She has appointed the department's first chief economist. These, however, are areas where the Treasury, Commerce Department and White House are already active—and likely to stay dominant.

Running the department has also given Mrs Clinton an instrument to promote the welfare of women, a cause she made her own as first lady in 1995 when a speech on women's rights at a conference in Beijing made a global splash. She has installed Melanne Verveer, her former White House chief of staff, as ambassador for women, reporting directly to her, and another longtime aide, Kris Balderston, “special representative for global partnerships”. One of his projects has been to create a coalition of governments, corporations and non-profits to develop cheap, hygienic cooking stoves for the millions of women around the world who have to forage for fuel to feed their families.

[Parallax]

Do you think she deserves the nasty comment made here even if she has not single great achievement, or makes a mistake that costs lives?

Yes. Maybe comments like that, if made publicly, would prevent future SsOS from making the same mistake and costing more innocent lives.

If it saves even a few lives, isn't it worth it? (OOPS, wrong thread.....................................)

[les3547]

Yes. Maybe comments like that, if made publicly, would prevent future SsOS from making the same mistake and costing more innocent lives.

If it saves even a few lives, isn't it worth it? (OOPS, wrong thread.....................................)

It amounts to wishing her death, I can't believe you condone it.

[Parallax]

It amounts to wishing her death, I can't believe you condone it.

I certainly don't want any harm to come to her, but I think Ken's comment is a valid sentiment.

[magkelly]

The woman fainted from the nasty stomach bug that has been going around. FYI, flu season started early this year and the type of flu is a particularly bad one. She was probably working despite it for several says. She overdid it, fainted, nearly knocked herself senseless. She has a concussion and has been ordered to stay at home all week. She's not avoiding anything. She's recovering from a serious blow to her head. Ever had a concussion and the flu at the same time? I have. Try managing to stand up let alone work.

She sent someone in her place and has said that as soon as she's able she'd be more than happy to address the committee personally. A mistake was made, yes, but it was not done in malice. What happened was tragic but they had no idea that it would happen. I do think she's overall been a good Secretary of State. One mistake, however horrible the consequences, does not change that. The game of diplomacy is not an easy one. It's usually not a safe job by any means, working in any embassy and even in embassies with military staff there have been casualties in the past.

It's easy to be an armchair critic but the truth is we have no idea of what it is to actually do her job. We make a mistake and we might get called on the carpet. She makes a mistake and she answers to the nation. I don't think what happened was okay, but neither do I think she deserves the venom directed at her. She's just one person and she has to answer to others. I doubt that the decision to use non military staff was solely hers. It was a wrong decision in this case, but what happened likely would have happened even with a few military guards on duty. The whole place was overwhelmed by a mob and even with guns and trained personnel there likely would have been some people killed and not just among those attacking. This is not the first such incident nor will it be the last so long as we continue to place embassies and people in less than stable countries. It's a necessary evil and it's a part of the job that people in that field know going into it that they face.

Yeah, I think there should be some discussion of this incident and I think it should lead to better security at our embassies but I don't want to see Clinton scapegoated. I think she's been a good SOS and that she deserves better than that.

[JohnInIndy]

It amounts to wishing her death, I can't believe you condone it.

How is that wishing her death? He's just wanting her to have the same protection that she gave those 4. And she wouldn't even be in as bad a country as they were in.

[les3547]

I certainly don't want any harm to come to her, but I think Ken's comment is a valid sentiment.

Military officers, police, mayors, parents, business managers, writers, judges . . . all people in positions of authority can make calls where people are endangered unintentionally. They are usually doing the best they can with what they understand, but that doesn't mean they won't make mistakes and can't learn to do better. So is it your recommendation that everybody (or is it just Hillary) in the world who unintentionally endangers others should be likewise endangered themselves . . .what, to teach them a lesson, a little revenge, some payback? Is that your idea of how to run a world?

I say his sentiment amounts to hate speech.

[Parallax]

I say his sentiment amounts to hate speech.

I say it was an off-hand remark borne of frustration with a situation.

[jeffkrol]

I'm not arguing here Les, just curious. Can you name 3 things she's done, not just been in the position when they happened but actually done, that would qualify by general standards as "incredibly good"?

That's not fair.. I can't name 3 things you have done ..... I'm sure you can say the same for me...

[JohnInIndy]

That's not dfair.. I can't name 3 things you have done ..... I'm sure you can say the same for me...

But neither one of you are SOS. And I really don't think your actions led to 4 murders like hers and Obama's did

I could be wrong on the second part.