Could Obama Have Prevented the Benghazi Attack?

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/could-obama-have-prevented-the-benghazi-attack/

On September 11 the New York Times chose to run an op-ed attacking President Bush for not preventing the attacks of September 11 charging that Bush had intelligence about Al Qaeda’s intentions that should have led him to act.

The same question should now be asked about Obama in the wake of the devastating attack in Benghazi, the brutal murder of a US Ambassador and other Americans. It should especially be asked considering that Obama has been skipping half his intelligence briefings.

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) – the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times – or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent – falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

This is a criminal level of irresponsibility and raises serious questions about what Obama knew in the weeks leading up to the Benghazi attack and what he did not know because he refused to show up to learn about the latest critical threats to the country and instead stepped out for a game of golf or a campaign stop.

American national security deserves more than 38 percent of the effort and no amount of posthumous posturing in front of a teleprompter will change that.

Questions should be asked about whether

1. Obama was aware of the rising level of instability in Libya and the thousands of Jihadists who had been drawn to the magnet of his Libyan War.

2. Whether he was aware of the threat to Americans in Benghazi, whose rising level of violence has made the city into a central point in Libya’s ongoing civil war.

3. Whether he was even aware that Libya was still effectively in a state of civil war

4. Whether he was aware of the rising levels of Anti-American agitation in North Africa in the last several days

5. Whether he was aware that Libyan security forces had been heavily infiltrated by Islamists, an admission that was made weeks ago by high-ranking government officials.

6. Were appropriate security measures taken to conceal the Safe House that was attacked from Libyan authorities? And if so, why not?

7. Were proposals made to end the US presence in Benghazi or to boost it up with outside security contracts, instead of local Libyans who fled the attack, and were those proposals ignored?

Those are some fairly simple questions and we deserve to know the answers to them.