Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who likely has designs on running for the Presidency in 2016) famously retorted, “What does it matter now?” during Congressional hearings to attempt to determine what happened on the evening of September 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, at the American Consulate when four Americans were killed.  Was it a protest? Was it an attack?  Was it a video?  No matter what caused the deaths of those Americans (it’s clear to me it was an attack, not a protest, and certainly nothing related to a hideous never until then heard of amateurish YouTube video–I’m basing that analysis of the video on reports of others; I didn’t and won’t watch it), make no mistake about it, our government left those Americans to die when they had the means available to attempt a rescue or to quell the attack. I’m familiar with our assets in that area of the world — while my familiarity is not current, I can surmise that we had the ability to respond in a manner that could have ensured a more positive outcome to the events. The “go” order for that response would have to have come from the President.  Our assets would have been gearing up to help nearly immediately.  The President would have been the one to authorize any launches or the one to tell them to stand down.

Why it is important that they were told to stand down?  That was a change from how we operate.  Our military are assured they will never be left behind.  True, there are some operational activities that take place in an environment where the people carrying out the operation know if they run into trouble, nobody is coming to get them out.  In those cases, they don’t even call for help.  If Benghazi was one of those cases (perhaps gun running to Syria — compare to Iran Contra in the 1980s), operational security was compromised in a big way, and the Obama Administration compounded the errors in a large and publicly bad way.  Assuming Benghazi wasn’t a Black Ops thing gone horribly wrong (I have no personal knowledge about these type of operations, so that would be speculation on my part), what the Obama Administration did was renege on decades of policy that allowed our military and foreign service people to do their jobs with the assurances that if they got into a bad place in the bad places they were asked to go on behalf of service to our country that they would not be abandoned.

What does it matter now?  It now means our military and foreign service personnel now know our government will not be there to have their backs in a bad situation (I believe one person testified exactly that during the hearings last week).  They have to wonder if this time they will be left hung out to dry.  Their families will be fed some useless line of bull and be told that some citizen’s rights will be violated (arresting the man that made that reprehensible video–the mere threat of doing so violates First Amendment rights and shows a willingness to completely ignore Constitutional rights).  So, they trumped up probation violations and that’s what they’re using to keep the man who made the dumb video in jail?  Maybe the violations were real.  Maybe they weren’t.  I’m left to doubt the authenticity of the charges as this point.

What does it matter now? We assure mothers, fathers, wives, and husbands that when they encourage their loved one in their choice to serve our nation that our nation will not abandon them when she asks them to perform dangerous duty on her behalf.  The Obama Administration violated that trust on September 11, 2012, when President Obama (and I’m sure he issued the order — or people who didn’t get the order after prepping had to tell people they couldn’t go) told response forces to stand down before he went to bed and got a good night’s sleep before jetting off to Vegas for fund raising the next morning.  No one who has a loved one in the military can believe the recruiter when told their loved one will not be left behind.  We can’t believe our trainers and our superior officers when they assure us that no man (or woman) will be left behind.  Not any more.  Definitely not as long as President Obama remains our president.  He’s proven time and again the that military is only a photo op (as he so crudely stated early in his first term on a stop in South Korea).  He doesn’t value veterans of our military, nor does he value active duty personnel under his command.  He wants to cut their benefits and increase their out of pocket costs for their health care and other benefits that have been promised to them through the years.  There’s a movement afoot to have veteran’s benefits only for those who actually served in battle and were decorated.  In their minds, anyone who “merely” served didn’t sacrifice anything for this nation.  They aren’t worthy of the costly benefits they were promised when they signed up to serve where they were needed when the government decided they needed them.  They signed up with every expectation that they might not return home (even though they had every hope that they would do so).  Maybe those promised benefits were part of the reasons they signed up.  But accepting those benefits came at the cost of maybe not being able to partake of them.  The only guarantee was that if they lived to complete their obligation, the nation would be grateful for their service.  It’s not longer clear that is the case.

Any one who serves now, knows the Administration will not be likely to be there for them.  They just might be left behind.  For years.  For dead. Who knows.

What does it matter now?  Indeed. For anyone who thinks this discussion on Benghazi is old news or less important than health care or the budget, I can only say you must never have served in the military or foreign service or loved anyone who did, because the difference is whether we’re going to accept that our leadership left people sworn to serve our nation to die with no attempt to help them when that help was available.  That, in the words of Vice President Biden about something else is  a “Big F—–ing deal.”