The shuffle continues.
Retiring Marine colonel tells Congress he wasn't involved in Benghazi response
A retiring Marine colonel who commanded a special operations unit in Africa during the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, told Congress on Wednesday that an elite four-man team under his command was kept in the Libyan capital that night to prevent attacks there.
Col. George Bristol’s statement corroborates previous testimony by his subordinate officer, Army Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson. Gibson told the House Armed Services Committee in June that, contrary to previous media reports, he was not ordered to “stand down” by higher headquarters in response to the Benghazi attacks. Rather, Gibson’s team was told to stay in the city of Tripoli to defend Americans there in the event of additional attacks and to help survivors being evacuated from Benghazi, Bristol said.
Phi Beta Iota: The most interesting part of the story is that the US Department of Defense has still not equipped the aircraft of its key leaders with inflight Internet and general communications, or in cases where they are flying commercial, ensured they are flying Lufthansa or some other airline that does provide Internet across the oceans. This one lapse is so emblematic of all that is wrong with DoD, we thought it worth emphasis.
