Bombshell: Obama State Dept. Withdrew Security Teams From Libya Before the Attack That Killed Ambassador Chris Stevens [video and article]

Posted by clnews _Featured_, False Flag Operation, Videos, War on Terror Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

(By Gary Benson | Townhall.com)

In case this recent development wasn’t egregious enough, another shoe has dropped in the Benghazi scandal — adding more fuel to the speculative fire about why the administration seemed so motivated to coordinate a dishonest cover-up (read that link) after the fact.  CBS News takes the lead on this outrageous story:

The former head of a Special Forces “Site Security Team” in Libya tells CBS News that in spite of multiple pleas from himself and other U.S. security officials on the ground for “more, not less” security personnel, the State Department removed as many as 34 people from the country in the six months before a terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Lt. Col. Andy Wood will appear this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing that will examine security decisions leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. Speaking to CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Wood said when he found out that his own 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force were being pulled from Tripoli in August – about a month before the assault in Benghazi – he felt, “like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers. There was concern amongst the entire embassy staff.”

“They asked if we were safe,” he told Attkisson. “They asked… what was going to happen, and I could only answer that what we were being told is that they’re working on it – they’ll get us more (security personnel), but I never saw that.” Wood insists that senior staff in Libya, including Ambassador Stevens, State Department Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, and himself, all wanted and had requested enhanced security. ”We felt we needed more, not less,” he tells Attkisson. Asked what response their repeated pleas got from the State Department in Washington, Wood says they were simply told “to do with less. For what reasons, I don’t know.”

ABC News has more:

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens wanted a Security Support Team, made up of 16 special operations soldiers, to stay with him in Libya after their deployment was scheduled to end in August, the commander of that security team told ABC News. The embassy staff’s “first choice was for us to stay,” Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, 55, told ABC News in an interview. “That would have been the choice of the embassy people in Tripoli.” But a senior State Department official told ABC News that the embassy’s Regional Security Officer never specifically requested that the SST’s tour be extended past August, and the official maintained there was no net loss of security personnel…

When confronted with this damning report, a State Department official blames the lack of security on insufficient paperwork (security preferences were never “specifically requested”) and suggests that Washington believed there would be no “net” security loss on the ground.  If you believe either of those excuses, re-watch the CBS News interview above — or read this story from ABC News, which obtained a memo showing State rejecting specific security requests in Libya.  Essentially, the administration told our diplomats to do more with less and trust Libyan forces to replace the elite American security personnel.

Read the rest of the article….