I care more about building a cadre than winning the next election.  Elections aren't going to be decisive very shortly.

Every state department head  knows the limitations of troops on foreign soil and movements thereof.  That's not news.  They also do need permission to land troops on foreign soil, and on that regard they would need more than an executive order from the president and/or congress.  In order to shuttle more troops into Benghazi, you'd need local government of said city to authorize those troops to land.  And that's where the break down occurred.  They couldn't get permission from local government offices to allow additional troop expenditures and movement into the contested area.

And tell the truth, I don't care about Benghazi either.  It's just a news story being perpetrated after a full year, in the hopes that it can be used to hang up Hillary's possible chance at a presidential 2016 run.

Personally, It's all political bullcrap on the republican side.  I'm republican and even I can smell the bullshit emanating from my own party lines.

Maybe the US govt should have somebody on full-time to organize that

maybe they can call that person "Secretary of State"

and then not give that job to Hillary Clinton

cause she sucks at actually doing anything

this is getting stupid, you are agreeing with us that there were concrete steps that occur to you off the top of your head to speed up any rescue to any foreign mission, then, you accuse us of BS for saying it should have done by a professional diplomat who was warned by her ambassador that an attack was imminent

Actually the AUMF of 9/20/2011 to go after AQ is all any president needs to go after AQ anywhere in the world.   Congress authorized Bush to send Marines into London after 7/7, if he felt like it.

No, you can't do it like that, because all it takes is a single leak, for the foreign country to go berzerk, knowing that combat troops are on the way to their country.  Even a small strike team would cause an international uproar.  They had to get permission first, before sending the plane.  The only thing they could do is, have the troops, security team on the tarmac, prepared to load on the plane, or already on the plane, but the plane would not be allowed to take off without final authorization.  The state department would have to get that authorization from the foreign country, and then congress would still need to hold an emergency session for troop deployment on foreign soil.

It's just one of those diplomatic gaffes, that nobody in politics wants to deal with.  And a lot of americans don't understand the run-around, or the red tape in these incidents.  On that regard, I think the Tea Party just don't have enough political knowledge of how our government ties it's own hands behind it's executive branches.  However the State Department is not the Armed Forces.  Even if the plane was in the air, with troops, and they didn't get permission...they would have to have the fuel to divert to another airfield...and then they would have to explain to the other foreign governments why a military plane with a fully armed combat team was onboard.  And then it still would go public.

Politics is a bitch.

Your still hanging one man's death, on one woman.  There's a lot more going on in the background, behind governmental offices and black curtains.

1.  Security incident.
2.  Calls for reinforcement.
3.  Options are balley'd back and forth.
4.  Decision is made
5.  Permission is sought.
6.  Permission granted/denied/unable to contact (unable to contact is still a Denied)
7.  Armed forces are contacted to send immediate troop reinforcements, if permission is granted by foreign country.

This process unfortunately takes more than 5 minutes.  Even the State Department had a hard pressed time to get the facts of what was really going on.  And the state department was given three different story's from the same foreign government.  One story said they had not heard of an attack.  Then it turned into there was an attack, but everything was under control.  Then the story AGAIN changed to there was a full on attack on the embassy in question, and the embassy had yet to be secured.

One question you should be asking is, why did the foreign country not send in immediate reinforcements in order to secure the embassy and lend support to the besieged consulate?

How long...did it take for foreign army troop/police support in order to help secure the embassy and repel the attackers?

Ah.  Ok, in that case, how prepared were you?  Come on, you can't say you would have been more prepared.  We all know you put your shoes on before your socks, so you couldn't have been any more prepared than she was.

Your saying that you can predict every single event in the future and plan for every contingency, which is pure fantasy.

By your OWN admission, the FBI/NSA/CIA/SS and other agencies had planned responses, and those agencies have their own chain of command.

If plans were formulated to deal with such an intrusion on an american embassy on foreign soil, then why are you blaming one woman?  By your own admission plans were in place.  Which means those divisions could immediately act on.  OH WAIT...those are INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES.  FBI is for homegrown terrorist and criminal activity within the bounds of the United States, on that part you don't know their jobs or plans.  NSA, National Security Agency which has a few field agents, but usually does analytical data and information gathering.  CIA pertains to most threats outside the bounds of the United States and almost overlapping within the bounds of the United States.  SS...Secret Service?  The secret service has few agents, and they do not deal with Terrorist threats.  They are a bodyguard detail.

I'm sorry, all those Intelligence agencies has nothing to do with puting down physical private contractor security or military personel into the field.

FBI, NSA, CIA, SS...are all intelligence divisions, except for personal bodyguards of presidents and former presidents, that have nothing to do with physically guarding an embassy.  Private contractors and marines guard world embassies of the United States.  If those intelligence divisions failed to detect the attack, well that's their agents fault.

You need to realize that Libya is an independent country. You cannot park the 1st Cavalry outside the embassy in Tripoli or Benghazi.

Other than that, whether you had 2 cops, 10 private security guards, 20 marines or Rambo himself, people WILL die if a bunch of lunatics show up shooting the place up and firing rpg's and mortars and whatever the hell they used.

If the situation was that desperate (which it wasn't by any account), just close down the embassy and go home. This is just a non-story desperately being kept around by your own home grown crazies.

It takes time to get units in the air and enroute, and longer to arrive.

In that time you can make phone calls to head of state, their 2nd head of state, the military leadership, and more.

Key, the gunfight lasted 9 hours.

The idea that anybody can shoot up an American consulate for 9 hours within 4 air hours of Italy, and we won't have any plan in place to react in time, has the most grave consequences for all NATO security.

Key keeps pretending that the attack on Benghazi was a total suprise to Hillary Clinton, when her ambassador on the ground asked for extra security.  As Key points out, there were concrete measures that our top diplomat was in a position to do weeks in advance.  She didn't.

If anybody else was in charge Key would agree with us, but as he says, this is about a failure named Hillary Clinton, and it's not fair that we apply objective standards to the presumptive Democrat nominee.  We have to make excuses for her, lest we be meanies.

A competent Administration would have a backup plan for When Arabs Won't Fight Al Qaeda.