So Obama has found three staffers in the State Department who don’t have the political clout to save themselves:
The A.P., quoting an unidentified administration official, said Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, had resigned. The third person, who was not identified, was an official with the department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, The A.P. said.
The buck stops here…..oh wait.
This follows on the heels of the “official accountability report” on the Benghazi attack in which they took the State Department to task but failed to deliver accountability to those on the top of the food chain.
The report is an indictment of nightmarish management-level incompetence: State Department officials “demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability”; there was a “lack of transparency, responsiveness and leadership at the senior levels”; there was “confusion over who was responsible.” Such descriptions, attached to the failures of almost any other organization, would cause the leader of that organization to be sacked — even if the failures hadn’t resulted in four deaths.
Oh sure, it sacrifices the careers of some lower level people like Boswell and Lamb but leaves the Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretaries of State, and the Assistant Secretary for the Near East virtually alone.
It is even odder that Secretary Clinton, who once said “I take responsibility. . . . I take this very personally,” also gets off without criticism. It’s not that absolving her or her top deputies is necessarily wrong, but where it leads is bound to affect morale in the department. Look at these events from the perspective of career officials at the office director or deputy assistant secretary level, and what just happened? People like you were just ruined, while people up the chain got off scot free. Being on the Seventh Floor appears to grant immunity.
And today, during the hearing today, without the head of the State Department present due to her coming down with something called “The Benghazi Flu”, Senator Bob Corker asked why some common sense wasn’t used:
Sen. Bob Corker on Thursday demanded to know why the State Department staffed its diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya without enough security to respond to the deadly attacks that killed four Americans in September.
“I cannot imagine sending folks out to Benghazi after we what we saw from the security cameras and the drones, I cannot imagine that we had people out there with the lack of security existent,” Corker (R-Tenn.) told department officials during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the attacks. “It seems to me that what the State Department would have done was to prioritize and in fact if we cannot have people there, not send them.”
Noting that Clinton just requested $1.3 billion from Congress, Corker asked why there were never any requests to make sure Benghazi was secure.
“I want to talk about why you did not ask about the resources for Benghazi,” Corker said.
Clinton couldn’t answer of course…she was home sick.
What a sham.
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