Does anyone here buy 16.5's so-tortured-it-should-be-illegal-under-the-Geneva-conventions logic? [EDIT: Or his laughable "laymen understand 'stand down' differently" thing?]
Anyone at all?
I'm a buyer. The stand down confusion was created by an early news report by Fox News (of course no other media source had time to do this kind of reporting; they were too busy covering for the Obama administration and smearing Romney for an ill-advised tweet) which referred to an order to wait as an order to stand down. To the reporter, and to the layman (including me), those two things mean roughly the same thing. Apparently, in the military "stand down" has a more precise and categorical meaning, i.e. terminate all operations and go back to doing whatever you were doing before (presumably up to and including jerking off).
In the more fevered swamps of the right wing blogosphere the reference to a stand down order took on a life of its own and was deemed to be indicative of cowardice at the highest echelons of the power structure. I actually think there were two orders to delay which have since been conflated with a the mythical stand down order. The first was when the CIA people at the Annex in Benghazi were gearing up to head over to the compound a mile away. Those people were told not to go - yet - by the local commander. After waiting some number of minutes, they decided to defy orders and go anyway. That is the delay I was familiar with. It appears, from reading through recent posts, that it has been claimed there was a separate order to wait given to a special forces group gearing up to go to Benghazi from Tripoli. That too appears to be a truthful claim. In military lingo, it was not a stand down order, but I think it is going way too far to call Hicks a liar. The phrase stand down order, with all of its layman connotations, was in the air, and it was not unreasonable to assent to its use implicitly in a question and answer session.
The truth is there was no official stand down order, but of course it would have been absolutely absurd to issue one under such circumstances. It is a red herring to argue against there being one. Even the most cowardly general in the world wouldn't issue a stand down order. He would just issue a "wait" order instead, and make sure that everybody waited long enough for any hostilities to end before sending his men into battle.
Personally, I don't blame the "wait" orders, such as they were, on anybody in the Obama administration, nor even on the commanders who gave those orders. They were judgment calls. We can second guess them now, but I think they were reasonable under the circumstances.
I think a more important issue, however, is one raised by the latest report. It seems that many hours after the President told Panetta to use all means possible to rescue Americans being attacked in Benghazi, no forces had actually moved. That is a remarkable span of inactivity when the President has ordered action. I think there was some bad planning at the highest levels, and also some bad implementation. When you are under time constraints, you want as many things happening in parallel as possible. I think that the decision making was instead happening in series. For example, if you think there's a 25% chance of using special forces troops training in Croatia, you start them mobilizing right away, and then maybe 2 hours later, when you have more information, make the decision as to whether or not they should actually "go." Sure, 75% of the time you've wasted their time and resources mobilizing them to do nothing, but 25% of the time, you've saved yourself 2 hours. It appears to me that none of this operational contingency planning happened, even in the midst of a crisis.
