SOS at CPAC: "Where's Admiral Gaouette?" and the "Benghazi CBA"

[bsteadman]

SOS at CPAC: "Where's Admiral Gaouette?" and the "Benghazi CBA"

Israel National News
Mark Langfan, at CPAC
3/16/2013

Excerpt:

"SOS" is a naval emergency distress call meaning "Save our Ship", but at the CPAC, (Conservative Political Action Committee) convention, "SOS" stands for SpecialOperationsSpeaks.com, a new organization of former US Special Ops officers who are issuing distress calls about urgent high-profile questions, and critical unanswered mysteries about the 2012 Obama Benghazi debacle.

CAPT Larry Bailey, USN (Ret.), a former senior SEAL commander and co-founder of Special Operation Speaks, demands to know, "Where the heck is Admiral Gaouette?" ADM Gaouette was the commander of the USS Stennis Carrier Strike Group on station in the Persian Gulf area who was mysteriously summarily stripped of his command during the attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered.

Several days afterward, it was reported that ADM Gaouette was summarily relieved of his command during a major operational contingency event during the Benghazi attacks for the alleged claim of "inappropriate leadership judgment." ADM Gaouette's detention and total disappearance weeks before the November 2012 presidential election was a story that CAPT Bailey says "disappeared into a black hole of silence."

CAPT Bailey, as a "Brother-in-the-Navy" of ADM Gaouette, has some urgent and vital questions:

Where is ADM Gaouette now, and where has he been for over 4 months?

Why hasn't Congress called ADM Gaouette to testify about the 2012 Benghazi fiasco, when he clearly was a key operational senior commander in-theater?

If ADM Gaouette is under some type of detention, what does "inappropriate leadership judgment" mean, what is he specifically charged with, and does he have proper legal counsel?

CAPT Bailey urges anyone who heard or saw anything, or has even the smallest most innocuous piece of the puzzle, to tell them what that piece is. He says, "The more questions SOS asks, the bigger the black hole of silence becomes."

Col. Richard F. (Dick) Brauer, Jr, USAF (Ret.), SOS Air Commando Coordinator co-Founder of SOS, has a slightly different, but still vital question: "Where was President Obama's CBA (Cross Border Authority) for the Benghazi ‘rescue’ attempt when US Defense Secretary Panetta claimed Obama told him, ‘Do whatever you gotta do to save American life.’?”

Col. Brauer explains that an insertion of any US forces into Benghazi, Libya, or across any international border into a country where US forces were not deployed, would have required a special US Presidential CBA authorization to be issued. So, in effect, Obama's telling Secretary Panetta to "Do whatever you gotta do" without simultaneously issuing a specific CBA enabling such action is like "telling a fire station to extinguish a 5-alarm blaze while the firemen were not legally allowed to even leave the fire house, go to the fire, or douse the burning building."

So, Col. Brauer's point is that President Obama may have known that verbally telling Secretary Panetta to "do whatever you gotta do" without his also issuing the legally necessary CBA was "passively ordering USSECDEF Panetta to ‘do nothing.’"
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View the complete article at:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Ne...8#.UUeJDVf4b9Y

[bsteadman]

Free Republic is running a thread titled, 'SOS at CPAC: "Where's Admiral Gaouette?" and the "Benghazi CBA", which was started 3/17/2013 by Nachum

The thread references a 3/16/2013 Israel National News article written by Mark Langfan at CPAC - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Ne...8#.UUeJDVf4b9Y

View the complete Free Republic thread at:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2997684/posts

[bsteadman]

Where Are the Benghazi Survivors?

Canada Free Press
Arnold Ahlert
3/18/2013

Excerpt:

Where are the survivors? The unseemly efforts undertaken by the Obama administration, Democratic collaborators and a calculatingly uninterested mainstream media to avoid answering one of the fundamental questions of the Benghazi debacle will no longer suffice. Republicans in both the House and the Senate have made it clear they have run out of patience with the administration’s effort to keep the survivors isolated. If they are successful, this scandal may finally get the kind of national attention it so richly deserves.

The effort to keep the Benghazi survivors under wraps is nothing new. On December 12, 2012, Breitbart News revealed that Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R- UT) had been “thwarted” by the State Department from seeing any of these Americans, some of whom had been badly injured. “My understanding is that we still have some people in the hospital,” Chaffetz said at the time. “I’d like to visit with them and wish them nothing but the best but the State Department has seen it unfit for me to know who those people are—or even how many there are. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know what state they’re from. I don’t even know how many there are. It doesn’t seem right to me.”

One would think that such an allegation would command the attention of investigative journalists across the nation. One would be wrong. Other than media referring back to the Breitbart story, there wasn’t one other news outlet interested in either the survivors or the disturbing reality that the State Department was keeping them secret.

Questions about them were revived when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton successfully stonewalled clueless Republicans during her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last January. At that time it was reported that five of the 20-30 people who survived the attack were State Department Diplomatic Security agents evacuated to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. When Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) questioned Clinton, she revealed that she had only talked to one unnamed survivor, and that she felt it was “inappropriate” to talk to the others until they had been interrogated by the FBI. Not a single Republican bothered to ask why contact with the State Department would have tainted an FBI investigation. Clinton, who helped perpetrate the administration lie that the Benghazi attack was precipitated by an incendiary video posted months beforehand on the Internet, walked away unscathed.

After Clinton’s appearance, Sen. John McCain claimed he wanted to hear directly from the survivors, saying they should come to Capitol Hill and report their own versions of what occurred on September 11. “They should certainly [do so]. If not come up to Capitol Hill at least be identified and take their statements as to what they saw,” he said. He continued. “We still want the questions answered. We’ll do everything we can to get answers to questions. The American people deserve them. Like Hillary said, ‘there are four dead Americans.’”

In February, Breitbart reported that Bill Bransford, a Washington, D.C. attorney at Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C. who specializes in federal employment law, contended that the survivors cannot legally reveal to the press or most members of Congress that they were even witnesses to the carnage. “First of all, I’m assuming that most of these people who witnessed the attack, except for the State Department folks, would be intelligence people, and they are not covered by the whistle blower protection laws,” Bransford explained.

He further revealed that State Department employees must sign non-disclosure agreements. “If somebody violates one of these non-disclosure agreements, the consequences could include interfering with a criminal investigation, obstruction of justice, criminal charges for releasing classified information, and those are pretty serious,” he warned. Yet Bransford also said that State Department employees are covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act, but that a revision of the law, the Whistle Blower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012, was so new, some of the changes may not yet be in effect.

Bransford added that it is likely some survivors could talk to certain congressmen authorized to hear their stories, but that the congressmen “are precluded from further releasing the information. They know that it’s classified and they can’t release it to the media. They couldn’t get up on the floor of the Senate or at a hearing and make a speech about it because it’s classified and they seem to respect that,” he said.

Breitbart also reported that Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where most of the survivors were taken, “is not only heavily guarded on the outside but on the inside as well, some say” and that “what appeared to be Secret Service personnel [were] moving in and out of a closed wing of the floor that was off-limits to everyone else.”

The fate of the survivors was pushed to the fore again on March 11, by CBS New’s Sharryl Attkisson, one of the few investigative reporters who still takes her job seriously. Attkisson again reminded Americans that the survivors remain off limits, even as she revealed that an undisclosed number of witnesses who also have not spoken publicly remain at the U.S. compound in Tripoli. In addition, she reported that CBS “had filed multiple Freedom of Information requests for Benghazi-related material but none has been provided.”

Four days later, the momentum began to shift. Stung by revelations that recuperating survivors still remain at Walter Reed, Republicans warned that unless the White House provides more information about the Benghazi attack, subpoenas could be issued to bring the survivors before Congress to testify. GOP leaders also threatened to hold up the confirmation of Deborah Jones, Christopher Stevens’ replacement as U.S. Ambassador in Libya.
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View the complete article at:

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53838

[bsteadman]

Free Republic is running a thread titled, 'Senator Graham: Benghazi Survivors ‘Told To Be Quiet’, which was started 3/17/2013 by 'yoe'

The thread references a 3/16/2013 Fox News article - http://nation.foxnews.com/lindsey-gr...administration

View the complete Free Republic thread at:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2997790/posts