Scared to Death

             What we have seen so far in Washington's triple scandals (quadruple, if we include Sibelius's shakedown of insurance execs to fund Obamacare) is a concerted effort to shield President Obama from any culpability. He didn't know, he wasn't involved, he wasn't told, etc. Former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 157 times, but not once, if you can believe it, did he speak to the president about targeting conservative groups.  Bill O'Reilly is tearing out the little hair he has left over that one.

            Democratic defenders seem confident that if anyone is going to take a hit, it's the underlings in the IRS and in the Justice and State departments.  Maybe Eric Holder's perjury will cost him his job, they say, but the president's hands are clean on that one.  But there's one scandal where the president's hands may be filthy dirty. It's the one scandal feared most by the Administration.  Benghazi.
            So far we know that right after Ambassador Stevens was killed, the president met with his security advisors.  All of them knew at that time that they were looking at a planned, terrorist attack. We know that he talked to Defense Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey about deploying troops in response to the attack.  We also know that this was the last time he talked to them that day.  Panetta testified that he then ordered anti-terrorism units in Rota, Spain, and special ops forces in Central Europe to get ready to deploy to Libya.  But they never got off the ground. Why? 
            Charles Krauthammer thinks the answer may lie in finding out where President Obama was in the hours following the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens.  We know that he met with Secretary Clinton to concoct a story about an anti-Islam video, but that's not the important point here.  Krauthammer comes close to the real story when he says that the president never talked to Panetta or Dempsey the rest of that day and night.  Why is that important?  The answer, I think, is contained in a three-letter acronym: CBA, which stands for Cross Border Authority.
            According to my sources, which include three independent military officers, U.S. forces need explicit orders from the president to cross over international borders on a hostile mission. That's why, for instance, Navy Seals needed and received a direct order from the president to cross into Pakistan to kill bin Laden.  Panetta and Dempsey were ordered to deploy troops, i.e., get them into position. But they never got the order to go to Benghazi.  They never had CBA, because the only person who could have given it to them was President Obama.  And he didn't.
            We can only speculate as to the reason the president decided not send troops into Benghazi to rescue Americans under siege.  Panetta tried to excuse Obama's inaction by saying that the troops were too far away (we had a Special Ops team in Sicily ready to go and only two hours away), that they could not have gotten there on time (How could he have known how long the attacks would last?), and that "The U.S. military doesn't do risky things." And this from the Secretary of Defense? What a disgrace!
            If the simple fact that the military lacked CBA can be established by following the "Stand Down" order up the chain of command, it would put the blame for our failure to rescue dying Americans in Benghazi squarely on President Obama. Regardless of his reasons for not giving CBA to the military, such cowardice, in my view, amounts to a violation of the president's oath of office to protect America from its enemies.  Worse, if he did it for political reasons consistent with the video falsehood, it would be unforgivable.
            That's why the White House is scared to death of Benghazi.