"Also Wednesday, the White House denied a widely circulated report that quoted former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich saying a "fairly reliable senator" told him that there exists a series of emails from the office of National Security Advisor Tom Donilon to a counterterrorism group on the night of the Benghazi attack ordering them to "stand down" rather than mobilize assets to respond to the attack.
"Neither the President nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi during the attack," NSC Spokesman Tommy Vietor told The Cable by email."
Gingrich is a arch deceiver and the very Devil incarnate, but he does not make things up, especially not when it's something so readily verifiable and electronically logged in exact detail as an exchange of emails originating from a White House computer.
I quote Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (Ret.):
"The Cuban Study Group's Report makes it appear that there was some doubt and some lack of understanding about this operation. At the combat level where it really mattered there was absolutely no misunderstanding.
Without introductory comment, the Report states starkly:
"At about 9:30 P.M. on 16 April, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special
Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell
of CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following
morning should not be launched until they could be conducted
from a strip within the beachhead." [NOTE: That Bay of Pigs
site had been selected, because--among other advantages--
there was a suitable air-strip on the beach. The Brigade's
B-26's would operate from there once it had been secured.
That was the plan; but it was predicated upon the
destruction of Castro's jet aircraft first.]
Gen Cabell and Mr Bissell tried to persuade Secretary Rusk to permit the dawn D-Day strikes.
"The Secretary indicated that there were policy
considerations against air strikes before the beachhead
airfield was in the hands of the landing force..."
The Secretary added, with reference to the air strikes that
President Kennedy had ordered, "They were not vital."
The Report continues:
"The order cancelling the D-Day strikes was dispatched to
the departure field in Nicaragua, arriving when the pilots
were in their cockpits ready for take-off."
That CIA Air Operations chief in Nicaragua is an old friend of mine. After he had received that order from General Cabell, he called me at my home, at about 2 A.M. on the morning of April 17th and told me about that catastropic order. I could hear the B-26 engines roaring nearby. He urged me to call the CIA command section and convince them to cancel it. We all knew that the entire operation depended upon that air strike. I called them; but as we all know now, that order was never reversed, and as the Cuban Study Group reported:
"The cancellation of the strikes planned at dawn on D-Day...was probably the most serious of the causes of failure of the operation as it eliminated the last favorable opportunity to destroy the Castro Air Force on the ground."
Sometime later, I met my CIA friend who had called me that night. He had been absolutely shattered by that reversal. He told me, "If I had gotten on my bicycle, and left the operations tent after that call those fired-up Cubans would have revolted and taken off. If they had left they would have destroyed those jets. The Brigade's landing would have succeeded."
The Bundy Brothers were lifetime CIA and served in the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses both, key advocates for (among other things) escalating the war in Vietnam.
The CIA are alleged to have completely dropped the ball in Benghazi when the complete reverse appears to be true.
Who is this Tom Donilon? And why does he appear to be interdicting vital on-the ground intelligence coming in to the White House, not passing it on to the President and issuing his own instructions?
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