(General Carter Ham, USA. Photo US Army).

There is nothing particularly spooky about this Halloween, though it was painfully close when I rolled home from Uncle Julio’s last night. Willow had given up and was closed, so the Mexican place was jumping with deferred energy. It was strange watching the bartender mixing chocolate milks for the hoard of little kids who had been driving their Yuppie parents crazy in the storm.

When I got home the power was still out at the building, with the laboring emergency generator in the basement only providing enough energy for one of the elevators, subdued hallway lighting and the bare essentials for lighting the foyer.

The lobby looked like the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Big Pink’s residents were huddled there, talking to one another about the storm and clearly starting to go a little stir crazy after 27 hours inside. The unit was still cold iron, and with some ice I got from the restaurant, I made a drink in the dark and retired to my bed early. It was cool and the eiderdown welcoming, and I was startled to waken with the light on beside the bed just after midnight. The clock radio was illuminated as well, and I sat bolt upright.

I could open the refrigerator door again, and maybe put those eggs away that had been sitting there accusing me from the counter since breakfast on Tuesday.

That led to a variety of other things, now that I could see them, and I was wired when I was done cleaning up, and celebrated with a toddy at around 0200. I dozed for a while after that, right until the alarm began to squawk.
The internet was still out, but what the hell. Like everyone else here, I am just relieved that the crisis passed without a disaster like the people of New Jersey and the Big Apple experienced. There but for fortune and all that.

We are off on a new tangent for the campaign, with the President looking Presidential, vowing to cut all the red tape and nonsense to get aid to the people who need it. The campaign is carefully pointing out that Mr. Romney has previously called for the elimination of FEMA, or at least the re-subordination of it to the States, so there is nothing that goes to waste in the endless campaign.

That has to be a relief for Mr. Obama, and put the whole Benghazi mess on the back burner. With the election so near, I doubt that it will blip the mainstream narrative. Still, there are some curious things about the whole story.

I am in no position to know, but I do know the process of how these things happen. There was a lot of discussion (prior to the storm) about who knew what and when. It now appears that the people at the consulate had asked for help a couple times, and it had been denied.

The Secretary of Defense helpfully pointed out that things were sort of confused, and therefore, forces should not have been committed prematurely. It was all just unfortunate, nothing to be done.

Sounds reasonable enough, but SECDEF Panetta ignores the process. When something happens that requires the immediate attention of the President, a message called a “CRITIC” is generated within the US SIGINT SYSTEM and sent to the National Security Operations Center at Fort Meade, with information copies to all echelons of command.

There is a reason for that. The CRITIC system was put in place by the intelligence community in mid-1958, responding to a Cold War requirement that critical intelligence be communicated from the field to the “highest authorities” in “speeds approaching ten minutes.” The information copies are spread broadly throughout the system for situational awareness by any command that might have a role to play in response.

That is not to say that ten minutes is all that it takes to get word to the President. But certainly, the information that the Consulate in Benghazi was under attack got at least as far as the White House Situation Room as soon as things started to go south at the compound, and was followed by additional requests for assistance.

That is where things get lost in the fog of war, which is not so much about war, but rather about a smokescreen. The problem with these things is that unless an event like Hurricane Sandy shows up to distract attention, the word begins to leak out. Shoot, we knew with the first chaotic press reports that there was something funny about the story. Demonstrators normally do not show up with crew-served weapons and RPGs at the ready.

Certainly a public affairs hack like Thomas Donolin, the National Security Advisor, would have had the facts quickly. He fell all over himself putting out the details of the bin Laden raid, barely waiting for the helicopter to land, and heavens, I would hate to think that politics would intrude in a matter of national security.

There is more confusing information, including some muttering that the Admiral commanding the Stennis Strike Group was relieved for cause. The Navy is not saying why, and usually it is about some inappropriate personal conduct with subordinates, or alcohol or both. The Russian military intelligence service- the GRU- was circulating a story that General Carter Ham and Rear Admiral Charlie Gaouette were in cahoots to commit mutiny. I never would have considered the GRU a source of anything but maskirovka- deception- but I follow their stuff with interest as a fellow professional.

(RADM Charlie Gaouette. Photo USN.)

Whew. But the problem with the current smokescreen is that other versions of what may or may not be the truth are out there. The most incendiary is that General Carter Ham, the bulldog-jawed Commander of AFRICOM was directed to stand down from a Quick Reaction Force mission he ordered to intervene to save the US Ambassador, who apparently was in Benghazi to meet a Turkish diplomat about the transfer of weapons from the massive caches accumulated by that madcap dictator Muammar Qaddafy.

Sort of elegant, like Iran-Contra, in that it provides plausible deniability while providing weapons to the rebels in Syria. Which I am not opposed to, in principle, but of course that sort of thing  would have wound up with the impeachment of Ronald Reagan, if his National Security Advisor John Poindexter had not taken a bullet and claimed he never mentioned it to Ronnie.

The conspiracy nuts are all over it. Get out your tinfoil, but this one has some interesting aspects and I am sure the investigation will be complete before the inauguration.

Me? I am glad we dodged this bullet, and I suspect that this story will be spiked until after the election is over. It would be too complicated to explain why we had Americans are risk and did absolutely nothing about it, even though we knew.

Within ten minutes. Nothing spooky about it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com