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The
Washington Post
Presidential
debate: Obama tells more about
Libya to some guy than to American public
By Erik Wemple
For
the good of the republic, Kerry Ladka must
leave his job with Global Telecom Supply in Mineola, N.Y., and take up
residence in the White House briefing room. Because, as it turns out,
this
61-year-old undecided voter showed great skill in getting some
much-needed
candor out of the president on Benghazi.
At
Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Ladka
stood up and asked about rejected requests for greater diplomatic
security in
Libya. “Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?” asked Ladka,
who
said that the question had come from the “braintrust of my friends at
Global
Telecom Supply in Mineola.” Wherever the question came from, it went
nowhere
with Obama, who used every grain of his political savvy to avoid
addressing it.
The public would have to wait.
Ladka,
however, wouldn’t. As reported in this
space yesterday, Ladka received a personal briefing from the president
on Libya
right after the debate concluded, perhaps because Obama realized he
hadn’t
answered the guy’s question and disrespected the Mineola braintrust.
According
to Ladka, here’s how the discussion proceeded:
He
basically explained to me why he delayed
calling it a terrorist attack. He said he wanted to be deliberate and
make sure
that the intelligence he was acting on was real intelligence and not
disinformation because he felt that anything he did in that region of
the world
— if he did it based on errorneous facts and information, it would be
more
damaging that [the event itself]. . . .
He was concerned that it could have been
misinformation or wrong information.
So:
Moments after telling a national TV
audience that the day after Benghazi he’d called it an “act of terror”
in the
Rose Garden, he was explaining to Ladka why he’d held off on calling it
a
terrorist attack. Fun.
The
president also explained to Ladka that he
didn’t want to identify the person at the State Department who’d turned
down
the request for heightened security because doing so would expose that
person
to harm.
Read
the rest of this article at the Washington
Post
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