Benghazi: Criminal act or act of war

Benghazi: Criminal act or act of war

zzzzU166P5029T2D587435F26DT20130503094138The ultimate in workplace violence…

Criminal charges have officially been filed today in Washington, D.C.’s U.S. District Count against the accused perpetrators of last year’s deadly assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. as reported by the Philadelphia Enquirer on Aug. 8, 2013 and CBS News on Aug. 7, 2013

Ahmed Abu Khattalah, leader of the Abu Ubaidah Brigades — a sub-group of the larger Ansar al Shariah militia — as well as other al-Qaeda allied groups with such names as the 17 February Martyr’s Brigade and the First Brigade of the Libya Shield forces have been implicated in the assault.

By all accounts, the Benghazi attack was a textbook example of a well planned, well armed and highly coordinated military assault versus “guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans,” as some have implied.

Unlike the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, the Obama administration has deemed both the Benghazi Consulate attack and self-admitted Islamic Jihadist Nidal Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood, Texas not as acts of war but as criminal acts.

Obama tip-toed through a linguistic minefield when he spoke last May at the National Defense University, where he claimed that even though the nature of international terror attacks threatening the United States has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, “no large-scale attacks” on America have occurred since then.

By Obama’s reckoning, the definition of “large-scale attacks” doesn’t include the 2013 Boston Marathon attack that wounded hundreds and ultimately killed four, the Benghazi attack which wounded dozens and killed four, and the the 2009 attack at Fort Hood that killed 14 (including an unborn child) and injured 30.

As defined by the State Department, embassies and consulates are correctly deemed the sovereign soil of the nation represented:

  U.S. embassies and consulates abroad, as well as foreign embassies and consulates in the United States, have a special status. While diplomatic spaces remain the territory of the host state, an embassy or consulate represents a sovereign state.

International rules do not allow representatives of the host country to enter an embassy without permission — even to put out a fire — and designate an attack on an embassy as an attack on the country it represents.

T. Kevin Whiteman

T. Kevin Whiteman

T. Kevin Whiteman is a retired Master Sergeant of Marines. He has written for Examiner, Conservative Firing Line, and other blogs.

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