Ex-security officer in Libya on State Dep't bureaucracy: "The Taliban is on the inside of the building"

The devastating soundbite du jour from today’s House Oversight hearings, courtesy of Eric Nordstrom. There’ll be some faux-trage aimed at him for his choice of metaphor here, if only in the interest of changing the subject politically, but don’t get bogged down in it. He’s not calling State an enemy, he’s saying that their persistent bureaucratic excuse-making in refusing to give him the manpower he needed to protect Stevens was ultimately his chief problem in Libya. More from ABC:

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Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, the commander of a Security Support Team (SST) sent home in August – against his wishes and, he says, the wishes of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens – said “we were fighting a losing battle. We couldn’t even keep what we had.”

Nordstrom agreed, saying, “it was abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. And the question that we would ask is again, ‘How thin does the ice need to get until someone falls through?’”

Wood said that when he heard of the attack on the Benghazi post on September 11, it was “instantly recognizable” that it had been a terrorist attack.

Why?

“Mainly because of my prior knowledge there,” Wood said. “I almost expected the attack to come. We were the last flag flying. It was a matter of time.

An obvious terror attack, according to security pros who had just returned from the country, and yet your Secretary of State went out there three days later as Stevens’s body was arriving at Andrews AFB and denounced “rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” If personnel like Wood knew it was terrorism and the State Department allegedly never concluded that there was a protest in front of the consulate, why was Hillary talking about an “awful Internet video” in the aftermath?

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