Osama Bin Laden Is Dead. So Are Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

When asked Thursday whether U.S. forces should have been dispatched to assist American servicemen under attack from terrorists in Benghazi on September 11, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta responded, “There’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on here,” adding that “the basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”

Leave aside whether that’s a sound principle in the first place. Now it turns out that we did in fact “know what [was] going on,” and that we did have “real-time information about what [was] taking place.”