Everything I have read and seen so far on Benghazi is still confirming my initial thinking on the matter, going way back to my days as a NavSpecWar officer who took a SEAL det to Beirut a long time ago.
Once the alarm is sent from Benghazi, dozens of HQs are notified and are in the loop in real time, including AFRICOM and EURCOM, both located in Germany.
Without waiting for orders, they begin planning and executing rescue operations, including getting air support over Benghazi ASAP. But one thing they CANNOT DO without explicit orders from the POTUS is cross an international border. That is the big red line.
All POTUS has to do is NOT grant cross-border authority, and the entire air-armada of military rescue (already in progress) must stop in its tracks. Ships can loiter on station, but planes fall out of the sky, so they must be redirected to an air base (Sigonella Sicily) to await the POTUS decision on granting CBA. If it never comes, the men in Behghazi must rely only on assets already in country in Libya, such as the Tripoli QRF and the Predators.
(And possibly AC-130s that might already have been in Libya: they were last year, but their location on 9-11-2012 is unknown. If they were in country but were prevented from firing, that is another situation.)
So if at the 5 pm DC-time meeting with Panetta and Biden, Obama said, No outside military action, meaning no CBA will be granted, then THAT IS IT. Case closed.
That constitutes standing orders all the way down the chain of command via Panetta and Dempsey to Ham and the subordinate commands trying to rescue the men in Benghazi.
If Obama then goes upstairs to the family quarters to watch TV or sleep, or otherwise makes himself unavailable, then his last standing orders will stand until he changes them, even if he goes to sleep until the morning of 9-12.
Nobody in the chain of command below him can countermand his standing orders not to send military forces from outside of Libya into Libyan air space.
Nobody.
Personally, I think he left no outside miltary intervention, no cross-border authority standing orders, and then he went to bed. Damn him to hell.
(And to me, the most damning aspect of all is that Obama went to bed while his Ambassador was still missing and presumed kidnapped by Al Queda. Ambassador Stevens might have been on a Youtube video pleading for his life, ready to get the Nick Berg/Danny Pearl intro to jihad treatment, and Obama WENT TO BED to rest up for his much more important fund raiser in Las Vegas!)
Didn’t he have to authorize the 2 drones to cross into Libyan airspace? Doesn’t make sense for them to claim they had to get permission from Libya, when they already sent in drones. And what retired General Keane said very strongly implied that there was an armed drone there - since he said they didn’t intervene because the drone didn’t allow them to identify who were the enemies and who were Libyan militia members.
IOW, it sounds to me like there was an armed drone there, which is why Woods painted the target and why somebody was giving coordinates for the target. And the story NOW is that they didn’t trust Woods to report exactly where the incoming fire came from.
I'm sure you know that the answer is "no," because had he done so there would be records of it in every command center within 5,000 miles.
I'm not quite sure who the President of the USA is - a hired worker who has very specific duties 24/7/365, or a monarch surrounded by courtiers? What you describe is more appropriate for the Emperor of the world.
In a sane society, however, the Commander-in-Chief can and should be awaken whenever necessary, and should be delivered, regardless of his opinion, into the Situation Room where he will be given specific scenarios - that in this case changed by the minute - and requested (not subserviently asked!) to stay at his post and keep directing the country's armed forces and every other department of the government, as needed (namely, the CIA,) until the situation is resolved.