NBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews used Thursday night’s airing to give Hillary Clinton a new defense for what happened during the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya: “Sometimes you get killed.”
Speaking to a panel of guests, the host said that the former Secretary of State has to “face reality today.” He then cited a poll that found 52 percent of independent voters are in favor of further investigations into the terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Mr. Matthews said he wasn’t sure if Mrs. Clinton could “dismiss” or “belittle” those who ask questions about the incident, but that he wished someone would say in her defense: “Damn it, it’s the real dangerous world out there,” NewsBusters reported Wednesday.
He then said that someone needs to make the case in her defense that “you got to get out there and take risks and sometimes you get killed. And that’s part of the business. And just be tough and talking to people about the real world.”
Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, has been tapped by House Speaker John Boehner to chair a special select committee to investigate the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost.
The interviews promoting Hillary Clinton’s new book are serving as a test drive for a presidential run, and she has just encountered a serious bump in the road. Despite obvious effort put into crafting careful rationalizations of her miserable record as secretary of state, she managed to blurt out a key fact in an interview … Read more
The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.
The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.
Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.
In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”
A separate U.S. official, one with intimate details of the bloody events of that night, confirmed the major’s assertion. The second source, who requested anonymity to discuss classified data, told Fox News he had personally read the intelligence reports at the time that contained references to calls by terrorists – using State Department cell phones captured at the consulate during the battle – to their terrorist leaders. The second source also confirmed that the security teams on the ground received this intelligence in real time.
Major Stahl was never interviewed by the Accountability Review Board, the investigative panel convened, pursuant to statute, by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the official body reviewing all the circumstances surrounding the attacks and their aftermath. Many lawmakers and independent experts have criticized the thoroughness of the ARB, which also never interviewed Clinton.
In his interview on “Special Report,” Stahl made still other disclosures that add to the vast body of literature on Benghazi – sure to grow in the months ahead, as a select House committee prepares for a comprehensive probe of the affair, complete with subpoena power. Stahl said that when he deposited the traumatized passengers at Ramstein, the first individual to question the CIA security officers was not an FBI officer but the senior State Department diplomat on the ground.
“They were taken away from the airplane,” Stahl said. “The U.S. ambassador to Germany [Philip D. Murphy] met us when we landed and he took them away because he wanted to debrief them that night.” Murphy stepped down as ambassador last year. A message left with Sky Blue FC, a private company in New Jersey with which Murphy is listed online as an executive officer, was not immediately returned.
Stahl also contended that given his crew’s alert status and location, they could have reached Benghazi in time to have played a role in rescuing the victims of the assault, and ferrying them to safety in Germany, had they been asked to do so. “We were on a 45-day deployment to Ramstein air base,” he told Fox News. “And we were there basically to pick up priority missions, last-minute missions that needed to be accomplished.”
“You would’ve thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11,” Stahl added. “A hurried-up timeline probably would take us [an] hour-and-a-half to get off the ground and three hours and fifteen minutes to get down there. So we could’ve gone down there and gotten them easily.”
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Hillary Clinton’s newly released memoir leaves little doubt she was the first member of the Obama administration to publicly link an anti-Islam video to the 2012 Benghazi terror attack – though she does not explain what intelligence she relied on to make the faulty connection. The former secretary of … Read more
In “Hard Choices,” Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, the former secretary of state attempts to answer the critics of her handling of the Benghazi scandal. Yet she completely fails to do the one thing that might have help lay the controversy to rest: express personal remorse and a sense of responsibility. Clinton’s account of the fateful … Read more
President Bush released a GITMO detainee who was involved in the Benghazi attack. To read the original article, visit https://www.freespeech.org/video/hypocrisy-bush-released-gitmo-detainee-involved-benghazi-attack
It is about time that pundits stop describing President Obama’s foreign policy as weak. There is a straight line between emboldening Syria’s Assad by calling him a reformer, Egypt’s Morsi a democrat, Turkey’s Erdogan a friend, Iran’s Rouhani a moderate, and now a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, a peace partner. Monday’s speedy announcement that … Read more
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows her presidential campaign is threatened before it begins by the mountain of wreckage left along her trail of tears tenure at State. Her failed and embarrassing “reset” with Russia, her mismanagement of Egypt so that all parties now hate the U.S. and President-elect Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is accepting Vladimir Putin‘s embrace, the horrors ofSyria escalating, Iran poised … Read more
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has released the chapter of her new memoir Tough Choices dealing with the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.
In an exclusive preview to Politico’s Maggie Haberman, a defensive Clinton challenged her critics but offered very little new information about where she was and what she did during the attacks.
“[T]here will never be perfect clarity on everything that happened,” she wrote, “…But that should not be confused with a lack of effort to discover the truth or to share it with the American people.”
Clinton still insisted that the anti-Islamic YouTube video did have some role in motivating the attacks, pointing to a report in the New York Times.
“There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives,” she wrote. “It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions defy not only the evidence but logic as well.”
She also defended President Obama, who she insisted gave the order to do “whatever was necessary” to support the Americans under attack.
“When Americans are under fire, that is not an order the Commander in Chief has to give twice,” she wrote. “Our military does everything humanly possible to save American lives — and would do more if they could. That anyone has ever suggested otherwise is something I will never understand.”
Clinton defended Susan Rice’s appearance on Sunday talk shows, pointing out that she did “the best she or anyone could do” with the current information from the intelligence community.
She also expressed contempt for the Sunday shows, deriding her critics for not appearing on the programs herself.
“I don’t see appearing on Sunday-morning television as any more of a responsibility than appearing on late-night TV,” she writes. “Only in Washington is the definition of talking to Americans confined to 9 A.M. on Sunday mornings.”
Clinton also addressed her controversial “what difference does it make” line, explaining that her words have been misinterpreted to appear that she was trying to minimize the tragedy.
“Of course that’s not what I said,” she wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth. And many of those trying to make hay of it know that, but don’t care.”
An array of Democrats — including Hillary Clinton’s allies — are meeting this week to hammer out a united front on national security issues, including a clear response to Republicans over the Benghazi controversy. They see an opportunity to wrest control of a narrative that some allies fear could be damaging to Clinton if she … Read more
