By: Victoria Toensing In her interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer last week, Hillary Clintonsaid “I was not making security decisions” about Benghazi, claiming “it would be a mistake” for “a secretary of state” to “go through all 270 posts” and “decide what should be done.” And at a January 2013 Senate hearing, Mrs. Clinton said that security requests “did … Read more
By: Melissa Quinn It’s been nearly two years since the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and we still have not come close to the truth. And if we ever are to find out how Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed that night, it’s going to take more work from … Read more
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com A targeting memo sent to the State Department by the Defense Department’s Africa Command two days after the Benghazi attack listed 11 suspects with ties to Al Qaeda and other groups, counter-terrorism and congressional sources confirmed to Fox News. This is significant because it arrived two days before then-UN … Read more
Security contractors have failed to fully screen local guards at U.S. embassies, putting Americans overseas at risk almost two years after the deadly attacks on the mission in Benghazi, Libya, an audit found. A review by the State Department’s inspector general of six contractors that provided local guards to boost embassy security found none fully performed … Read more
The illogic of the Republicans’ obsession with Benghazi—and with Hillary Clinton’s role in the tragedy—has been documented ad nauseam, and suffice to say that five investigations, 50 briefings, and 25,000 pages of documents have found absolutely no intentional wrongdoing by anyone in the Obama administration, including former Secretary Clinton. In fact, the only involvement Clinton … Read more
Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that the Defense Department’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) sent a targeting memo early on September 14, 2012 naming four individuals with direct connections to al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa and seven connected with Ansar al-Sharia as suspects in the Benghazi terror attack.The memo was sent three days … Read more
With an arsenal that includes Bowe Bergdhal, Benghazi, and now the unfolding events in Iraq, House Republicans are digging in for a relentless multifront, election-year messaging siege against the White House over foreign policy. “I’m sure Democrats will try to blame Republicans for going too far,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz said. But pointing to Iraq, where … Read more
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.”
