Hard Choices week got that much harder for Hillary Clinton with an astonishing interview Fox’s Bret Baier conducted last night with an Air Force major intimately involved with the events of Benghazi.
Eric Stahl, who spoke to Baier in what is one of the most riveting interviews in recent memory, is the recently retired U.S. Air Force major who was commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that flew the bodies of the four men who died in Benghazi to Germany. James Rosen was the reporter on the story. In a better world, they’d win a Pulitzer for this interview.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Unless Stahl is the best fabricator around, two things are starkly clear: the Benghazi attack was worse than we thought and the Obama administration knew this instantly and took immediate actions to prevent the public from knowing in the lead-up to a presidential election.
From Fox’s online report:
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.
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.”
Stahl also describes what appears to be the administration’s immediate move to ensure that the survivors of the attack didn’t provide the public with details of that night:
Stahl said that when he deposited the traumatized passengers [survivors of the attack] 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.
Stahl also believes that his crew could have gotten to Benghazi soon enough to have rescued people on the ground, if the order had been given.
This was an amazing and alarming interview. If what Stahl is saying is true, it raises an alarming question: What happens when a U.S. diplomatic installation is attacked by organized terrorists, who are victorious, and the president and secretary of state refuse to tell the American people? And another question: Does Stahl know he is about to be savaged by his own government if what he says gains traction?
It takes a special kind of woman to greet the greiving families of those killed in Benghazi and, knowing all this, tries to blame a politically-expedient video.