Two whistleblowers claimed that opportunities to “save lives” during the 2012 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi Libya, and to capture the terrorists responsible for the attacks were missed, and the State Department squashed opportunities to kill or capture those responsible for the attacks for political reasons during interviews with Fox News Senior Correspondent Adam Housley broadcast on Wednesday’s “Special Report.”
The whistleblower said, “There’s so many ways that you can get screwed over per se, basically thrown under the bus if you give any sort of information.” According to Housley, the man also told him that other members of his squadron wanted “to talk about Benghazi from the very beginning, but none have been interviewed since the 2012 attack, and all are afraid of retribution.”
Housley added that the man told him, “within minutes, his air squadron was told that a quote, real-world mission was going down. They raced to the field, and were quickly briefed as planes were armed and prepared to launch.”
The man added, “There were people everywhere, that fly line was full of people, and we were all ready to go, all of us.” Housley reported that the man stated findings by the Accountability Review Board found the Benghazi were “timely and appropriate” are incorrect, and that his squadron, which was stationed at Aviano Air Base in Italy, “and according to men who were there, could have easily flown to Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, and then on to Benghazi.”
The source further said, “I definitely believe that our aircraft could have taken off and got there in a timely matter, maybe three hours at the most, in order to basically, at least stop that second mortar attack and have those guys running for the hills, and basically save lives that day.”
Housley added that the man rebutted military claims that such a mission wasn’t doable because refueling tankers weren’t available is invalid.
The source also said, “They just kept telling me, we’re waiting on a call, we’re waiting on the call. I still feel a sense of fault for not being there when we were needed. we could have been there, and that’s the worst part. That’s a horrible feeling to have when can you help someone, especially when you don’t even find out until later and then you hear that people actually died.”
Another former team sergeant for a quick reaction force, who went by Mike, said, “I know everybody was spun up, and then all — for some reason they were all just shut down. And I think it probably leads back to a policymaker somewhere saying, hey, let’s just — because nobody in the military is going to shut down an operation. They want to get involved.”
Mike added of the deaths of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, “They got killed in a mortar attack at the end of the battle, when the sun was coming up, when they shouldn’t have been killed, because we had plenty of time at that point, hours and hours and hours of time, to be able to do something, which we did nothing.”
According to Housley, Mike was in the US at Delta Force HQ on the night of the Benghazi attacks, but returned to Libya shortly thereafter, and claims the US
“had multiple chances to kill or capture the terrorists responsible, but were repeatedly denied by the State Department.”
Mike told Housley, “At our level, we were doing everything we’re supposed to be doing. At everybody else’s level, above us, it was political. I read the emails. I read the emails where they’re saying, hey we can’t do this now. Now is not the right timing, because it’s just, politically we just can’t do it.” And “If we would have hit the target at the time that special operations operators had the intelligence to hit the target, we could have collected important information and intelligence that would have led to bigger fish.”
Housley concluded the report by saying that neither of the men he spoke to had spoken to any investigators.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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