squistion
Footballguy
I doubt you will accept this as "evidence," but Hillary gave a reasonable and plausible explanation for her comments in the context of what was happening at the time:
CLINTON: Well, I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book, Hard Choices. I'd be glad to send it to you, Congressman, because I think the insinuations that you are making do a grave disservice to the hard work that people in the State Department, the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the White House did during the course of some very confusing and difficult days.
There is no doubt in my mind that we did the best we could with the information that we had at the time. And if you'd actually go back and read what I said that night...I was very -- I was very careful in saying that some have sought to justify. In fact, the man that has been arrested as one of the ringleaders of what happened in Benghazi, Ahmed Abu Khattala, is reported to have said it was the video that motivated him.
None of us can speak to the individual motivations of those terrorists who overran our compound and who attacked our CIA annex. There were probably a number of different motivations.
I think the intelligence community, which took the lead on trying to sort this out, as they should have, went through a series of interpretations and analysis. And we were all guided by that.
We were not making up the intelligence. We were trying to get it, make sense of it, and then to share it.
When I was speaking to the Egyptian prime minister or in the other two examples you showed, we had been told by Ansar al-Sharia that they took credit for it. It wasn't until about 24 or more hours later, that they retracted taking credit for it.
We also knew, Congressman, because my responsibility was what was happening throughout the region, I needed to be talking about the video, because I needed to put other governments and other people on notice that we were not going to let them get away with attacking us, as they did in Tunis, is they did in Khartoum.
And in Tunis there were thousands of protesters who were there only because of the video, breaching the calls of our embassy, burning down the American school. I was calling everybody in the Tunisian government I could get, and finally, President Marzouki sent his presidential guard to break it up. There were -- is example after example. That's what I was trying to do, during those very desperate and difficult hours.
JORDAN: ...Secretary Clinton, you said my insinuation. I'm not insinuating anything. I'm reading what you said. Plain language. We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. That's as plain as it can get; that's vastly different than vicious behavior justified by Internet material.
Why didn't you just speak plain to the American people?
CLINTON: I did. If you look at my statement as opposed to what I was saying to the Egyptian prime minister, I did state clearly, and I said it again in more detail the next morning, as did the president.
I'm sorry that it doesn't fit your narrative, Congressman. I can only tell you what the facts were. And the facts, as the Democratic members have pointed out in their most recent collection of them, support this process that was going on, where the intelligence community was pulling together information.
And it's very much harder to do it these days than it used to be, because you have to monitor social media, for goodness's sakes. That's where the Ansar al-Sharia claim was placed. The intelligence committee did the best job they could, and we all did our best job to try to figure out what was going on, and then to convey that to the American people.
This guy wants to stick with the video reason.
