CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me go to Brandon first. I guess this is the question that gets to me. If you’re out there pinned down and the word gets back to Washington in real time at the National Security Agency or the national security desk, why didn’t we try to send somebody from somewhere? What happened?
BRANDON WEB: Hi, Chris. I think people need to understand this is a situation where as much as the people on the ground working with the State Department in Libya knew that the threat was there and requested the security, the State Department just wasn’t prepared to deal with this situation. And by being prepared, you have a list of things that when something goes wrong like this you go down that list and you make certain phone calls and notify certain people. And that just wasn’t the case. They had numbers from the DoD that had expired. Then you run into a situation where these agencies, the CIA, the State Department, and the military don’t necessarily talk to each other and are in communications as much as you’d think.
MATTHEWS: You know, as an American, that doesn’t work for me. The president, the National Security Agency people, are sitting in the White House 24/7, there’s officers on deck. They’re getting an instantaneous report of what’s going on there. What weren’t they looking at in terms of assets that could have been sent? Where was the U.S. cavalry, to use an American image? Where were the people that could have come or that tried to get there within however many hours it took to save the lives of the people still living. Where were they and why couldn’t they do it? I’m going to ask that question until I get an answer.
WEBB: I agree. I mean, there’s some blame on the Secretary of Defense. Our sources say that Obama, before he left on that campaign trip, told Panetta, you do everything you can to save those people. So, I think a lot of people in the military are wondering that were sitting there standing by ready to go, why wasn’t the call sent down to send those folks in? But a lot of people need to understand, you know, when you add the CIA and the heroes that went on their own, took their own initiative.
MATTHEWS: T hat’s what I’m impressed by, then you hear about the guys who got in there, grabbed their uniform, grabbed their weapons, got on a plane and they were stopped en route. I mean, that’s unbelievable! People who were like volunteer fire department racing to save their colleagues, and what happened to them?
WEBB: Well, I think that, you know, the two heroes of the day are Glen Doherty and Ty Woods, the two Navy SEALS/CIA contractors that were taking the initiative that day along with the JSOC, or the Joint Special Operations Command, troops that were on the ground that noticed, you know, having worked in that military system, noticing that help isn’t on the way and took their own initiative to go in there and rescue these folks, and you know, largely, most of the Americans in Benghazi were evacuated, and, you know, relatively few lives were lost, other than the Ambassador, Sean Smith, and the two Navy SEALS.
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