President Obama defended today his administration’s response to the Benghazi terror attack as a car bomb explosion killed several people near a Benghazi hospital.
“Nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days” Obama said of last year’s attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi as the blast today left at least nine dead, including two children.
His remarks were in response to recent hearings conducted by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which began investigating the attack in October of 2012, around the time four bombings killed 15 in Pakistan, 8 in Beirut, 24 in southern Yemen, and 19 in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh Province.
The attack on the U.S. Embassy took place on September 11, 2012; killing 4 the same day three other terrorist attacks killed a total of 12 in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Yemen.
Months later, Hilary Clinton decried the “politicization” of the incident and defended the State Department as she testified before Congress on January 24 of this year, only a day after a wave of attacks around Baghdad killed at least 26 and the same day a suicide bomber blew himself up during a funeral in Iraq, leaving 7 dead.
Late last month, an Iraqi Army raid in the city of Hawija led to 331 deaths and 600 injuries in four days of violence as House Republicans released a report on last year’s Benghazi attack condemning the White House and State Department for covering up details among other accusations.
“If this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down, that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later we end up putting out all the information,” Obama said, not referring to today’s hospital bombing or the bombings of four police stations over the weekend. “Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days? So the whole thing defies logic.”
Since the controversial Benghazi attack there have been nearly 140 terrorist incidents around the world, not to mention the 105 U.S. military deaths as a result of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
It sucks that this happened. It’s a tragedy. I get why you guys are making light of it, to shed more light on it, btu still, it’s such a terrible thing. Surely there must be a better way.