Amid all the noise over who's responsible for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, the media downplayed the State Department's Oct 9 briefing on what happened that night at the Benghazi embassy.
It's an amazingly dramatic narrative involving multiple rescue attempts and an escape in an armored vehicle with two flat tires.
Around 9pm, agents heard gunfire and an explosion at the embassy gate. Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith (who died in the attack) and another agent secured themselves inside a safe haven, and four other agents barricaded themselves into two different buildings.
Attackers had got into the safe haven building and set fire to the furniture with jerry cans full of diesel. The building filled with smoke, which eventually prompted the agent, Ambassador, and Sean Smith to leave the haven. They were all suffering smoke inhalation, and there were armed men shooting inside the building.
The agent exited, then realized the other two weren't with him and went back inside to get them. But after multiple attempts he couldn't find them, collapsed from smoke inhalation, and radioed the agents in other buildings.
The other agents moved under fire to the safe haven. They took it in turns to go into the smoke-filled building on hands and knees, and eventually found Sean Smith, who was already dead. But they couldn't find the Ambassador.
Then a security team of six Americans and a brigade of 16 Libyan militias arrived and persuaded the agents to leave the compound. They drove out in an armored vehicle under fire from AK-47s and grenades. They finally made it to relative safety in an annex several streets away.
The agents completely lost track of Ambassador Stevens until he was located in hospital, after doctors reached the State Department by calling numbers at random on Stevens's cell phone. The briefing reveals that the State Department is still sketchy on how Stevens was brought to the hospital.
Via the State Department.
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
