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May 16, 2021 - Epoch Times
08:58
Lara Logan: ‘They’re Not Journalists. They’re Political Assassins.’
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How were you targeted?
What exactly happened?
And how did your mind change?
And actually, even before that, tell me, how were you thinking about the world in journalism prior to this?
Well, I was very happy in my 60 Minutes bubble.
A lot of people would call me the face, the future of 60 Minutes.
And I worked with some of the greatest journalists I have ever been really fortunate enough to work with.
And when you You know when you're gang raped and sodomized and beaten almost to death and blown up and repeatedly and you know in firefights and hell holes and you go without food and water and in a bed.
When you share those experiences with people they become much more than just your colleagues They are your family.
You are a band of brothers.
And more than that, we all really and truly believed in what journalism was at its core.
And I worked for really great people.
And one of them, my former boss at 60 Minutes, actually is the person who opened my eyes to our own bias.
In fact, when I answered a question about how liberal most of the media is, I didn't think it was newsworthy.
And my answer was, you know, that most of my colleagues were liberal.
And that made news for some, you know, inexplicable reason to me.
But my boss reached out to me afterwards and he said that his greatest achievement at 60 Minutes was making us aware of our own bias.
And it was underappreciated, undervalued by everybody except the audience.
And that is word for word.
I have never forgotten those words because it is so true.
We really weren't aware of our own bias.
You know, you think that you're getting all these awards and being recognized and they're writing glowing profiles of you in the New York Times and Washington Post and everything because you're so diligent and you're such a great journalist and you really care about your job and it's very noble and it's very worthy and Sincerely, all of that is true.
We would kill ourselves to do the very best work that we could.
I worked myself to death and I I gave everything I've got, just as I do today.
However, it's like Gary Webb said.
Gary Webb is the San Jose Mercury journalist who they did the film about, To Kill a Messenger, and he broke the story Dark Alliance about the CIA and their dubious history with drugs and introducing crack cocaine to the streets of America and really to black communities.
And then he won the Pulitzer and then he was discredited, right?
And Gary Webb ended up Committing suicide by shooting himself twice in the head, which every firearms expert I know says that has to be a miracle for anyone to be able to do that.
But he wrote in his book before he died that he was doing the same thing, judging journalism contests and winning awards.
He thought it was all because of his great journalism.
And then he said, and then I wrote Dark Alliance and I realized how sadly misplaced My bliss had been.
And it wasn't because basically I was such a great journalist.
It was that I'd never written anything important enough to suppress.
And that was the lesson that I learned.
I didn't do the story on Benghazi for 60 minutes because it was political.
I didn't do it because I didn't like Hillary Clinton.
I didn't do it because of the election.
I didn't do it for any of those reasons.
I did a story because I knew that there was a lot that hadn't been told.
I received information from a really good source that there were two operators on behalf of Delta Force who were in Libya at the time, in Tripoli, who had, on hearing the news that the special mission compound was under attack, they went around to everybody in the embassy, they collected money, They begged, borrowed, and stole money from everybody they could, and they hired a plane on their own.
They got in that plane, they flew to Benghazi, and they were the ones who made contact with the local militia.
They were the ones who received Chris Stevens' body.
They were the ones who went with the local militia to the annex and fought their way in, rescued everybody at the annex.
We took out Ty Woods and Glenn Doherty's bodies and eventually left Benghazi with Ambassador Chris Stevens' body as well and brought them home.
And I was told that they prevented what would have been the worst hostage crisis in the history of the United States of America, worse than the Iranian hostage crisis, had they not done what they did.
They were never ordered.
They were never dispatched.
There was no QRF. Nobody ever made any attempt To do anything in Benghazi.
And Greg Hicks, you know, the former ambassador who became acting ambassador that night, he said in our 60 Minutes story that he was told by the defense attaché, and for those of you who don't know, defense attaché is always the top official spy in any foreign country.
And he said, 10 minutes in, he looked at him and said, so, you know, what are they doing?
And he said, I'm sorry, Greg, the cavalry ain't coming.
And Greg Hicks said, I felt sick in the pit of my stomach.
Because I knew in that moment, every one of us who goes out on the end of the line for our country, we believe our country had our back.
And in that moment, I knew it didn't.
And I looked at him and I said, we better tell the boys in the annex.
And two of those boys in the annex died that night.
And that was the truth of Benghazi that they wanted to suppress.
We named the real suspect, Sofiam Ben-Kumu, who was later, more than a year after our story, as the man responsible for Benghazi and an Al-Qaeda terrorist.
We said that in our piece.
We broke the story that those Delta operatives were on the ground.
We said very little about it because we could get no one in the Obama administration to give us permission to speak to those operatives or to tell their story.
And that story was suppressed because of what it said.
They found a way to smear us by raising doubt.
Over the least important person in the story who was a contractor who was there that night.
And then the smear campaign began and they went round to every journalist in D.C. They were offering a document that was published by the Washington Post, which was supposedly an after action report from that night.
Everyone that we spoke to said that report is fake.
It was stamped U.S. Embassy Benghazi, which any diplomat knows that wasn't an embassy.
By law, it was a special mission compound.
Diplomats were on the ground.
People on the ground said they'd never seen that stamp.
The guy who was supposed to have written it said he didn't write it.
Now he's the guy they went after.
But when this guy disappeared, When he wasn't going to be around to defend his story and unnamed State Department sources went to the New York Times and said they'd been briefed by unnamed sources from the FBI and what the guy in our story said didn't match what he told the FBI. Well, you know, he was gone and now you've got the New York Times saying your guy lied and we have it confirmed from people we can't tell you who they are from the State Department.
Who haven't seen the report, but they got told about it by other people.
We can't tell you who they are.
Well, that was enough.
That was enough to destroy the story that, by the way, they moved very quickly to erase from the digital world.
So all of these reporters that piled on You know, really grandstanding about how my career should be over and 60 Minutes should be ashamed and this terrible reporting.
None of them have seen the story because otherwise, how could they have written the things that they wrote?
They wrote that we made it up, that the page we got from Chris Stevens' schedule that day wasn't lying in the ruins.
As we said it was, they disgracefully reported that that compound of Chris Stevens had been renovated and restored and we made that all up.
Well, you know what?
There were three buildings and only one was renovated and it wasn't the one where Chris Stevens lived.
And we had video of it.
We actually had footage of that lying in the ground.
We had the GPS coordinates.
We had a security person who had filmed it for us, who had mapped that out frame by frame.
And that was a complete and utter lie.
So you had people like that.
They're still around.
They're not journalists.
They're political assassins working on behalf of political operatives and propagandists.
Who do not care one bit about real journalism or honesty or anything like that.
They care about annihilating anyone and everyone That stands in their way, in their quest for absolute power, where none of us have a right to exist if we don't fall in line.
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