The father of Tyrone Woods, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, spoke out for the first time this week, characterizing the apologies he received from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “totally insincere” and indicating “we’re not being told the whole truth.”
Charles Woods called in to Wednesday’s edition of “The Lars Larson Show” to voice his anger about reports that the White House could have intervened before the deadly attack on the embassy.
“I haven’t done this before, but when I heard, that there was a very good chance that the White House, as well as other members of the military, knew what was going on and obviously someone had to say, ‘Don’t go rescue him,'” Woods explained. “We need to find out who it was that gave that command … and why.”
Woods recounted meeting Obama and Clinton at Andrews Air Force Base, where the bodies of the four slain American diplomats were brought home to the U.S. on Sept. 14.
“He kind of just mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’ His face was looking at me, his eyes were looking over my shoulder, like he could not look me in the eye,” Woods said. “It was not a sincere, ‘I’m really sorry that your son died.’ It was a totally insincere, more of a whining-type ‘I’m sorry.’ And it was like shaking hands with a dead fish. It just didn’t feel right.”
Woods described receiving a similar condolence from Clinton.
“She did not appear to be one bit sincere at all. She mentioned that thing about, ‘we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video’ – that was the first I even heard about anything like that.”
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The grieving father received the news of his son’s death via telephone the morning of Sept. 12. “My initial response was something is wrong here, something doesn’t smell right,” Woods revealed. “I said, how could this possibly happen?”
His son, nicknamed “Rone” by military colleagues, had insisted the Libya detail would be his last assignment after retirement, and he was due to come home just six days after Sept. 11.
“My son, he wasn’t even there. He was at a safe house about a mile away. He got the distress call. He heard them crying for help. That’s why he and Glen risked their lives to go that extra mile just to take care of the situation,” Woods declared. “And I’m sure that he wasn’t the only one that received that distress call, ‘come, save our lives.'”
Woods continued, “I’m sure that other people in the military, in the State Department, in the White House received that same call that he received. And I’m sure that most military people would have jumped at the chance. You know, ‘we are not going to allow this to happen, we are going to go protect that life, we don’t leave anybody behind, we don’t leave anybody out there on a wire just to die. We’re going to save that life.'”
Woods said he would continuing working towards uncovering all the facts about the situation.
“So that people, like Ty, who are out there — principled men and women that are willing to sacrifice their lives — that they won’t be abandoned by their commander in chief.”