Kerry: Job Development 'Really What Benghazi Was About'

Secretary of State John Kerry said in a Google+ hangout today that he didn’t follow this week’s Benghazi hearing but doesn’t think there was anything new to learn from it.

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But he has formed the opinion that Benghazi is inextricably linked with diplomatic efforts to develop the global marketplace.

“I obviously was on the road all of last week. And so I didn’t see the hearings. But I followed them, and I’m getting a summary report of everything that’s taken place,” Kerry said in the online event called “The U.S. and the World: What’s In It for Us?” hosted by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

“What I’ve seen thus far, I have to tell you, after all of the hearings that I took part in as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, all of the briefings that I took part in, many of which were classified, I really haven’t learned anything new,” he said.

Kerry called Benghazi a “terrible event” and a “terrorist attack.”

“We all understand that,” he said.

“And obviously, it’s emotional, but so is losing, you know, our ambassador, so is losing two members of our former armed forces who were providing security, and so is losing our employee who was there doing an extraordinary job on communications,” saying he had “respect” for the whistleblowers who testified.

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“…There’s so many values that we are struggling to try to carry out to the world in many different ways. And to bring it to a more prosaic place, we are living in a very new global marketplace, where relationships with countries also mean jobs; jobs for our people, jobs for other people in the world. And it means building strength through economic growth and development, which brings with it a lot of the values that Americans stand up and promote and fight for,” the secretary continued.

“So that’s really what Benghazi was about. It’s a tragedy. But I hate to see it turn into a pure, prolonged, political process that really doesn’t tell us anything new about the facts.”

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