Reach the target with two aerial refuelings along the way. Welcome to the combat operations floor. Lieutenant colonel David Hayworth takes us into the command center as the b1 and other aircraft carryout the days attack plan against isis. It doesnt have windows, but it has a nice view. The air war has been going on for 14 months, but this is the first time news cameras have been allowed into its nerve center. The weapon of choice is information. The more information we have, the better we are able to make decisions. On one wall, a giant map showing the location of every plane. Green are american and allied. The blue are commercial aircraft. On another, a video feed from an unmanned drone, one of dozens orbiting over iraq and syria. We make our way around the floor to a spot in the center called the crows nest. This is the nexus, the center of the air campaign. 60 minutes is here to follow that b1 bomber on its mission against isis. General Charles Brown is the commander of the air war. How much of an effort does it take to mount a strike like that . Just that one airplane, a threeday process scheduling wise. Sometimes days, weeks, months. Just after 2 00 a. M. , five American Helicopters with special Operation Forces landed outside a heavily guarded isis prison in northern iraq. The troops stormed the compound, and in an exchange of gunfire killed two dozen isis fighters. A u. S. Servicemen was fatally wounded. The commandos rescued 70 hostages about to be executed. Charlie we want to talk about e 60 minutes report, but also about a u. S. Raid resulted in the First American killed in iraq since renewed military intervention last year. David martin joins me now from the pentagon. I am pleased to have him on the program. Thank you for joining us. Tell me what we know now in terms of what was the intent, what was the success, and what does it imply about the future . David the intent was to rescue what was thought to be kurdish prisoners before they were executed in the belief that they were about to be executed. That came from aerial surveillance of the prison compound which showed mass graves being dug. They went in, a firefight broke out, an american commando was killed in the firefight. They managed to save or rescued 70 prisoners being held by isis. Those prisoners have since told the United States now that they are back in some form of safety that they had been told that they were going to be executed after morning prayer. If you back up the time of the raid, that means that those commandos landed about 56 hours before the scheduled execution. One other interesting thing about that raid, i just minutes ago was in a press conference with the fence secretary asked carter, and he said, i suspect there will be more like this. Charlie it seems that there is something indicated by this that america is to pay her to do . David thats right. If you look at the last war in iraq when the United States had 100,000 plus troops on the ground, what really defeated al qaeda in iraq were those special operations, the night raids, 1020 a night, and which they not only killed and captured leaders, but they swept up those cell phones and laptops and got more intelligence about the network. In this war where we only have 3500 trainers and advisers, and we now know some commandos on the ground, there have been exactly to raids, the one earlier this week, and one a couple of months ago when they went after an isis leader in syria. They got a lot of intelligence out of that raid, particular about how the finances of isis work. Secretary carter said they got a lot of intelligence out of this raid on the prison compound. We dont know yet what was in that intelligence. Charlie my understanding is they captured some isis combatants . David it is not clear. They have six members of isis, but it is not clear if they were running the prison or if they were in fact prisoners who had somehow run afoul against isis. Charlie we do know the u. S. Was asked to do this by the peshmerga forces, to join them . David thats right. The mantra is that iraq is a sovereign country and we are there at the behest of the government. We saw that in the air war. In iraq, iraq has veto power over any target that the u. S. Wants to strike because it is their country. Charlie what do we know about how the member of delta force died . David again, secretary carter just said something interesting, which i have not had a chance to follow up on yet. He said the indications are that that soldier, whose name was joshua wheeler, a 39yearold master sergeant, that he and his teammates were responsible for pulling those prisoners out of there. I dont know the circumstances or why he said that, but that is what the secretary said. He was hit by enemy small arms fire. In a firefight like that, it is possible that you could be hit by friendly fire, but the pentagon specifically says he was hit by enemy small arms fire. Charlie let me talk about what you saw and the access you had. What surprised you about what you saw . David what surprised me the most, both what i saw and the reporting i did leading up to it, is the difficulty of finding highvalue targets that are really worth hitting. When you go there, you see very clearly that the u. S. Air force can hit just about anything it aims at. Every once and a while there is a dud. The dud rate is 2 on the bombs, but otherwise they are firing satellite guided or laserguided weapons that almost hit the targets. Hitting a target is not the problem. The problem is finding lucrative targets. The raid we watched was against a cluster of buildings that were supposed to hold a car bomb factory that isis used to mount car bomb attacks. When we watched the raid, you could clearly see secondary explosions that indicated that explosives were indeed in those buildings. But what is to stop isis from moving in to another vacant building, getting more derelict cars, making more homemade explosives . And this is what passes for isisindustrial base. Those Oil Platforms where they skim oil off the desert floor. So this air campaign would not pass a costbenefit analysis. That b1 bomber that dropped its bombs on those buildings, and it basically obliterated those buildings, it stayed over iraq for several more hours, and it was sent to check out a report of a loan sniper on a rooftop. So here you have this bomber that was built to drop Nuclear Weapons on the soviet union back in the 1980s, which is caring 17. 5 tons of conventional bombs, hunting around for one sniper. Charlie here is what is interesting. For me, is this the place where they coordinate with the russians so that there is no overlap in terms of conflicting . David we dont know exactly where that coordination happens, but it has to go through this command center. When we were there, there was no coordination. The memo of understanding had not been signed yet. So we did not see any formal coordination, but the american pilots we talked to were not sweating the russians at all. They know that they have air superiority over those russian planes and that the russians would be very foolish i mean, in the first place there are three times as many u. S. Aircraft as there are russian aircraft. More importantly, the u. S. Has all these support aircraft like Early Warning radar planes, and they give these pilots a total picture of everything that is happening in the airspace, and they will see the russians before the russians and see them. In addition, the u. S. Also has the f22 stealth fighter, which is the only jet fighter in the world that is both supersonic and stealth. The russians dont have anything like that. The americans and still maintain total air superiority over syria. The russians are a nuisance. Charlie they are a nuisance to the u. S. , but do we know whether they have been effective at all in terms of their attacks against rebel forces fighting Bashar Alassad . David they are helping the syrian army along with iranian fighters. They mount offensives to take back some of the territory in the corridor that runs from damascus up to aleppo. They are making some progress, but they have conducted so far about 140 strikes. The u. S. Conducts about 140 strikes in two days. They conduct 6070 strikes, drops, weapons a day, and you see how slow the progress is that the u. S. And its allies are making against isis, so i dont think russia is going to have dramatic effect instantaneously on that battlefield with your airstrikes. Charlie we still have the idea that airstrikes will get you somewhere, but not far enough, unless they put soldiers and combat troops on the ground, they can never complete the job. David you have to retake the ground to win a war, and to me that is probably the most discouraging thing about what i witnessed. The last iraq war, 130,000 troops on the ground with complete control of the air and it took eight years. This iraq war, we have 3500 advisers on the ground and who knows how long its going to take . Charlie david martin at the pentagon, thank you so much. David you bet. Charlie back in a moment. Stay with us. Charlie former secretary of state Hillary Clinton ran a marathon on thursday, answering questions in front of the longest running select committee in the United States congress. At issue, the deadly 2012 attack in benghazi, libya. At the end, the republican chairman conceded that there were no big revelations. We reached out to all the republican members of the select committee to appear on this program. Of those that responded, none were available. Representative adam schiff is one of the democrats on the committee. I am pleased to have him here. Welcome to the program. It is great to be with you. Charlie where are we and where are we going . That is a good question. It is hard to say. All the other hearings that were planned were canceled once the hearing with secretary clinton was scheduled. Error going to be 1012 hearings, defense secretary, cia, but those were all put off or canceled for good, so we are waiting to hear from the majority, and of course we will have to evaluate based on their plan Going Forward what that means in terms of our participation. There has been a debate all along about whether it makes sense for democrats to participate in what we view as a highly partisan exercise designed to attack the secretary, so we will have to see what they plan in the future and make a decision about that. Charlie is it likely that you will not go forward, democrats . Our Ranking Member is issuing a statement that we continue participating for now. A lot will depend on where they intend to take this. To be honest, i dont think they know yet where they want to take this. Everything has been leading up to the moment we had last night, and i think they are in the process of evaluation how much longer they want this to drag on and what is the objective. We tried from the very beginning of this investigation to get them to agree to some scope, if not scope in terms of the time of the investigation, at least to identify what issues we were trying to unravel, whether it was the allegation of a standdown order or whether it was some other issue, but they were unwilling to it essentially narrow or even define the scope, so we are not sure where we are headed, to be honest. Charlie have you asked for the release of the transcripts of the interviews with Sidney Blumenthal . Many times. This was a deposition governed by house rules. We ask promptly after his deposition to have that vote, the republicans would never scheduled to vote. They did not want to have to vote on this. We forced a vote on it during the middle of this hearing, and to a person, the republicans voted to keep those transcripts private. It is curious because they were willing to release blumenthals emails, but they werent willing to release the transcript of his explanation of the context of those emails, and i think, charlie, the reason is pretty clear. It wasnt so much what he said, but what they asked him. The gop members have been going on national tv to say they are not interested in the Clinton Foundation or the personal relationship he had with the clintons, but when you look at the questions that were asked, there were literally hundreds of questions about the foundation, media matters, the relationship he had with the clintons, and a must nothing about the events of benghazi. Charlie tell me what you think of the questions were and what the answers were. The Big Questions at the outset of all of the investigation, i will tell you we have to put this into context. In the very beginning after these tragic events, there were very legitimate questions about was the security enough, were the requests that went unheeded, who was responsible for that, how do we improve security in the future, what happened afterwards, why were the talking points wrong . Those were all legitimate questions. But by the time this started, they had been asked and answered, which was the challenge in terms of defining what we were going to do in this investigation. There have been these persistent myth about standdown orders, gunrunning, interference insecurity, so it was clear we were going to do another look at that, but what i think is so telling about this and this was intimated by the chairman at the conclusion of the clinton hearing, notwithstanding all the witnesses, interviews, documents, emails, there has been nothing new discovered that alters any conclusions made in these other eight investigations. So we do not have much to show for a year and a half worth of work, in the sense that we cant tell the families or the American People anything new about this tragic events. Charlie are you bothered by the fact that the secretary of state did not know about the request for additional security . I think the secretary answered that quite well yesterday, and it wasnt the first time she has been asked. There are people responsible for security at all our embassies. That is who received the request for additional security. I dont know whether i would want the secretary of state, who has a very big job, to be micromanaging decisions about whether there should be six security personnel, eight, twn, or what level it ought to be. There are people whose expertise and job is to do that at the state department. The key question, do we keep this facility open, i think that is perfectly appropriate for her. And she did answer that. Charlie in this case, this was summoned she knew and admired, and if he was requesting additional security, you might assume that somehow it would get to her . Well, it might have, and it didnt, and i think the fact that they did have a relationship and this was somebody that she chose for this position, i think that indicates also that if ambassador stevens thought she was the right person to make these decisions, he would have been able to go to her. In fact, there is a mechanism within the state department to go to her. The secretary has a relationship with all of these ambassadors around the world. Some more than others, but we have to put this into perspective. There were 20 capitals that seemed under siege at this time when that video took place. There were numerous other hot spots around the secretary also had to deal with. There were a lot of dangerous posts. Whether this particular request should have gotten to her, the answer is that it didnt get to her. It is hard to lay responsibility at her feet. Charlie she pointed out that she had a number of conversations with chris and security was not brought up. Yes, im not sure how often she communicated with the ambassador, but i know she was quite clear that he never raised a security issue with her, and i think the accountability review board which looked at this objectively, done by two career they concluded that the decision to act on those requests was certainly a flawed position by those who made it, but that was not really a decision to be made at the secretary of state level. Charlie she said that every recommendation has been a limited. Is that a fair statement . It is a fair statement which he said that when she left the state department they were in the process of being implemented, some taking years to implement. She did mention one that we in congress have slowed down and not fully implemented, and that is the establishment of a joint Training Center to train our diplomatic and security personnel. That is a project slated to be built in virginia. If we were serious about Embassy Security as our committee lets on, we would get that project moving. Charlie there is also the question of where does spontaneous reaction to of film, where does that go from being spontaneous in terms of the streets of benghazi to a planned al qaeda attack taking the advantage of a spontaneous outburst . This is a subject that we covered in an investigation that lasted almost two years in the intelligence committee. What we discovered, and i think that has been verified by the select committee as well, and that is the intelligence we received was improved in the days after the attack, and changed yet again in the week after the attack. Initially, some of the first intelligence indicated that this was a planned attack that she related to the egyptian prime minister. Within about 2448 hours, the cia had assessed based on human intelligence, opensource intelligence, signals intelligence, that it probably began as a protest that was hijacked into an attack. It was not until about eight days afterwards, when we got the videos from those compounds and we could see there was no protest outside the facility that we were able to definitively conclude that this did not begin as a protest, but what i think is significant here is that if you look at what the secretary said at the time she said it, much like if you look at what ambassador rice said at the time she said it, it was completely consistent with what our Intelligence Community was telling us at that time. Everyone knows how the intelligence process works, particularly after a tragic incidents like that incident like this, your assessments continue to evolve over time. We in congress were trying to understand what we knew. Some of that proved to be wrong. We found no evidence that there was any deliberate intent to deceive anyone. Charlie was it faulty intelligence . It was, but i dont consider that an intelligence failure. Initially, you had one group that claimed responsibility. You had open source reporting that there were active protests going on. You have people on the ground saying protests were going on, so if the intelligence is conflicting, the analysts who look at all