Americans in Algeria: Surviving a terrorist attack

Charlie Rose: You have to be wanting to tell her, "If I don't get back, I want you to know everything I feel."

Nick Frazier: I didn't do that. And part of it might be because I didn't want to give up hope. And another because I didn't want her to think that I was going to die. I think between those two reasons, I never really said goodbye.

Algerian soldiers came to the rescue from a nearby base and battled the militants for three hours.

Nick Frazier: They saved our lives. They returned fire. Heavy, heavy, heavy gunfire. They stood by the bus and shot back and kept the terrorists from getting onto the bus, which is, I'm assuming, their intent.

Finally, the soldiers took Frazier and the others on the bus to safety. For Nick Frazier, the terror was over.

But here, at this Spartan work camp where Mark Cobb lived and worked, a second group of al Qaeda fighters had seized control.

Mark Cobb: My first reaction was to call my boss in London.

Charlie Rose: What was the message?

Mark Cobb: My message to him was very simple. "We're under a major terrorist attack."

Charlie Rose: You felt it, at that moment?

Mark Cobb: Oh, it was clear. I was guessing that I was hearing gunfire involving probably 20-plus individuals trading fire. It was that kind of intensity. By that point in time, I could hear very clearly gunfire inside the camp itself. So I knew the camp had been attacked. And I was looking out the window myself. And I saw three terrorists in the parking lot. And that's the point in time where I realized I needed to hide.

Charlie Rose: Had it occurred to you by this time, "I'm an American, an expat. I'm a manager here. Maybe they're coming for me"?

Mark Cobb: Absolutely. I knew as the highest-ranking American on the site, I would be a prize. They put the highest value on American hostages, British hostages and French hostages.

Cobb gathered his staff in one room and locked the door. He crouched behind a filing cabinet as his coworkers hid him.

Mark Cobb: I sat in a small ball in the corner. And they took all the maps. And they laid them over the top of my head. And they stacked the maps in front, where the small gap was between the metal cabinet. And, basically hid me.

Charlie Rose: Did you feel safe?

Mark Cobb: No. If they started poking at the maps with an AK-47 or peeling maps off the top of me, I knew it was over with, yeah. I heard them kick open the front door. That's I guess at the point, in all honesty, that I felt pure terror. I felt I was going to be taken. So at that point, I elected to begin to make my calls to my family and say my goodbyes.

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[PATANNC]

So this is your "terrorist" reporting. There was this big terrorist attack on Benghazi on 9/11....Did you hear about that one?

Maybe you can get an interview with the president and his people to find out what they were doing on 9/11...Now, I'd be willing to watch that...Possibility of that interview would be the "snowball in hell" --

60 Minutes wouldn't touch anything that could make Obama "uncomfortable..."

[langejames1]

What absolute garbage!
I feel for the people you used for emotional masturbation, but the attackers were NOT Al Qaeda or even Islamists, they were simple mercenaries looking for a return.