Free Republic

The Benghazi bleed is draining Obama and Democrats, with the consequence yet to be seen. If he loses, it will be one reason why; if he wins, he will run into a headwind of investigations and inquiries that will get his second term off to an ugly beginning. Either way, it has put an end for the time being at least to the Democrats' latest effort to dig themselves out of the foreign policy hole they dug themselves into in the late l960s, and from which they have yet to emerge. They tried with Jimmy Carter, ex-career naval officer (and...

.....The strike that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans is either proof of President Barack Obama's leadership failures or a tragic event that occurred despite the administration's best efforts to protect the compound and respond in the aftermath of the attack, according to highly charged arguments on both sides.....

Question: How is Benghazi different from Watergate and Iran-Contra? The obvious answer: the media. Liberal journalists turned Watergate and Iran-Contra into gigantic national scandals by their consistent, relentless pursuit of both stories; to the contrary, they are consistently, relentlessly ignoring Benghazi................... [SNIP] ......The operative words are "searched diligently." CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and the usual suspects looked everywhere for something -- gee, anything -- to hurt Reagan. Being political partisans first and journalists second, they dug furiously for their Watergate. And they thought they had it in Iran-Contra. It's fascinating, however, to see...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

Blown away by Hurricane Sandy: News of the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi,Libya.But the coverage is returning as Sandy’s floodwater’s recede and Republicans press the Obama Administration for more answers about the deadly attacks in the Middle East.“I think there’s classified information the public should know about eventually but there’s no reason for it to be classified,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio,a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said,declining to discuss what classified information he has or has not seen.Rubio said he hopes for more public information after his committee holds a closed-door hearing on the attacks Nov. 15.“After the...

As he left his Marine One helicopter Wednesday evening and walked to the residence of the White House, President Obama did not respond to a question shouted out by ABC News’s Mary Bruce about when he would begin to provide answers to the numerous questions building up about what exactly what went wrong in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. The president smiled and continued walking. Perhaps he couldn’t hear the question over the din of the chopper’s blades, but either way the smile and wave – almost Reagan-esque in style – underline the apparent strategy the president specifically and...

Fox News reports: >>>The U.S. Mission in Benghazi convened an “emergency meeting” less than a month before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, because Al Qaeda had training camps in Benghazi and the consulate could not defend against a “coordinated attack” . . . . Summarizing an Aug. 15 emergency meeting convened by the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Aug. 16 cable marked “SECRET” said that the State Department’s senior security officer, also known as the RSO, did not believe the consulate could be protected. . . . According to a review of the cable...

There are some large disconnects between Obama administration explanations concerning security and response actions taken before, during and after the disastrous terrorist attacks on our Benghazi consulate and accounts,compared with those which continue to emerge from outside sources. Following numerous White House claims now known to be inaccurate and intentionally misleading,we are repeatedly assured that we will get the real scoop in due time after full investigations are complete. One perplexing issue,among many, evolves around conflicting accounts regarding requests and denials of military aid which might have saved American lives.Further delays only increase wide-spread suspicions that there are no legitimate...

The Obama administration fiddled while Benghazi burned and four Americans died. Late last week, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News reported that CIA operators caught in the attack in Benghazi requested military backup but were denied by higher headquarters. If true, this would exhibit fatal inaction and negligence on the part of the administration or the military's chain of command, or worse, some sort of cover-up. On Friday, President Obama was asked directly by Denver's KUSA-TV's Kyle Clarke whether our forces were denied backup during the attack. The president dodged the first question. Clark followed up, "Were they denied requests for...

Officials feared the US Consulate in Benghazi was vulnerable to a 'co-ordinated attack' and had convened an 'emergency meeting' just weeks before Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in an assault by Al-Qaeda, a classified cable reveals. Mr Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a commando-style attack on the US Mission in the Libyan city on September 11, for which Al Qaeda in North Africa and Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia were implicated. Classified cables obtained by Fox News reveal concerns expressed by the State Department's senior security officer in an emergency meeting on August 15 that the consulate could...

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got it half-right last week when, asked about the Obama administration's conduct of events before, during and after a terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, she said it would all take a while to sort out because of "the fog of war." True, as far as it goes, but there's also the fog of political expediency to consider. It will prove thicker and more difficult to penetrate. If Americans ever get a full, official accounting about what happened in Benghazi, it won't be until after Election Day -- and absent a...

If you have serious questions about what happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11, you are not alone. Former admiral, congressman and Democrat Joe Sestak has questions, too. “There are questions the administration needs to answer,” Sestak said Monday morning as Hurricane Sandy rolled into Delco. “Put politics aside, something did go wrong.” That, of course, is the understatement of the year. Four Americans are dead, including U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. They were killed in a terrorist attack that lasted seven hours and included several desperate calls for help. But no help came. Why? Months before the fatal attack,...

WASHINGTON -- Here is a timeline of comments by the Obama administration and Libyan officials on what they believed happened in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, beginning the night of the assault and continuing through September. Republicans have criticized the administration for its description of the attack. They have suggested that the administration insisted it was a protest over a film that insulted the prophet Muhammad because acknowledging that it was a terrorist attack would have affected the presidential campaign. The administration has said it provided information as it became available and has strongly objected to the...

-Libyan-flagged vessel used by a Malta-based humanitarian organisation implicated in a covert US arms smuggling operation to Syrian freedom fighter- A Libyan-flagged vessel which last year was used by a Malta-based humanitarian organisation in supplying a lifeline to rebels in Misurata, has been implicated in a covert US arms smuggling operation to Syrian freedom fighters, which may also be linked to murdered US ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi last month. The ship 'Al Entisar' which was chartered last year by I-Go Aid Libya, then run by businessman Mario Debono, has been reported to be linked to last September's attack on...

This isn’t an “October surprise” foisted on the media by opposition research; it’s news. If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy? Unlike some of my colleagues on the right, I don’t think there’s a conspiracy at work. Rather, I think journalists tend to act on their instincts (some even brag about this; you could look it up). And, collectively, the mainstream media’s instincts run liberal, making groupthink inevitable. In 2000, a Democratic operative orchestrated an “October surprise” attack on George...

The relentless drip, drip, drip dominating the final days of the presidential campaign isn't a rainsquall spawned by Hurricane Sandy,it's the slow release of disturbing information about the al-Qaida-inspired 9-11-2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.........................The Benghazi attack,if it proved to be a planned attack rather than a spontaneous response to a video created without Obama's approval, would call into question at a politically inconvenient moment the fundamental assumptions that guide his administration's Middle Eastern diplomacy--in particular, the history-changing impact of his own personality and his insistence that his diplomacy is smart. A planned attack would also demonstrate...

............The Obama administration has some explaining to do. With four Americans dead overseas, their fellow citizens rightly want to know why they couldn't have been protected. But the answers will not fit neatly, or in time, to make 30-second campaign ads. And there may be new revelations but definitive answers can't be expected before election day.

<p>We have had ambassadors murdered abroad before, but we have never seen anything quite like the tragic fate of Chris Stevens. Amid all the controversy over Libya, we have lost sight of the human — and often horrific — story of Benghazi: a U.S. ambassador attacked, cut off and killed alone, after being abused by frenzied terrorists, and a second member of the embassy staff murdered, as two American private citizens rushed to the rescue, heroically warding off Islamist hit teams, until they were overwhelmed and also killed.</p>

An Egyptian suspected of involvement in last month’s attack on the US mission in Benghazi in which Ambassador Chris Stevens was slain in Cairo yesterday, Wednesday. According to the Egyptian Interior Ministry, the man — named only as Hazem — died in a shoot-out with security forces at an apartment in Nasr City, northeast Cairo. They had been sent to arrest him following information received implicating him in the Benghazi attack. He is said to have recently returned from Libya. Security sources say he threw a bomb from the ground floor apartment but it bounced back into the building. Police...

If Obama ordered the military to “secure our personnel,” where is the order?Ambassador to Libya was killed in our own consulate in Benghazi on the night of September 11. For the next six weeks, President Obama repeated the same talking point: The morning after the attack, he ordered increased security in our embassies in the region.Suddenly, on the campaign trail in Denver on October 26, he changed his story. “The minute I found out what was happening . . . I gave the directive,” he said, “to make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to...