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Americans of all political stripes were distressed by the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador. But the reaction of the national broadcast networks has been demonstrably and shamefully partisan from the beginning of this story. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, all three broadcast networks touted the political angle that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander asserted on the September 14 edition of Today — while Mitt Romney would be damaged by his supposedly...

Classified United States military units are operating in the region near Libya since the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to the director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. The disclosure that secret U.S. military forces were dispatched to Libya recently was revealed in a letter sent Wednesday to the House Armed Services Committee by Vice Adm. Kurt Tidd, director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Tidd said that after the attack in Benghazi, the U.S. European Command sent a Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) platoon to reinforce security at the U.S. Embassy...

U.S. says CIA responded within 25 minutes to Benghazi attackIntelligence officials dispute a report by Fox News that officers in Libya were ordered to 'stand down' after the diplomatic compound came under attack. By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times November 2, 2012 WASHINGTON — CIA security officers in a Benghazi post responded within 25 minutes to a call for help from a nearby State Department compound after it came under attack Sept. 11, officials said Thursday, seeking to refute a Fox News report asserting that CIA managers ordered them to stay put. In releasing a detailed timeline of CIA actions...

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...

The Benghazi debacle boils down to a single key factor — the granting or withholding of “cross-border authority.” This opinion is informed by my experience as a Navy SEAL officer who took a NavSpecWar Detachment to Beirut. Once the alarm is sent – in this case, from the consulate in Benghazi — dozens of HQs are notified and are in the planning loop in real time, including AFRICOM and EURCOM, both located in Germany. Without waiting for specific orders from Washington, they begin planning and executing rescue operations, including moving personnel, ships, and aircraft forward toward the location of the...

Intelligence officials have disclosed a new detailed timeline of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, acknowledging the CIA played a greater role in responding to the attack than has previously been disclosed.  A senior U.S. intelligence official also insisted that the CIA security team that initially responded to the attack was not given orders “to stand down in providing support,” as had been suggested in media reports.

WASHINGTON — Security officers from the C.I.A. played a pivotal role in combating militants who attacked the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, deploying a rescue party from a secret base in the city, sending reinforcements from Tripoli, and organizing an armed Libyan military convoy to escort the surviving Americans to hastily chartered planes that whisked them out of the country, senior intelligence officials said Thursday. *** Thursday’s briefing for reporters was intended to refute reports, including one by Fox News last Friday, that the C.I.A.’s chain of command had blocked the officers on the ground from...

President Obama says, "I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to." It is clear that he did not issue such a directive, or else the CIA and the military defied him. Why would our president not come to the defense of our consulate under attack? This is an attack on American soil. This was a 9/11 attack by an al-Qaeda branch in Libya. Therein lies the answer. Obama does not believe in using the military to defend our national security, which he sees as aggressive, Republican,...

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...

Frank Gaffney neatly recaps a slew of breaking reports by Catherine Herridge, Aaron Klein and Clare Lopez concerning what might have drawn the late Amb. Christopher Stevens to Benghazi on September 10 and 11. The diferent strands of this developing story indicate that Stevens may have been there to oversee or inspect an ongoing covert CIA operation to supply weapons and men to the jihadist-dominated "rebels" fighting Syria's Assad. Stevens' last meeting, after all, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Turkey, of course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a leading supporter of the "rebels" fighting to ovethrow...

The truth about the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi is trickling out slowly. The latest development is found in a classified cable obtained by Fox News that reveals the compound in Libya was unprepared to withstand a “coordinated attack” due to lack of security and other issues. Appearing on Fox News with Greta Van Susteren on Thursday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) revealed two more interesting pieces of the Benghazi puzzle. First, that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens rang Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks on Sept. 11 to tell him the consulate was under attack. “He said...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama régime has been running guns and armaments and munitions to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate jihadist groups, including heat-seeking shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles designed to shoot down jetliners. The American Mission in Libya was apparently trying to buy back man-portable anti-aircraft missiles that the Obama Régime sold or gave to the Muslim Brotherhood and then went "missing." The Administration was also trying to buy back weapons previously owned by the Gaddafi Régime that spread everywhere after the "revolution." Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same...

WASHINGTON - On Monday, Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to President Obama in response to White House assertions about the military response to the September 11, 2012 attack in Libya. The full text of the letter can be found below: ***SNIP*** There appears to be a discrepancy between your directive and the actions taken by the Department of Defense. As we are painfully aware, despite the fact that the military had resources in the area, the military did not deploy any assets to secure U.S. personnel in Benghazi during the...

When the bodies of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya, arrived at Andrews Air Force Base after the Sept. 11 attack, they were greeted by the president, the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense. Conspicuously absent was CIA Director David Petraeus. Officials close to Mr. Petraeus say he stayed away in an effort to conceal the agency's role in collecting intelligence and providing security in Benghazi. Two of the four men who died that day, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, were former Navy SEAL commandos who were publicly identified as State Department...

We've received many emails over the last week or so from readers asking us to get to the bottom of this situation/rumors du jour...I'm not sure that we can actually do that quickly, but here is what we've been hearing... First of all, over the last week there have been many reports that the AFRICOM commander, GEN Carter Ham, had been arrested by his second in command and relieved of command. The reasoning in several articles from journalists and bloggers is that GEN Ham was ready to violate a do-not-assist order with regards to Benghazi. I would think that there...

CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG). "The CSG is the one group that's supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,"

Barack Obama faces not one but two perfect storms. He actually may be grateful for the meteorological one if it predictably helps obscure the political one at least for the next week. Hurricane Sandy is, of course, a disaster no one would welcome. Untold numbers of Americans are having their lives endangered, or at least severely disrupted, and the potential economic harm is unimaginable at this point. The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.” For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the...

A senior U.S. Intelligence official discounted a Fox news report from last Friday that said officials within the CIA chain of command denied repeated requests from its officers on the ground to assist during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. The official insisted that the CIA operators on the ground were in charge of their movements and the safety of those who were preparing to respond was also an important consideration. "There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support," the official said. The official detailed the minute by minute account of what they say...

As was noted on AT recently, a retired State Department Foreign Service Officer said: "Our Benghazi facility was a half-baked operation. It was not a consulate. It was a 'facility' with an ambiguous purpose, at least as far as the unclassified world is concerned." If it was not a consulate, then it was not sovereign United States territory.  This fact has important legal consequences -- as was only just touched upon (at ~13:00, but pick up at ~10:00 for full context) by Newt Gingrich on Fox News in his appearance on Greta Van Susteren's Oct. 30 show (caution: auto-play).One of...

Once a mob began attacking the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, officials in Washington, D.C., watched with alarm. Now, new details are emerging about their response to the deadly attack. President Obama and his entire national security team monitored what was going on half a world away. Army Gen. Carter Ham, who was the regional commander for Africa, happened to be in Washington that day. One source familiar with the events said there was a sense of urgency. The consulate was burning, and Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was visiting the consulate with a small...