Free Republic

We’re here, the final hours of the 2012 Presidential campaign. It’s D-Day, Judgment day and Super Bowl Sunday all rolled into one. To me, this campaign season has seemed to be the longest I can remember. Maybe my memory is fading, but I can’t remember a campaign as hard fought as this one. Yes, the Bush, Gore election of 2000 was aggressively fought and the battle of the “hanging chads” seemed to go on forever, but somehow it worked itself out and our country righted itself in a couple of months. I’m not so sure about this election. The division...

As Americans fought for their lives in Benghazi, Libya, the Pentagon’s options for direct intervention were narrowed to one: a fleet of F-16 fighters parked across the Mediterranean at NATO's air base in Aviano, Italy. How the best military in the world came to having only one real choice in a terrorist attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. citizens is the story of an ill-equipped commander. U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military options in North Africa, had no access to AC-130 gunships or to armed drones, such as the Predator, that could have killed...

It is now apparent that the president of the United States countermanded standing Pentagon orders to help American personnel under attack. Ambassador Stevens and three others were left to die without AC-130 Spectres and rescue teams that are always on standby in the Africom theater. Only the White House could have countermanded those standing orders, and we know that POTUS had an emergency meeting with Panetta and Hillary within 55 minutes of the start of the attack. AFRICOM's General Carter F. Ham was fired -- presumably for wanting to rescue the Americans under fire. Ambassador Stevens and his people were...

Just days before the presidential election, U.S. officials are striking back at allegations they failed to respond quickly or efficiently against the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, detailing for the first time a broad CIA rescue effort. In the first days after the attack, various administration officials linked the Benghazi incident to the simultaneous protests around the Muslim world over an American-made film that ridiculed Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Only later did they publicly attribute it to militants, possibly linked to al-Qaida, and acknowledged it was distinct from the film protests. The changing explanations have led...

Sources who have debriefed the team that was at the CIA annex the night of the attack in Benghazi say that the CIA operators from the Global Response Staff, or GRS, were equipped with Mark 48 machine guns and had two types of laser capability. Each weapon had both a “passive” as well as a “visible” laser that could be used against the Libyan attackers. Fox News has learned the guns were fitted with PEQ-15 lasers. The “passive” laser is not visible to the naked eye but can help team members identify hostile forces when the shooter is wearing NODS,...

Exclusive Walid Shoebat Bombshell Barack Obama’s claim to election fame – that Al-Qaeda has been destroyed – needs a reality check, according to a group of anti-Al Qaeda Libyans in exile. “We beg to differ,” they exclaimed. “Obama gift-wrapped Libya, handed it over to Al-Qaeda, and we can prove it.” The group stated they have come into possession of some highly classified documents that in their view, “will bring the Obama Administration down.” They were not bluffing; they provided the first installments of official classified documents which we provided in some of our previous reporting. “The rest,” they say, “will...

Barack Obama’s claim to election fame – that Al-Qaeda has been destroyed – needs a reality check, according to a group of anti-Al Qaeda Libyans in exile. “We beg to differ,” they exclaimed. “Obama gift-wrapped Libya, handed it over to Al-Qaeda, and we can prove it.” The group stated they have come into possession of some highly classified documents that in their view, “will bring the Obama Administration down.” They were not bluffing; they provided the first installments of official classified documents which we provided in some of our previous reporting. “The rest,” they say, “will be provided when Mitt...

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama met with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House on Sept. 11, 2012 at 5:00 PM—just 55 minutes after a State Department email notified the White House and the Pentagon that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi was under attack. The meeting between Obama, Panetta and Biden had been scheduled before the attack took place, and the Department Defense is not commenting now on whether the three men were aware when they met that day of the ongoing Benghazi attack or whether Obama used that meeting to discuss with...

“Anytime a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans who were serving our country get killed, we have to figure out what happened and fix it,” he said, speaking with Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in New Hampshire. “But I do take offense with some suggestion that in any way, we haven’t tried to make sure that the American people knew as the information was coming in what we believed.”

Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus has emphatically denied that he or anyone else at the CIA refused assistance to the former Navy SEALs who requested it three times as terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on the night of Sep. 11. The Weekly Standard and ABC News (report) that Petraeus's denial effectively implicates President Barack Obama, since a refusal to assist "would have been a presidential decision." Earlier today, Denver local reporter Kyle Clarke of KUSA-TV did what the national media largely refuses to do, (asking) Obama directly whether the Americans in Benghazi were denied requests for aid....

A Mideast “Fast and Furious” emerging within weeks of the election would be devastating On October 4 in Canada Free Press, I wrote a column entitled Was Ambassador Stevens’ Death a Hit?, so suspicious did I find the circumstances surrounding the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya at that time. On October 25, I followed up with Obama’s Feet of Clay, in which I discussed the likelihood that President Barack Obama failed to react to the attack despite real-time knowledge of developments in Benghazi because he wished to obscure or bury evidence of the administration’s gun running activities...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Fox News within the last 35 minutes, ladies and gentlemen, has broken a story that will shake this country down to its core. Well, the portion of the country paying attention to this, which is, to the chagrin of the regime, quite a large portion. President Obama has demonstrably failed here in his most basic responsibility, to keep Americans safe who are in harm's way. This is a major breaking story. CIA operators were denied three requests to go help those under assault in Benghazi. "Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in...

Yesterday, Leon Panetta told reporters that the US military didn’t intervene to assist our consulate in Benghazi during the attack because of a lack of real-time intelligence.  Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin now reports that the CIA got at least three requests for support from the annex in the city to help fend off the attack — and that the chain of command not only refused the requests, but ordered its personnel to “stand down.”  Two of the Americans killed in the terrorist attack disobeyed orders and attempted to rescue their fellow Americans: Fox News has learned from sources who were...

If you don’t get torches-and-pitchforks irate about this, you are not an American: The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces...

Another LINK to Fox New's breaking Benghazi CIA story. Report: CIA Refused Request for Back-up in Benghazi Terror AttackLISTEN to the very end; ALL 5:37 of Jennifer Griffin's report.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is suggesting that a retired Navy SEAL be punished for writing a book giving an insider's account of the U.S. raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Asked in a network interview if he thinks the writer should be prosecuted, Panetta replied, "I think we have to take steps to make clear to him and to the American people that we're not going to accept this kind of behavior."