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A report whose credibility is unclear says Iranian forces will enter Iraq to suppress rebellion, take over U.S. embassy. Katyusha rockets fired on a camp housing Iranian dissidents near Baghdad killed five members of the Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) opposition, Iraqi security officials said Saturday.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified this morning on Capitol Hill that President Barack Obama was absent the night four Americans were murdered in Benghazi on September 11, 2012:Panetta said, though he did meet with Obama at a 5 o'clock prescheduled gathering, the president left operational details, including knowledge of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, "up to us." In fact, Panetta says that the night of 9/11, he did not communicate with a single person at the White House. The attack resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. [snip],a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/petraeus-and-panetta-speak-not-president_659902.html">(As Bill Kristol)...

Turkish news reports say an explosion in front of the U.S. Embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara has injured several people.

A banner showing al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri and former emir Osama bin Laden is placed outside the French Embassy in Cairo, Egypt during a protest organized by Mohammed al Zawahiri. Image from Euronews. Within the past few days, Mohammed al Zawahiri, the younger brother of al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri, has threatened France and the West while condemning the intervention in Mali. The younger Zawahiri promised that if France and its allies continue to fight in Mali, then Westerners will be the "first to burn." During an interview broadcast by Euronews on Jan. 22, Mohammed al...

Senate hearing: 9:00a.m. EST. House hearing: 2:00 p.m. ESTWatch live here. Also on C-SPAN 3. In her first testimony since the Benghazi attack, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will participate in a full day of hearings Wednesday about U.S. diplomatic security and the American mission in Libya. Sec. Clinton will appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the morning followed by an afternoon testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In December, the State Department's highest ranking foreign service officers, William Burns and Thomas Nides, testified before Congressional lawmakers in the Secretary's place. They discussed a new report by...

With Americans being held hostage in Algeria, the U.S. embassy in that country is posting Facebook photos of ... "Rubik’s Cubes Portrait of Martin Luther King Jr." Here's a screen grab:

What actually happened in Egypt and Libya on September 11, 2012? The story from the U.S. government has changed many times in an effort to craft a narrative that causes as little damage as possible to the Obama administration. Now the administration seems to have settled on something approaching a final version.The U.S. embassy in Cairo, September 11, 2012Newscom It goes like this:On September 11, and in the days that followed, citizens in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa gathered to protest The Innocence of Muslims, a video on YouTube produced in California that was disrespectful to Islam and the...

Three top officials in the State Department resigned Wednesday in the wake of a scathing report which slammed "systemic failures" and "management deficiencies" in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, which resulted in the murder of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell, head of the bureau of diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programs, have stepped down, CNN and CBS television said, citing unnamed department officials. Lamb, who was Boswell’s deputy in charge of international programs, denied requests from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli for an extension of temporary security...

WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

On the face of it, Ms Wintour, 63, may not appear a natural candidate for international diplomacy. Her reportedly aloof and demanding personality has earned her the nickname “Nuclear Wintour” and inspired the waspish character played by Meryl Streep in the film The Devil Wears Prada. But according to Bloomberg News, Mr Obama has placed her on his short list to safeguard transatlantic relations at the Court of St James. It would be hard to find a better connected ambassador in the fields of fashion and entertainment than Ms Wintour, who was awarded an OBE for services to British journalism...

Parallels: A mission was attacked after warnings, Americans were killed after security requests were denied, and a diplomat went on TV to explain it all — our current U.N. ambassador, after embassy bombings in 1998. 'What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on both embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Wednesday after two hours with our U.N. ambassador. "In both cases, the ambassador begged for additional security." In both cases, Susan Rice was involved more than she...

CAIRO: The United States Embassy in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, said in a statement on Monday that it would not offer services on Tuesday ahead of planned large demonstrations in Tahrir Square near the embassy in light of security concerns. “Due to the security situation around the US Embassy, there will be no visa or American citizen services tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov 27,” the embassy posted on its official Twitter account. Liberal and secular groups have called for a “million person march” on Tuesday to continue their protests against President Mohamed Morsi and a presidential decree that gives him near absolute...

Photo Ben Curtis/AP The US ambassador in Libya and three other embassy staff were killed in a rocket attack after the diplomat's car was targeted in the eastern city of Benghazi, it was confirmed on Wednesday. A statement from President Obama "condemned the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including ambassador Chris Stevens". The president added: "Chris was a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States." Earlier, Libya's interior ministry confirmed that Stevens died in the attack. "The American ambassador and three staff members were killed when gunmen fired...

This photograph is actually a video still captured from an Al Jazeera video of the amazing scene at the U.S. Benghazi Consulate compound sometime before 11:30 pm. Four additional captioned photos can be found at my Flickr page below. This is the first in a series of photos I will be posting over the weekend along with some new video. In each instance it is my goal to present information that the U.S. news media has by and large failed to present to the American public. Most of the video and video still images were obtained from Middle Eastern sources....

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...

On Saturday, retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News that according to his sources, President Obama watched the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, from the White House as it took place. “This was in the middle of the business day in Washington, so everybody at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, everybody was watching this go down,” he said on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” “According to my sources, yes, [President Obama] was one of those in the White House Situation Room in real-time watching this,” he added. Video: Military analyst says Obama watched Benghazi...

SNIPPET: "Indonesian anti-terror police, Densus 88 secure a terror suspect's house during a raid in Mojosongo, Solo in Central Java. Indonesian police have arrested 11 members of an Islamic group allegedly planning attacks on American diplomatic missions, a spokesman says." SNIPPET: "The group had planned to hit the US embassy and a US consulate, as well as a building near the Australian embassy in the capital Jakarta that houses the office of American mining giant Freeport-McMoran, police said. Police said they were from a new outfit called HASMI, the Sunni Movement for Indonesian Society, and explosives and a bomb-making manual...

Across 166 pages of internal State Department documents -- released Friday by a pair of Republican congressmen pressing the Obama administration for more answers on the Benghazi terrorist attack -- slain U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and the security officers assigned to protect him repeatedly sounded alarms to their superiors in Washington about the intensifying lawlessness and violence in Eastern Libya, where Stevens ultimately died. On Sept. 11 -- the day Stevens and three other Americans were killed -- the ambassador signed a three-page cable, labeled "sensitive," in which he noted "growing problems with security" in Benghazi and "growing...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Hillary Clinton may think that she's taking the hit for Obama, but she isn't. She's always gonna be in the hot seat given her position, but Obama cannot escape this! I don't care what they think. He cannot escape this. His usual defense, "It's Bush's fault," that doesn't work here. So for Benghazi, Obama can't blame Bush. He can't blame the rich. He can't blame what he inherited. He can't blame the Republican majority in the House. He can't blame Bain Capital. He can't blame Romney. He can't blame Hillary. He can't blame anybody. It's all on...

The Clinton’s are clearly on a divergent path than President Obama. Hillary just Judo’d Obama in this informative article posted in the UK Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2215431/Death-U-S-ambassador-Chris-Stevens-revealed-AK-47s-grenade-attacks-smoke-filled-safe-room.html?ITO=1490