Free Republic

On December 28, 2013, The New York Times published a thoroughly researched review of the September 11, 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic and CIA facilities in the city of Benghazi. David Kirkpatrick, The Times’ Cairo bureau chief, traveled to Libya and personally conducted a series of interviews with witnesses and even the relatives of suspects in that attack. His exhaustive account of the events on that night was illuminating, but his conclusions about what sparked that deadly attack made the most waves. Kirkpatrick found that there was “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had...

I'm still trying to figure out how the New York Times missed evidence that Al Qaeda was present in Benghazi in 2012. I found clear signs less than an hour after I started working the story for the American Media Institute. The New York Times employs a vast research department. The AMI does not. I investigated the story using only basic gumshoe methods. How come I found evidence, and the New York Times did not? I'll be talking about this tomorrow on Clear Channel radio in California. You can listen in to 960 KNEW at 3 p.m. Pacific time.

What was the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces doing through the night of September 11, 2012, while he knew Americans were under jihadist siege in Libya? You won’t learn the answer to that question by reading the mini-book-length, six-“chapter” revisionist history of the Benghazi massacre cooked up by David D. Kirkpatrick and the New York Times. The Times report is a labor of love in the service of President Obama and, in particular, the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ramp-up. Former secretary of state Clinton, of course, was a key architect of Obama’s Libya policy. She was also chiefly...

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy. Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional. Indeed, is far from clear that the paper even realizes what it has done. Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000 word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East. Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June...

The New York Times story concluding that the Benghazi attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility was not al-Qaida-related and was spurred by an anti-Muslim video will win the newspaper a Pulitzer prize, says Democratic operative James Carville. Carville, appearing Thursday on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," defended reporter David Kirkpatrick's journalism, even suggesting he testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. After all, Carville said, Kirkpatrick's six-month investigation was the most exhaustive probe anyone has made.

The author of the widely disputed New York Times article on Benghazi repeatedly posed naked as a Princeton student. Far from the moderate journalist pose he strikes now, David D. Kirkpatrick was a prominent campus progressive and activist. Kirkpatrick was arrested for lewd conduct, advocated for classes on pornography, and even posed for Playgirl. “Kinky” Kirkpatrick had a “rather unusual habit of disrobing for photographers in public places,” reported The Daily Princetonian in January 22, 1990. [snip] Kirkpatrick also campaigned for a class on pornography titled, “Pornography and America: Textuality and Sensuality” where guest speakers actually included porn film directors,...

WASHINGTON—The mother of a victim in the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attack blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with WORLD, saying a recent article in The New York Times is only trying to protect Clinton’s 2016 presidential aspirations. “They’re just covering up for Hillary,” Pat Smith, mother of slain foreign-service officer Sean Smith, told me by phone. “Hillary killed my son. … As far as I can tell from all my sources, she was responsible—directly.” Lawmakers, media outlets, and analysts have all criticized a front-page story in Saturday’s edition of The New York Times, in which...

One shouldn’t question the good faith of a news report merely because one disagrees with the report’s conclusions. But David Kirkpatrick’s revisionist Benghazi account in the New York Times invites doubt about his commitment to unbiased reporting about that tragic affair. My doubts stem both from the reporting itself and from what a person whom Kirkpatrick interviewed told me. [....] Kirkpatrick’s heavy reliance on self-serving comments by Libyans that also serve the purposes of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, etc, suggests that he had a story he wanted to write and was looking for confirmation of that story. This suspicion was...

Page 1 below; 2 more pages at link. During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick was asked about the connections between Muhammad Jamal’s network and the Benghazi attack.Jamal, as I documented in a response to Kirkpatrick’s em>Times piece, was clearly operating as part of al Qaeda’s international network. And according to multiple reports, including in the New York Times itself, Jamal’s network is suspected of taking part in the Benghazi attack. This reporting contradicts Kirkpatrick’s thesis that only “local” Libyan actors were involved and that neither al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, nor any other internationally connected...

The New York Times has published a strange but unsurprising account of the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012 — strange in that it presents the explanations and testimony of terrorists involved in the attack without comment or context, and unsurprising because that account supports the narrative the Obama administration aggressively promoted for weeks after the massacre. The first of the Grey Lady’s two key findings: “Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned...

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s air power...

**SNIP** The cable was a last token of months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi, many fostered by shadows of the earlier Sept. 11 attack. The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies. Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on...

Entrepreneurs have a mindset and orientation to work their way through uncertainty by taking action. "Making things happen" is the hallmark of an entrepreneur, and it defines our 44th president.

Despite the triumph of placing two conservatives on the Supreme Court within four months, leaders of the conservative movement these days seem less celebratory than divided. Heading into a midterm Congressional election in which the enthusiasm of conservative advocates could play a vital role in determining how Republicans fare, conservative leaders face internal rifts over polarizing issues and are dogged by a sense that a Republican-led Congress and a Republican president are not taking the nation in the proper direction on some critical matters, party leaders said. The fissures were evident as members gathered here on Thursday for the first...

As a lesbian in a long-term relationship, Margaret Leber objects to the idea of amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But Ms. Leber, a software engineer and a registered Republican in Jeffersonville, Pa., is also a member of the Pink Pistols, an organization of gay and lesbian gun owners, and marriage is not the only issue on her mind. "Right now, I am leaning toward Bush," Ms. Leber said. "All the Democrats just rolled into Congress to vote for this gun-control bill. Somebody with my values and beliefs can't be a single-issue voter." President Bush's support for the gay-marriage...

As one of 12 siblings taught at home by their parents in St. Croix Falls, Wis., Abram Olmstead knew he would fit right in at Patrick Henry College, the first college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers. But what really sold him was the school's pipeline into conservative politics. Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this semester, seven are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in the 4-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. An eighth intern works for the president's re-election campaign. A former Patrick Henry intern now works on the paid staff of the president's top...

The New York Times’ “conservative beat” is nothing more than a ruse for attacking the very foundations of conservatism, as well as the Bush Administration. [Bill] Keller surely knows that his own newsroom often is perceived as liberal and that a more intense effort to report on conservatives might rid his staff of any misconception that conservatives are all, well, strange or alien. In any case, good journalism should attempt to get beyond convenient but distorting labels. -- Terry Eastland, The Weekly Standard, 3/3/04 It’s an election year. There’s a conservative Republican president up for re-election (thank God!). And the...

College for the Home-Schooled Is Shaping Leaders for the Right By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK URCELLVILLE, Va. — As one of 12 siblings taught at home by their parents in St. Croix Falls, Wis., Abram Olmstead knew he would fit right in at Patrick Henry College, the first college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers. But what really sold him was the school's pipeline into conservative politics. Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this semester, 7 are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in the four-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. An eighth intern works for the president's...

For more than a month, one of our national papers of record, The New York Times, has been examining "conservative forces in religion, politics, law, business and the media." No, that isn't made up. The quoted material comes from Times national editor Jim Roberts, announcing last month that David D. Kirkpatrick, the former media correspondent, would patrol the new beat. As with any press release, it deserves a question or two, beginning with why The Times thinks it can cover all of those conservative forces with only one reporter. The task would seem to require a legion of correspondents, but...

The long rise of America's conservative movement has finally caught the attention of the New York Times. The worried Old Gray Lady is assigning a full-time correspondent to spend the next year on discovering what mischief the right is up to. The move is a turnabout for the Times, which has always looked down its nose at conservatives and preferred to pretend they don't exist. After all, they don't exist in the rarefied little world of the Times' movers and shakers. According to the New York Observer's "Off the Record" feature, David Kirkpatrick, who had been covering the book industry,...