Free Republic

1:43 interview of Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Fox News by Shannon Breem Sunday Oct 28, 2012. AFRICOM leader General Carter Ham was never given the order to secure the consulate in Benghazi. This is what the general told Rep. Jason Chaffetz after the 9-11 Benghazi terror attack. That means only Barack Obama or Defense Secretary Panetta, the two men above the AFRICOM commander, never ordered an operation to secure the consulate. This was despite the many pleas for assistance coming from the consulate and annex. The Obama Administration replaced General Carter Ham with General David Rodriguez at AFRICOM on...

You know who doesn’t like getting thrown under the bus? The CIA. You know what the CIA does when you try to throw it under the bus? They get even — quickly, quietly, and with fatal consequences. That seems the most logical explanation for the torrent of information pouring out this week (unless Hillary Rodham Clinton — also thrown under the bus by President Obama — is scrapping any chance of ever running for president again and is simply setting the whole administration on fire, along with her legacy as secretary of state). The main lesson from Watergate (after the...

The freshly appointed chairman of a federal investigation into the Benghazi massacre is an apologist for Islamic terrorism who has a cozy relationship with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. And to add insult to injury, at press time Tuesday evening the chairman of this new State Department panel, former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, was poised to participate in a panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia.” The news comes on the heels of a new report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism that found...

....The 2012 debate season began with a lay-up,a Mitt Romney victory that shattered every record in the history of snap polling. Style. Crispness of answers. Eye contact. Their candidate had every advantage that the focus groups crave.Then came Joe Biden. Imagine you’re a liberal,and think of all the lines you wanted Barack Obama to use against Mitt Romney....Did Biden forget any of them? Or did he pull a San Diego Fourth of July fireworks display and spray them all at once?..........An hour after the debate ended,the [RNC] released a super-cut of every Biden laugh,claiming that he was “laughing at the...

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter says that the terrorist attack in Libya is an issue "because of Romney and Ryan": Video Via the Washington Free Beacon: STEPHANIE CUTTER: In terms of the politicization of this — you know, we are here at a debate, and I hope we get to talk about the debate — but the entire reason this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s a big part of their stump speech. And it’s reckless and irresponsible what they’re doing. BROOKE BALDWIN: But, Stephanie, this is national security....

The size and "lethality" of the attack on the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead was "unprecedented," a senior State Department official said today. Senior State Department officials today gave the most detailed account to-date of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats. One official said the nature of the assault was unparalleled in recent history. "The lethality and number of armed people is unprecedented," one of the officials said. "There was no attack anywhere in Libya...

The two most discussed candidates to be America's next top diplomat now find themselves on opposite sides of the Libya issue, with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice in the role of defending the administration's narrative and Sen. John Kerry(D-MA) promising tough congressional oversight while giving the State Department room to conduct its own investigation. As the controversy over the administration's handling of the issue grows,Rice's comments on the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi are coming under increasing attack. Her insistence on a number of Sunday talk shows Sept. 16 that,according to the best information available at the...

Between reverences to the majesty of abortion, the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte regularly collapsed into displays of facile jingoism that would have sent liberals for their fainting couches had the streamers in the hall been red instead of blue, or had they occurred in, oh, say, 2004. Opaque and vaguely sinister phrases like “economic patriotism” were bandied about freely, and the laudable extirpation of Osama bin Laden was milked for all it was worth. The frenzy reached its climax with Vice President Biden’s sloganeered boast that “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!” Less than a week...

Immediately after the murder of Chris Stevens, America's Ambassador to Libya,I suggested that the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11 could have profound consequences for President Barack Obama,particulary if he failed to take appropriate action against the murderers–the most likely candidates being members of al-Qaeda's new terror franchise in Mali. But with the US presidential contest entering its critical final phase, the Obama administration deftly avoided getting into any controversy over the murder of Mr Stevens and three other members of the consulate staff by leading everyone to believe the murders were not part of an...

After more than two weeks of obfuscation and misdirection from the Obama administration, the American public is coming to understand what the U.S. intelligence community learned in the 48 hours immediately following the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Among the important new details: * Top Pentagon officials declared the assault a terrorist attack on “Day One.” Doing so enabled them to expedite any response to the attack (Yahoo! News). * U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials understood right away that the attacks were planned for the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 (THE WEEKLY STANDARD). * Within 24...

WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — The Obama administration’s plan to transfer $450 million in cash to Egypt hit a roadblock Friday as a top House committee chairwoman blocked the move, saying it warrants further review. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, said the State Department had notified Congress of plans to move the money to the new government of President Mohammed Morsi as Cairo struggles economically. The money is part of the nearly $1 billion in debt relief that President Barack Obama had promised the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt earlier this year. “This proposal comes to Congress at a point when the U.S.-Egypt relationship has...

......You be the judge. The Washington Post has cobbled together a timeline of administration statements on the attack, with the following disclaimer: “We will leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions on whether this is merely the result of the fog of war and diplomacy — or a deliberate effort to steer the storyline away from more politically damaging questions. After all, in a competitive election, two weeks is a lifetime.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. .....Both liberal critics and the Republicans see a mix of ineptitude and cunning in the White House’s behaviour. After they were brushed off...

CNN reported on the personal journal of slain American ambassador Christopher Stevens over objections from his family, a State Department spokesman said Saturday. The news channel, in a story posted online Saturday, said that it found a journal belonging to Stevens four days after he died in a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Three other Americans also were killed. CNN broke a pledge to the late ambassador's family that it wouldn't report on the diary, said State Department spokesman Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a blistering...

His inflammatory chat show on satellite television has long prided itself on baiting liberals, Christians and Jews, but last week saw Sheikh Khalid Abdullah stage the broadcasting controversy of a lifetime. The rabble-rousing Egyptian tele-Islamist knew he had found a ratings-grabber when he found an obscure, badly-made film on the internet called the Innocence of Muslims. It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention to its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed until Mr Abdullah's show broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed. Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who...

Yesterday, when most of the mainstream media busied themselves pounding Mitt Romney for having the chutzpah to denounce the initial apology for American freedom of speech issued by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, they were missing a much more important story. As Islamist attacks on the U.S. escalated throughout the Middle East, it became apparent that the Obama administration’s recent bout of back slapping celebration over its foreign and defense policy was completely unjustified. Not only were the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department sleeping while terrorist forces plotted a full-scale assault on our mission in Benghazi, Libya...

The fleet anti-terrorism security team's deployment is on hold Saturday even as the protest grows outside the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. [Houston Chronicle tease on front page] WASHINGTON (AP) — Objections by Sudan's government have held up the security mission of an elite Marine team that the U.S. planned to send to Khartoum, a U.S. official said Saturday. As a result, the deployment has been delayed and possibly curtailed, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to disclose details on the troop movement. The Marine unit, known as a fleet anti-terrorism...

............"American flags were torched from Tehran to Amman to Kuala Lumpur. Egyptian protesters fought street battles with security forces. In Afghanistan, which was otherwise surprisingly quiet, an effigy of Barack Obama was burnt in an eastern province. In India-administered Kashmir, the top Islamic cleric told all Americans to "immediately leave" because Muslim sentiments "have been hurt by these pictures." Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned a historic string of Western insults, saying that an "evil chain – namely Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist and Quran-burning American priests," showed that the US and "evil Zionist groups are furious at...

Armed men attacked foreign peacekeepers operating in Egypt's North Sinai today, in what appears to be an opportunistic attack by Islamist militants inspired by the anti-American protests that have swept the Muslim world in the past few days. The attackers threw hand grenades, fired rocket-propelled grenades, briefly entered the peacekeepers camp, and raised a black Islamist flag, according to a former Egyptian state security officer who spoke with several officers on the base. The former Egyptian officer asked not to be identified by name. ....The militants made their way 30 to 50 meters inside the camp before they retreated under...

In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein,Victor Frankenstein is responsible for creating a monster. Realizing his mistake, however,Victor becomes horrified of his own creation. Victor grows even more despondent with the knowledge that the monster he created is guilty of murder. This is the point in the story where the similarities between Victor and Obama,who have both created monsters, end. One is horrified and remorseful over the monster he created. The other feels no remorse. It is left to the reader to decide if this lack of remorse is due to Obama's inability to recognize that he has created a monster. Or...

....Protesters in Tunis broke into the U.S. Embassy compound and set fire to cars in the parking lot before being pushed out by police and special forces, who also confronted stone-throwing crowds with tear gas and gunfire, the Associated Press reported. Police in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, fired on protesters trying to scale the walls of the embassy there, AP said. And security forces in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, fired guns in the air to keep protesters away from that city’s U.S. Embassy, a day after its compound was broken into and looted. In Tripoli, Lebanon, demonstrators set fire to...