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The Scandal In Libya: On the night Bengazi burned and four Americans died, forces ready to deploy were told to stand down and our secretary of state cut out of the loop her department's counter-terrorism bureau. Few people know who Gregory Hicks and Mark Thompson are, but then nobody knew who John Dean was when he testified at the Watergate hearings and blew the Nixon administration and its coverup out of the water. "I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go," says Hicks, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya on that fateful night. "I think everybody...

Accountability: As with Fast and Furious, the designated scapegoats for the deaths of Americans at the hands of administration bungling will merely be switching desks. Only the maker of that irrelevant video is in jail. Reports of the resignation of four State Department officials after the Accountability Review Board's (ARB) review of State Department actions before during and after the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, may have been greatly exaggerated. Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, has not resigned from the department, as a State Department spokeswoman indicated Dec. 19. Boswell is instead...

<p>Leadership: A less-than-adequate independent review cites "grossly" inadequate leadership, "systemic failures" and "management deficiencies" that mean our secretary of state isn't ready for that 3 a.m. call either.</p> <p>We know Hillary Clinton had a virus that caused her to faint and suffer a concussion from her fall and needs her rest. We also know she wasn't up to it when U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice took her place and went on five Sunday talk shows to blame a video for the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi.</p>

Diplomacy: Egypt descends into chaos, Syria's chemical weapons are on the move, and Benghazigate's questions remain unanswered, but our outgoing secretary of state wants saving the African elephant to be her legacy? 'Some of you might be wondering why a secretary of state is keynoting an event about wildlife trafficking and conservation," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday in Washington, D.C., before a group of animal activists and several international ambassadors. Yes, that thought occurred to us, considering that she has put aside the fact that four Americans are dead, apparently forgotten casualties of the Sept. 11, 2012,...

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...

Benghazi Scandal: "Her meeting with GOP senators begs the question that if all she can do is read talking points handed to her by the White House then perhaps she should be the next White House press secretary." The above observation, courtesy of Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman for four U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N., is the flip side of our view that Susan Rice, who was sent out on five Sunday talk shows to explain Benghazi by a president who says she had "nothing to do with Benghazi," is as qualified to be the next secretary of state...

Scandal: David Petraeus' admission that he knew almost immediately that Benghazi was a terrorist attack raises anew our question: Was he coerced into telling lawmakers Sept. 14 that it was caused by a video? The tangled web that is Benghazi-gate got more tangled Friday when, according to Rep. Peter King, David Petraeus testified in a closed-door hearing that his agency determined immediately after the Sept. 11 Libya attack that "al-Qaida involvement" was suspected — but that the line was taken out in the final version circulated to and by administration officials. "No one knows yet exactly who came up with...

Leadership: Obama admits sending our U.N. ambassador, who had "nothing to do with Benghazi," to explain Benghazi on five Sunday talk shows "at the request of the White House" with talking points "provided to her." Considering this was President Obama's first press conference in eight months, his bluster that if "Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me" regarding Benghazi is a bit odd. When the questions needed to be asked and answers needed to be given, both the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were nowhere to be found....

Petraeus Scandal: Four Americans have been killed under still-unexplained circumstances, yet the obsession is with a general's mistress and not with the truth of why these men were left to die in Libya. How ironic that the FBI agents who descended on the home of Paula Broadwell to gather information on the mistress of now-former CIA Director David Petraeus probably did a better job than the FBI agents who gave a cursory look at our burned-out consulate in Benghazi, leaving behind classified documents strewn on the floor and even our ambassador's diary to be picked up by CNN. A press...

Petraeus Scandal: An affair that was known to the FBI for months and kept from congressional oversight committees might explain his complicity in a false narrative of the Benghazi terrorist attack and the order to "stand down." The addition of sex to Benghazigate adds a dimension sure to keep the scandal going and one that does indeed make Watergate seem like a third-rate burglary. The affair admitted to by Gen. David Petraeus, now our former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, might have attached blackmail or the potential for blackmail to a scandal we have already called a case of...

Petraeus Scandal: An affair that was known to the FBI for months and kept from congressional oversight committees might explain his complicity in a false narrative of the Benghazi terrorist attack and the order to "stand down." The addition of sex to Benghazigate adds a dimension sure to keep the scandal going and one that does indeed make Watergate seem like a third-rate burglary. The affair admitted to by Gen. David Petraeus, now our former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, might have attached blackmail or the potential for blackmail to a scandal we have already called a case of...

Scandal: The filmmaker blamed for the terrorist attack on our Libyan consulate and the murder of our ambassador goes to jail for an "unrelated" matter. If you believe that, you also believe al-Qaida is on its heels. If the Obama administration had heeded warnings from Ambassador Chris Stevens that, after two previous incidents, the consulate in Benghazi was surrounded by terrorist training camps and couldn't withstand an organized attack, Mark Basseley Youssef might still be a free man today. If requests for enhanced security had not been repeatedly denied, or if nearby help that was requested and denied three times...

Benghazi: In an astonishing display of media bias, CBS makes a mockery of journalistic ethics by hiding a portion of a "60 Minutes" interview proving the president lied from day one about calling Benghazi a terrorist attack. There must have been some knee-slapping guffaws at CBS when CNN's Candy Crowley corrected GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, falsely claiming President Obama did call Benghazi a terrorist attack on the very next day. CBS knew Obama was lying and had a tape to prove it. As part of a "60 Minutes" interview taped on Sept. 12, the day after the terrorist attack...

Bias: Call it the "October Suppress" as the so-called "mainstream" media provided less coverage to the current president's bungling of and lying about Benghazi than they did to another president's decades-old DUI arrest. Last Friday, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Kirsten Powers, a Daily Beast columnist, appeared on Fox News' "Happening Now" program to justifiably bash the mainstream media and its orchestrated suppression of coverage of the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Neither is a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," but both roundly condemned the shameful and politically motivated actions of their colleagues. Miller...

Bias: Call it the "October Suppress" as the so-called "mainstream" media provided less coverage to the current president's bungling of and lying about Benghazi than they did to another president's decades-old DUI arrest. Last Friday, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Kirsten Powers, a Daily Beast columnist, appeared on Fox News' "Happening Now" program to justifiably bash the mainstream media and its orchestrated suppression of coverage of the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Neither is a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," but both roundly condemned the shameful and politically motivated actions of their colleagues. Miller...

Scandal: A month before the terrorist attack, the State Department was warned Benghazi couldn't protect itself and was surrounded by Islamist militia and al-Qaida camps. It was 3 a.m. and the administration pressed "snooze." When the U.S. mission in Benghazi called an Aug. 15 emergency meeting, it wasn't to discuss an obscure Internet video. It was to discuss the lack of security for a consulate surrounded by at least 10 terrorist camps. An Aug. 16 cable to the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and obtained by Fox News reported that the State Department's senior security officer "expressed concerns...

Leadership: After the president rushed back to the White House to watch the Weather Channel, pundits said he acted "presidential" — as if he'd be judged by the last four days and not the last four years. Acting presidential is one thing and being presidential quite another. Touring disaster areas is what every president finds himself doing sometime during his administration. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, President Obama is doing all the right things, such as telling FEMA to do what it's already tasked to do, even as the sequestration he pushed as part of the Budget Control Act...

Scandal: A month before the terrorist attack, the State Department was warned Benghazi couldn't protect itself and was surrounded by Islamist militia and al-Qaida camps. It was 3 a.m. and the administration pressed "snooze." When the U.S. mission in Benghazi called an Aug. 15 emergency meeting, it wasn't to discuss an obscure Internet video. It was to discuss the lack of security for a consulate surrounded by at least 10 terrorist camps. An Aug. 16 cable to the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and obtained by Fox News reported that the State Department's senior security officer "expressed concerns...

Leadership: After the president rushed back to the White House to watch the Weather Channel, pundits said he acted "presidential" — as if he'd be judged by the last four days and not the last four years. Acting presidential is one thing and being presidential quite another. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, President Obama is doing all the right things, such as telling FEMA to do what it's already tasked to do, even as the sequestration he pushed as part of the Budget Control Act threatens to cut $900 million from the agency's budget. Pledging to cut red tape,...

Libya: As the father of a former Navy SEAL slain at Benghazi wonders why our secretary of state lied to him, we wonder why our CIA director abetted a lie that contradicted counterterrorism officials and the FBI. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a media eager to deny George W. Bush a second term made Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, a national heroine and reported virtually her every word and move. "Cindy Sheehan," gushed NBC News, "is single-handedly bringing the Iraq debate to Mr. Bush's doorstep." But nobody in a mainstream media eager to see President Obama get...