Libya

WASHINGTON - Susan Rice would seem to have everything going for her: close ties to President Obama, charter membership in the Washington foreign policy establishment, and seasoning after four years as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But her path to becoming America's top diplomat looks increasingly rocky. White House officials circulated word three weeks ago that the former Rhodes scholar was Obama's top pick to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton when she steps down next year.

WASHINGTON - Authorities with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the CIA, decided to remove the terms "attack," "Al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from unclassified guidance provided to the Obama administration several days after militants attacked the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a senior official said Tuesday. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, relied on the so-called talking points when she appeared on several Sunday TV talk shows five days after the Sept.

Some Republicans aren't giving up on the claim Mitt Romney floated in the second presidential debate: that the Obama administration, for political reasons, downplayed the possibility that the deadly attack on a U.S. facility in Libya in September was a well-planned terrorist operation. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has suggested that Susan Rice, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, is "not qualified" to serve as secretary of State because, in television interviews five days after the attack, she said that "the best assessment we have today" is that the attack in Benghazi began as a spontaneous response to earlier protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo related to the video "Innocence of Muslims.

WASHINGTON - Lawmakers on Sunday targeted U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's talking points about the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, vowing to find out who changed the original language and why. The incident left four Americans dead, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Days later, Rice said the administration's preliminary view was that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video, rather than a planned terrorist attack. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON - Appearing before two congressional committees in closed-door sessions, former CIA Director David H. Petraeus did little to ease the partisan divide over whether Obama administration officials misled the public after heavily armed militants killed four Americans in the Libyan city of Benghazi, lawmakers said Friday. Petraeus told the House and Senate intelligence committees that he believed almost immediately that the Sept. 11 assault was an organized terrorist attack, according to lawmakers and staff sources.

WASHINGTON - With his fiery defense of his ambassador to the United Nations, President Obama appears to have committed himself to nominating Susan Rice to be secretary of State and making her confirmation fight a test of wills with Senate Republicans, congressional aides and Democratic strategists said Thursday. These Democratic insiders said that by defending Rice on Wednesday against what he called "outrageous" GOP criticism for her comments on the deadly militant attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, Obama was betting on a confirmation victory that would deter Republicans from challenging nominations as often as they did in his first term.

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans signaled stiffening resistance Tuesday to the Obama administration's possible nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of State. GOP strategists said lawmakers would use such a nomination as an opening for an extended examination of how the administration handled the Sept. 11 militant attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. Although the Senate rarely rejects a president's Cabinet picks, the strategists said, the process could be so painful and lengthy that Obama might come to regret his choice.

WASHINGTON - CIA security officers in a Benghazi post responded within 25 minutes to a call for help from a nearby State Department compound after it came under attack Sept. 11, officials said Thursday, seeking to refute a Fox News report asserting that CIA managers ordered them to stay put. In releasing a detailed timeline of CIA actions that night, senior intelligence officials have put aside long-standing concerns about revealing the extent of the agency's presence in Benghazi in order to push back against what officials say are baseless allegations that aid was withheld.

If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy? Unlike some of my colleagues on the right, I don't think there's a conspiracy at work. Rather, I think journalists tend to act on their instincts (some even brag about this; you could look it up). And, collectively, the mainstream media's instincts run liberal, making groupthink inevitable. In 2000, a Democratic operative orchestrated an "October surprise" attack on George W. Bush, revealing that 24 years earlier, he'd been arrested for drunk driving.

Jon Stewart is known for taking down Fox News with devastatingly well-edited montages; on Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert achieved the same goal simply by wandering around the "Colbert Report" studio.   Inspired by an overwrought Bret Baier "Special Report" on the Benghazi attack, in which the Fox News host strolled around a dimly lit, columned space asking accusatory questions such as "Is this a huge scandal that exposes a failed Obama foreign policy?” Colbert fired back with some questions of his own. Emerging Baier-like from the shadows behind his desk, Colbert began with a question that neatly summed up the satirical point of the entire segment: "If you put a statement in the form of a question, is that journalism?