Benghazi

Michael Hirsh is the National Journal's chief correspondent. The events surrounding the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, look dramatically different depending on your politics. Republicans tend to see a cover-up and a scandal. Democrats see an attempt to damage President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. A Pew poll suggests that the public is divided as well, with 40 percent saying the administration has been dishonest, 37 percent saying...

TRIPOLI, Libya — Gunmen staged overnight attacks on at least six security buildings and outposts throughout Libya's eastern city of Benghazi, killing six soldiers, military officials said Saturday. The assaults, which included snipers, rocket-propelled grenades, knife-wielding assailants and explosives thrown onto rooftops, come after a number of smaller targeted attacks and assassinations of security officials in the city over the past several months. Ali el-Sheikhy, a spokesman for the army's chief of staff, said no group has...

Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don't know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn't meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics. Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks , the honorable, apolitical...

TRIPOLI, Libya — Rooftop snipers and knife-wielding assailants killed six soldiers in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi early Saturday, officials said, in the largest attack on the country's new security forces to date. The brazen overnight assault by hundreds of plain-clothed gunmen on security installations forced soldiers to withdraw from some of their bases. In one case, soldiers fled out the back door of the First Infantry Brigade's headquarters in Benghazi as assailants stormed the main...

There were two surprising things about Hillary Clinton's first tweet . Clinton broke her Twitter silence this week with this bio: "Wife, mom, lawyer, women and kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD . . . . " A photo by Diana Walker showing a serious-looking Clinton in black and looking at her Blackberry through dark glasses is her avatar. What's surprising is that the photograph belies her tweet.

Terrorism is speech — speech that gathers its audience by killing innocents as theatrically as possible. The 19th-century anarchist Paul Brousse called it "propaganda by deed. " Accordingly, the Boston Marathon attack , the first successful terror bombing in the United States since 9/11, was designed for maximum effect. At the finish line there would be not only news cameras but also hundreds of personal videos to amplify the message. But what message? There was no claim of responsibility, no explanatory propaganda.

Her Twitter followers signed up fast, almost 1,000 of them a minute, to see what she had to say. And Hillary Rodham Clinton, debuting on the social-media site Monday with a biography identifying her as a "hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker," kept them guessing. The end of her bio read: "TBD . . . " To be determined. Perhaps no figure in American political life has surfaced on Twitter quite the way Clinton did. But none shares her position...

The controversy over the Obama administration's response to the Benghazi attack last year began at a meeting over coffee on Capitol Hill three days after the assault. It was at this informal session with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the ranking Democrat asked David H. Petraeus, who was CIA director at the time, to ensure that committee members did not inadvertently disclose classified information when talking to the news media about the attack. "We had some...

Republican lawmakers, who have spent months seeking to tie President Obama to last year's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, are increasingly focusing their probe on a new target: former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. The GOP-led investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others now centers heavily on the State Department and whether officials there deliberately misled the public...

In the new James Bond thriller, "Skyfall," the villain is a cyberterrorist named Raoul Silva, a disgruntled former British agent who's trying to crash the digital universe. It's a nice touch, creating a very real, very terrifying scenario that "could paralyze the nation," as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned just last month. And that is about the only aspect of the movie that is likely to be accurate. Don't get me wrong — I'm a fan of the Bond movies. I go to see them for...

CBS News said Friday that it has confirmed a computer used by one of its Washington reporters, Sharyl Attkisson , was breached by an unknown intruder and that the hack appeared to be "sophisticated. " The intrusions were detected in December while Attkisson was reporting almost exclusively on the government's response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya . The attack on Sept. 11, 2012, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens . Attkisson has...

TRIPOLI, Libya — A Libyan army colonel was killed in an ambush on his brigade in the country's south on Friday, the unit's spokesman said, in the latest incident of violence in the North African country. Separately, in the eastern city of Benghazi, an independent TV station reported an unknown attacker hurled a hand grenade at its building. The violence underscores the instability that has rocked Libya nearly a year after the capture and killing of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi,...

There were two surprising things about Hillary Clinton's first tweet . Clinton broke her Twitter silence this week with this bio: "Wife, mom, lawyer, women and kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD . . . . " A photo by Diana Walker showing a serious-looking Clinton in black and looking at her Blackberry through dark glasses is her avatar. What's surprising is that the photograph belies her tweet.

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller on Thursday defended a pair of controversial government surveillance programs, telling Congress that leaking information on them harms national security. In his last appearance as FBI director before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller said that terrorists track leaked information "very, very closely" and that because of leaks "we lose our ability to get their communications" and "we are exceptionally vulnerable. " Responding...

WASHINGTON — CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is stepping down and being replaced by White House lawyer Avril Haines, who will be the first woman to hold the post. When President Barack Obama named a successor to former CIA Director David Petraeus in January, Morell was passed over in favor of the White House counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Morell had been acting director since Petraeus' resignation. Morell, 54, announced his retirement Wednesday, saying he...

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller on Thursday staunchly defended a pair of controversial government surveillance programs, telling Congress that leaking information on them harms national security. In his final appearance as FBI director before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller said that "every time that we have a leak like this — and if you follow it up and you look at the intelligence afterwards — they are looking at the ways around it. " "One of...

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness , and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government's large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question "Will Barack Obama's scandals derail his second-term agenda?" was a question: What agenda? The scandals are interlocking and overlapping in ways that drain his authority.

Susan Rice, currently the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will replace Tom Donilon as President Obama's national security adviser. Obama nominated Samantha Power to replace Rice at the U.N. Read the full story by Scott Wilson and Colum Lynch here . Both Rice and Power are known as advocates of military and humanitarian interventions in foreign countries: The ideological shift signaled in the personnel choices highlights the...

It's all but a journalistic commandment: Thou shalt not have a vested interest in the story you're covering. Otherwise, a personal entanglement could color a reporter's neutrality or cloud public perceptions of fairness. An obvious area of concern: when a journalist's relatives or spouse is part of the news. So what to make of all the family ties between the news media and the Obama administration? According to the news media, nothing much at all. News organizations say they've worked out the conflicts — real or potential —...

WASHINGTON — CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who defended harsh interrogation techniques and was involved with the fallout after the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, announced his retirement Wednesday. When President Barack Obama named a successor to former CIA Director David Petraeus last January, Morell was passed over in favor of the White House counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Morell had been acting director since Petraeus' resignation. ...