Libya

What's life like for an ex-president? Pretty busy, if you're Jimmy Carter. Sporting a pair of artificial knees, Carter, 88, logs many thousands of miles each year, monitoring elections (Egypt and Libya), mediating conflicts (Sudan and Congo), building houses (Haiti). He also works on projects with a group called the Elders, or what Carter jokingly calls "political has-beens" to foster, for example, reconciliation in places where peace seems hard to come by. Although he lost his 1980 bid for reelection as president at age 56 to Ronald...

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libyan officials say explosions went off in the capital Tripoli and the restive eastern city of Benghazi, but no casualties were reported. A security official says one bombing targeted an abandoned church in Benghazi that had been previously damaged by fire. The explosion damaged only a car parked outside. The official says two other explosions targeted parked security vehicles elsewhere in the city. A soldier was lightly wounded from flying debris. The official spoke on...

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...

WASHINGTON — The night of smoke, chaos, gunfire and grenades that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, is well-documented. Eight months later, it is the decisions made back in Washington that remain murky and in perpetual dispute. Why was a diplomatic outpost left so poorly protected? Should the Pentagon have rushed jets or special forces to the rescue when the assault began? Did President Barack Obama's administration obscure the true nature of the terrorist attack to help him get...

NIAMEY, Niger — The newest outpost in the U.S. government's empire of drone bases sits behind a razor-wire-topped wall outside this West African capital, blasted by 110-degree heat and the occasional sandstorm blowing from the Sahara. The U.S. Air Force began flying a handful of unarmed Predator drones from here last month . The gray, mosquito-shaped aircraft emerge sporadically from a borrowed hangar and soar north in search of al-Qaeda fighters and guerrillas from other groups hiding in the region's...

Three State Department officials on Wednesday provided a riveting, emotional account of last year's fatal attack on U.S. installations in eastern Libya as they accused senior government officials of withholding embarrassing facts and failing to take enough responsibility for security lapses. The testimony provided new details on the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on U.S. installations in Benghazi and their aftermath. But the new information failed to break the political logjam...

President Obama on Wednesday demanded and accepted the resignation of the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Steven T. Miller, as part of a multi-pronged effort to quell controversies that threaten to dominate his second term. The action was Obama's first substantive step to address a political uproar stemming from the IRS's disclosure that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. It capped a day when the White...

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...

Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president's actions in Libya as "leading from behind. " — Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, May 2 issue To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama foreign policy — Lizza's painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic and confused as it appears — this will have to do. And it...

Folks, deep breath time. This is not the end of the Obama presidency. It's a bad stretch with an unfortunate confluence of unfortunate events. None of which will make the first paragraph — not even the first page — of the account of the Obama administration in the history books. Let's tick through the trifecta of scandals and what they tell us — about the foibles of this administration, about the hidden operations of bureaucracies, about the modern practice of politics. Benghazi.

WASHINGTON — The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has subpoenaed the co-chairman of the independent review board that investigated last year's attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, to answer questions about the panel's findings behind closed doors. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement Friday that he had issued the subpoena to retired veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering to force him to appear at a deposition next week. Pickering, who...

Folks, deep breath time. This is not the end of the Obama presidency. It's a bad stretch with an unfortunate confluence of unfortunate events. None of which will make the first paragraph — not even the first page — of the account of the Obama administration in the history books. Let's tick through the trifecta of scandals and what they tell us — about the foibles of this administration, about the hidden operations of bureaucracies, about the modern practice of politics. Benghazi.

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...

Frederic M. Wehrey is a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-editor of " Perilous Desert: Insecurity in the Sahara . " BENGHAZI, Libya W hile many Americans have been riveted by recent congressional testimony and debate about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, this country has been caught in its own drama. In recent days, amid Libya's worst political crisis since...

Let's take a break from the raging discord that has dominated Washington lately by remembering federal employees who died abroad in service to their country. With so much attention focused on what the government has done wrong, we'll end the week with words about government workers who died trying to do right. Actually, four of them are central to one of the controversies, last year's attack on the American post in Benghazi , Libya. But this piece will focus on the...

REPUBLICANS AND conservative media obsessed with what they regard as the Obama administration's scandalous coverup of the nature of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last Sept. 11 have offered a shifting series of allegations. First they charged that U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice " willfully or incompetently misled the American public " when she appeared on news programs Sept. 16 and described the attack as having emerged from a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim video.

TRIPOLI — When the uprising against Moammar Gaddafi began in eastern Libya eight months ago, Nezar Ali Abdelsalam poured his soul into it, digging graves, cleaning city streets and helping the fledgling rebel leadership with Internet technology as it worked to overthrow the dictator. That mission has been accomplished — Gaddafi fled Tripoli in August and was killed Thursday as the last loyalist holdout fell — and the Transitional National Council is set to form a new government.

EACH TIME he addresses the war in Libya, President Obama seems to contradict himself. After a meeting Wednesday with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the president was supportive of Mr. Cameron's declaration that "the president and I agree that we should be turning up the heat in Libya. " "The more effective the coalition is in rallying all the resources that are available to it," Mr. Obama said, the more "we're going to be able to achieve our mission in a timely fashion . " Yet Mr. Obama apparently remains unwilling to rally...

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...

"Why not release all of the unclassified documents? The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he'll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?" — Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, after the Obama administration released some 100 pages of emails and notes about the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. ___ "We heard the winds whipping and glass smashing everywhere.