Foreign Policy, Benghazi | featured news

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday she took responsibility for not adequately protecting U.S. personnel in the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The United States has some "very good leads" about who carried out the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador in September, President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

The temperature under Susan Rice’s hot seat didn’t cool any over the weekend. Republicans vow to get to the bottom of UN Ambassador Rice’s role in reporting what happened when the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked on the anniversary of 9/11.

The U.S. military did not quickly intervene during the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya last month because military leaders did not have adequate intelligence information and felt they should not put American forces at risk, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday.

It was six weeks ago on Tuesday that terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Now, CBS News has obtained email alerts that were put out by the State Department as the attack unfolded. Four Americans were killed in the attack, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

A Republican-led House oversight committee opens hearings Wednesday on diplomatic security in Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three others were killed on Sept. 11, adding fuel to a political debate over the issue in the final weeks before presidential elections... GOP lawmakers deny they are trying to embarrass the Obama administration before the election.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday vowed to pursue a full accounting of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi "wherever that leads," but cautioned that it could take time for a complete picture to emerge.

Leaders of a House committee said Tuesday that U.S. diplomats in Libya made repeated requests for increased security for the consulate in Benghazi and were turned down by officials in Washington.

The presidential campaigns and their allies began the week with aggressive attacks on the candidates’ records ahead of the first presidential debate on Wednesday. In an opinion article published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of foreign policy failures, saying that the president had allowed the nation’s influence to atrophy by “stepping away” from American allies overseas.

The White House criticized Republican claims that President Obama called an ambassador's death a 'bump in the road." White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama was referring to Middle East unrest in general, and called the GOP claim "both desperate and offensive."