The tragedy of Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, seemed a cut-and-dried story in the days after a mob attacked the State Department's mission in eastern Libya. Today, the public knows that those early administration pronouncements were false.
The Obama administration, seeking to tamp down mounting questions over its handling of the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, released unprecedented details this week of the CIA's role in efforts to defend the consulate and rescue its inhabitants.
Senior officials at the State Department on Tuesday night presented a greatly revised account of the events surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya, abandoning earlier assertions that the assault had grown out of a protests against an anti-Islam film.
U.S. and Libyan officials launched investigations Wednesday into a deadly nighttime attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, trying to determine whether it was a premeditated assault by Muslim militants or a mob enraged by a U.S.-produced film that derides Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Gunmen shot down a helicopter carrying voting materials near the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on Friday, killing one election commission worker, a spokesman for the country's ruling council said.
Col. Moammar Gadhafi's air force bombed the airport in the Libyan opposition's main stronghold on Thursday after the rebels used seized planes and helicopters to launch attacks on the government's advancing troops, witnesses and rebel officials said.
Two ferries carrying 4,500 Chinese workers from strife-torn Libya arrived at the Mediterranean island of Crete on Thursday, despite rough seas that left hundreds of Americans stranded on a docked ferry in Tripoli.
