Top CIA officer in Benghazi delayed response to terrorist attack, US security team members claim

A U.S. security team in Benghazi was held back from immediately responding to the attack on the American diplomatic mission on orders of the top CIA officer there, three of those involved told Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Their account gives a dramatic new turn to what the Obama administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an “old story” – the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Speaking out publicly for the first time, the three were security operators at the secret CIA annex in Benghazi – in effect, the first-responders to any attack on the diplomatic compound. Their first-hand account will be told in a Fox News special, airing Friday night at 10 p.m. (EDT).
Based on the new book "13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi" by Mitchell Zuckoff with the Annex Security Team, the special sets aside the political spin that has freighted the Benghazi issue for the last two years, presenting a vivid, compelling narrative of events from the perspective of the men who wore the “boots on the ground.” 
The security contractors -- Kris (“Tanto”) Paronto,  Mark (“Oz”) Geist, and John (“Tig”) Tiegen -- spoke exclusively, and at length, to Fox News about what they saw and did that night. Baier, Fox News’ Chief Political Anchor, asked them about one of the most controversial questions arising from the events in Benghazi: Was help delayed?
Word of the attack on the diplomatic compound reached the CIA annex just after 9:30 p.m. Within five minutes, the security team at the annex was geared up for battle, and ready to move to the compound, a mile away.
“Five minutes, we're ready,” said Paronto, a former Army Ranger. “It was thumbs up, thumbs up, we're ready to go.”
But the team was held back. According to the security operators, they were delayed from responding to the attack by the top CIA officer in Benghazi, whom they refer to only as “Bob.”
“It had probably been 15 minutes I think, and … I just said, ‘Hey, you know, we gotta-- we need to get over there, we're losing the initiative,’” said Tiegen. “And Bob just looks straight at me and said, ‘Stand down, you need to wait.’”
“We're starting to get calls from the State Department guys saying, ‘Hey, we're taking fire, we need you guys here, we need help,’” said Paronto.
After a delay of nearly 30 minutes, the security team headed to the besieged consulate without orders. They asked their CIA superiors to call for armed air support, which never came.
Now, looking back, the security team said they believed that if they had not been delayed for nearly half an hour, or if the air support had come, things might have turned out differently.
“Ambassador Stevens and Sean [Smith], yeah, they would still be alive, my gut is yes,” Paronto said. Tiegen concurred.
“I strongly believe if we'd left immediately, they'd still be alive today,” he added.
In a statement to Fox News, a senior intelligence official insisted that,  “There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support.”
Baier put that assertion directly to the operators.
“You use the words ‘stand down,’” Baier noted. “A number of people now, including the House Intelligence Committee  insist no one was hindered from responding to the situation at the compound…so what do you say to that?”
“No, it happened,” said Tiegen.
“It happened on the ground-- all I can talk about is what happened on that ground that night,” added Paronto. “To us. To myself, twice, and to-- to Tig, once. It happened that night. We were told to wait, stand-- and stand down.  We were delayed three times.”
In a statement to Fox News, a senior intelligence official did allow that the security team was delayed from responding while the CIA’s top officer in Benghazi tried to rally local support.
In the special, Baier also asks about the infamous YouTube video that was blamed for the violence in Benghazi.
Paronto laughed at the suggestion that the video played any role in the events of that night, saying he did not even know of the video until he was out of Libya and on his way home. “I didn't know about the video ‘till I got to Germany,” he said. “(I had) no idea about any video, no. No, sir.”
The full, first-hand account of what really happened in Benghazi can be seen when Fox News airs 13 hours at Benghazi: The Inside Story Friday night 10 p.m. (EDT), Saturday at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. (EDT), and Sunday at 8 p.m. (EDT)

Lebanese army says Israel detonated spying device, killing 1

BEIRUT –  The Lebanese army says Israel remotely detonated a spying device planted in south Lebanon, killing one civilian.
A Lebanese security official, however, says the dead man was a member of the militant Hezbollah group. The official says Hussein Ali Haidar was dismantling the device planted on the group's telecommunications network in Adloun village on Friday when it exploded. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations.
The army says Israel detonated the device "from a distance" through aircraft flying overhead.
The Israeli military declined to comment.
Lebanese and U.N. officials have accused Israel in the past of detonating similar surveillance devices planted in south Lebanon, where Hezbollah guerrillas operate. Hezbollah and Israel, bitter enemies, fought a fierce monthlong war in 2006.

Spying cell towers may be spread across US

There are at least 19 bogus cellphone towers operating across the United States that could be used to spy upon, and even hijack, passing mobile phones.
So says Les Goldsmith, head of ESD America, a company that imports and sells tightly secured mobile phones that can detect "baseband" hacking attempts. Goldsmith calls fake cell towers "interceptors."
"Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated," Goldsmith told Popular Science in a piece posted online last week. "One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina, and he found eight different interceptors on that trip."
MORE: Best Android Antivirus Software 2014
The better to spy on you with
Cellphones communicate with cellular-service towers using the baseband processor, a chip that controls some or all of the radio signals sent to and from the device. Baseband processors run their own operating systems and are made by a handful of companies that zealously protect their trade secrets; not even phone makers know exactly how the baseband processors work.
Mobile phones seek out and establish contact with the nearest compatible cell tower, or at least the one with the strongest signal, jumping from one "cell" to another as they move around. However, while each phone has to prove its authenticity to each tower (to verify that the cellular service has been paid for), towers are under no obligation to verify their own identities to phones.
That's where bogus towers come into play. Also known as "IMSI catchers," they're used by law enforcement in many countries, including the U.S., to collect the IMSI identification numbers of the SIM cards on GSM and LTE phones. Even without any phone calls or texts sent or received, a phone's IMSI will be logged by every nearby cell tower, real or fake.
Most cellular communications between a phone and a tower are encrypted, but the encryption standard has to be agreed upon during initial contact. A tower can demand that weak encryption, or no encryption at all, be used. Signal protocols — various iterations of 4G, 3G or 2G — are also negotiated.
An ordinary cellphone indicates when it moves from 4G to 3G, but it won't display which form of encryption is being used. The user will have no idea if calls, texts or data are being transmitted "in the clear" for anyone to hear or see.
MORE: How to Secure Your iPhone Now
In this way, a bogus tower with a signal stronger than other nearby towers can force decryption upon targeted devices. High-end bogus towers can relay outgoing communications to genuine cellular networks, and thereby stage man-in-the-middle attacks; the targeted user can place calls and send texts, usually with no indication that he or she is being monitored.
Bogus towers can even be used to deliver malware by attacking the baseband processor, as several proof-of-concept hacks demonstrated at security conferences have shown. It's possible that the much-rumored, but never proven, ability of the National Security Agency to use a phone that's been "turned off" as a microphone depends on baseband malware.
Catching the catchers
The CryptoPhone 500 sold by Goldsmith's company can tell when an IMSI catcher is in operation. A Samsung Galaxy S3 running a heavily modified version of Android licensed from the German company GSMK, the phone has a "baseband firewall" that monitors everything going in and out of the baseband processor.
If GSM encryption is downgraded or deactivated, or the baseband sees a lot of traffic without corresponding activity in the "userland" operating system (in this case, Android), the screen alerts the user that an IMSI catcher may be in operation.
Using data provided from clients who use CryptoPhone 500s, Goldsmith's company has created a map of the U.S. showing locations of 19 IMSI catchers. Most are in California and the Southwest, but Chicago and New York have one each.
"A lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases," Goldsmith told Popular Science. "So we begin to wonder — are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?"
It's possible that they're neither. One unnamed American expert who spoke to the British tech-news site The Register put forward a less thrilling explanation.
"It is most probable that these sites are to allow coverage to groups of people that are not in a conventional coverage area (such as paying customers in a casino, or military groups)," the source said. "I would suggest that university campus areas may do the same."
Do it yourself
If you want the ability to detect IMSI catchers with your own phone, you're in luck, because it's gotten a bit easier. Goldsmith won't disclose how much the CryptoPhone 500 costs, but media reports have put the U.S. retail price at about $3,500.
If you already have your own Samsung Galaxy S3 and know how to root it, however, you can install the recently released IMSI-catching app Darshak, available for free in the Google Play store.

State vs. Bill O'Reilly: Spokeswoman attacks Fox News host as ISIS threat grows

Marie Harf, whose career has alternated between government jobs and campaign jobs, is the deputy spokesman for the State Department, and if her recent communications are any indication, the face of the most acute foreign-policy crisis facing these United States is Bill O’Reilly’s — an admittedly self-satisfied visage, to be sure, out of which pours a stream of apparently inexhaustible glibness. But he’s never beheaded anybody, so far as I know.
Mr. O’Reilly became an enemy of State when he conducted an interview with Fox News reporter James Rosen, who had some mildly unflattering things to say about Ms. Harf’s superior, Jen Psaki, the witless off-brand Pippi Longstocking who is the current media face of the American diplomatic project. The Obama administration is, to be charitable, currently unsure of how to go about dealing with the Islamic State, and Ms. Psaki was something less than convincing in trying to explain what exactly the administration has been up to between that group’s beheadings. Ms. Harf proclaimed (here I’ll translate from the Twitterese): “Jen Psaki explains foreign policy with intelligence and class. Too bad we can’t say the same about Bill O’Reilly.”
This is not a new thing for the Obama administration, for Democrats, and for the Left. White House communications director Anita Dunn denounced Fox News in the early days of the Obama administration, and Megyn Kelly has recently been elevated to the status of sacred hate totem for Democrats.
To begin with the specific case of Ms. Harf, it is unseemly for an official of the State Department to publicly denounce Bill O’Reilly or any other critic in the media. The State Department has more important things on its agenda, its business is foreign rather than domestic, and there should be at least some decent pretense of separation between the functioning of the American diplomatic apparatus and the Democratic campaign apparatus. That is sometimes difficult to do: Ms. Psaki is literally in bed with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, being married to its deputy finance director. (You can read all about it in Greenwich magazine — because of course she’s a Greenwich girl.) The State Department is not the high-school-prom decorating committee, and Ms. Psaki is, despite her demeanor, a grown woman who works in a media-oriented job. She can take her lumps, having signed up for them.
No doubt the queen-bee tweener impersonation is putting absolute mortal terror into the Islamic State, whose members surely are checking her Twitter feed as they whet their blades.

IRS says it has lost emails from 5 other employees related to probes

The IRS said Friday that it has lost emails from five other employees involved in congressional probes into the agency's targeting of conservative groups, leading one top Republican to declare "this pattern must stop."
The announcement comes after the agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The revelation set off a new round of investigations and congressional hearings.
On Friday, the IRS issued a report to Congress saying the agency also lost emails from five other employees related to the probe, including two agents who worked in a Cincinnati office processing applications for tax-exempt status.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, whose committee has been investigating the scandal, said the disclosure is yet another example of the Obama administration changing its story on the scandal.
"The IRS’s ever-changing story is practically impossible to follow at this point, as they modify it each time to accommodate new facts," Issa, R-Calif., said. "This pattern must stop."
The disclosure came on the same day the Senate's subcommittee on investigations released competing reports on how the IRS handled applications from political groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
The Democratic report, released by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said both liberal and conservative groups were mistreated, revealing no political bias by the IRS. The Republican report, issued by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said conservative groups were clearly treated worse.
The IRS inspector general set off a firestorm last year with an audit that said IRS agents singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for inappropriate scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
Lerner's lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, the Justice Department, the inspector general and at least two federal judges.
The IRS blamed computer crashes for all the lost emails. In a statement, the IRS said all the crashes happened well before Congress launched the investigations.
"Throughout this review, the IRS has found no evidence that any IRS personnel deliberately destroyed any evidence," said the IRS statement. "To the contrary, the computer issues identified appear to be the same sorts of issues routinely experienced by employees within the IRS, in other government agencies and in the private sector."
When Congress started investigating the IRS last year, the agency identified 82 employees who might have documents related to the inquiries. The IRS said 18 of those people had computer problems between September 2009 and February 2014. Of those employees, five probably lost emails -- in addition to Lerner -- the agency said Friday.
Lerner, who was placed on leave and has since retired, has emerged as a central figure in congressional investigations. The other five employees appear to be more junior than she.
In addition to the Cincinnati workers, they include a technical adviser to Lerner, a tax law specialist and a group manager in the tax-exempt division.
In general, the IRS said the workers archived emails on their computer hard drives when their email accounts became too full. When those computers crashed, the emails were lost.
"By all accounts, in each instance the user contacted IT staff and attempted to recover his or her data," said the IRS statement.
The IRS has said it stored emails on backup tapes but those tapes were re-used every six months. The inspector general's office is reviewing those tapes to see if any old emails can be retrieved.
Friday's reports by the Senate subcommittee on investigations mark the conclusion of just one investigation. The Justice Department and three other congressional committees are continuing their probes.
Levin is chairman of the investigations subcommittee and McCain is the ranking Republican. Their staffs routinely work together on investigations, and while they don't always agree on the results, it is highly unusual for them to issue such diverging reports.
"The investigation found that the IRS used inappropriate selection criteria, burdensome questions and lengthy delays in processing applications for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status from both conservative and liberal groups," Levin said in a statement.
The Democratic report slams last year's audit by the IRS inspector general. It says the IG report was incomplete because it focused only on the treatment of conservative groups. The IG's report "produced distorted audit results that continue to be misinterpreted," the Democratic report said.
The inspector general's office declined to comment Friday. A spokeswoman said they were reviewing the report.
The Republican report says far more conservative groups were singled out for extra scrutiny. They were also asked more questions and were more likely to have their applications rejected or withdrawn.
"The IRS selected conservative groups out of normal processing, placed them on a separate list, stopped work on their applications completely, forced them to answer intrusive questions about their behavior and demeanor at meetings and delayed their applications for multiple years," the Republican report said. "Our investigation has uncovered no evidence that liberal groups received the same expansive inappropriate treatment that conservative groups received."
The Democratic report said investigators reviewed 800,000 pages of documents and conducted 22 interviews with current and former workers at the IRS and the inspector general's office. The investigators, however, were not allowed to see confidential taxpayer information, so many of the documents were blacked out.
Only two committees in Congress have the authority to see confidential taxpayer information: the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Those two committees are continuing their probes.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Cartoon

ISIS threat scrambles candidates’ 2014 playbook, brings out Dems’ hawkish side

The rise of the Islamic State threat has, in a matter of weeks, turned the 2014 midterm election on its head, leaving Democrats and Republicans alike scrambling to show their hawkish side on national security and terrorism -- shelving for now the partisan sparring over ObamaCare, and the multiple scandals that dominated headlines and threatened to define the Obama administration. 
With just nine weeks to go before voters decide the makeup of the next Congress, ISIS, Ukraine, Gaza and Boko Haram have supplanted the IRS, Benghazi, NSA data-gathering and the VA on the lips of candidates -- and the minds of voters. 
The result is a race that's looking much different than the last off-year midterm cycle. Four years ago, Fox News polled voters on their top issues at the ballot box -- the economy was at the top, and Iraq was at the bottom. 
While the economy still matters, recent polling shows voters want a tougher approach to foreign policy, as Islamic State militants ravage northern Iraq and Syria and threaten western interests. 
Candidates are giving it to them. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who faces a Republican challenge from former GOP chairman Ed Gillespie in November, on Wednesday urged the Obama administration to present a "clear strategy" for "eliminating" the Islamic State threat. 
"The United States should not take any military options off the table, because stopping ISIL is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the U.S. and our European allies," Warner said in a statement. 
The sudden focus on foreign policy poses a challenge for both parties. 
Republicans, who have been pulled in an isolationist direction by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and budget-minded Tea Party groups, are adjusting their tone. Even Paul, while saying President Obama must make his case for military action to Congress, told Fox News on Wednesday that the terror group has "absolutely" declared war on America. (And for the record, Paul says he is not an "isolationist".) 
For Democrats, the focus on the Middle East allows candidates to -- at least briefly -- get off the defensive on ObamaCare and administration controversies ranging from Benghazi to IRS targeting. 
But the furor over terror threats means there's less room for Democratic candidates to tout modest domestic gains like job creation or the rebound of the stock market. And new polls show that the president suffers in public opinion on foreign affairs, leaving Democrats once again putting distance between themselves and the commander-in-chief. 
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who's in a race against former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, did exactly that when she issued a Twitter rebuke of the president on Wednesday after he said the goal is to make the terror group "manageable." 
"Do not believe ISIL is 'manageable,' agree these terrorists must be chased to the 'gates of hell,'" she tweeted. The comment was a reference to Vice President Biden's vow, at an event on Wednesday with Shaheen, to pursue the militants "to the gates of Hell." 
Lara Brown, associate professor of political management with George Washington University, said the economy -- and the "languishing recovery" -- likely will remain a top issue in the fall. 
But she described voter perceptions of Obama's leadership abroad as a factor. 
"I think that puts Democrats, especially those that are more moderate ... in a more difficult position, because they need the president to take a strong stand so they can say they are standing behind the president," she said. 
Brown said the president could still "get back on top" of the narrative. "To a certain extent, the jury's out on where we are on this," she said. 
A fresh GWU poll underscored the president's vulnerability on the subject. The poll of 1,000 likely voters, taken Aug. 24-28, showed 58 percent disapprove of his handling of foreign affairs. A Pew Research Center and USA Today survey also showed 54 percent see Obama as "not tough enough" on security issues. That's a turnaround from when Obama ran in 2012 in part on the successful mission to take out Usama bin Laden. 
The same Pew poll showed dramatically changing attitudes toward America's role in the world, after years where fatigue from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars appeared to be setting in. The share of Americans who now say the U.S. does "too little" to address world problems roughly doubled since November 2013, to 31 percent. The share who say the opposite fell sharply, from 51 to 39 percent. The survey of 1,501 adults was taken Aug. 20-24. 
As Democrats try and toughen their tone, Republicans are doing the same -- and going after the president for a strategy they say is in shambles. 
Brown, Shaheen's opponent, said this week that America's enemies have been "emboldened by the Obama administration's incoherent foreign policy. " 
He released a scathing web video juxtaposing Biden's 2012 claims about Obama's "strength" with ominous footage of Islamic militants and the president's recent gaffe where he said "we don't have a strategy" yet to address ISIS in Syria. 
The ad ends with the text "Obama Biden -- a foreign policy failure."

GOP lawmaker accuses DOJ of hiding former employee linked to IRS scandal

WASHINGTON –  A top House Republican is demanding the Department of Justice hand over contact information on a former employee accused of having a conflict of interest in the IRS targeting scandal investigation.
In a Sept. 3 letter, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, once again asked Attorney General Eric Holder for information on Andrew Strelka’s whereabouts. 
“Despite notifying [Oversight and Government Reform] Committee staff that the [Justice] Department no longer employs Mr. Strelka, the department has refused to assist the committee in speaking to Mr. Strelka directly,” Jordan wrote. “The department’s efforts to prevent the committee from learning Mr. Strelka’s whereabouts suggest the department has cause for keeping him from speaking with the committee.”
Jordan says he wants Strelka’s contact information so the Oversight Committee can conduct a transcribed interview. The letter gives Holder a Friday deadline for the information.
The DOJ has addressed the Strelka issue in the past, saying he is no longer an employee. They have also said that the department is “already conducting an active investigation” into the IRS matter.
In August, Jordan along with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., pressed the DOJ for information on Strelka.
The lawmakers claimed in that letter that Strelka, who was employed as an attorney at the Justice Department’s tax division, until recently represented the IRS in civil lawsuits filed over the targeting. However, Strelka used to work under IRS official Lois Lerner in the exempt organizations division of the IRS.
Lerner was the IRS’s exempt organizations director when Tea Party and other conservative groups were scrutinized when applying for tax-exempt status.
The lawmakers claim that Strelka’s relationship with Lerner should have prevented him from being involved in the investigation.
They also say they have emails that show that during his tenure Strelka was directly involved in the targeting of conservative groups. In one case, they point out, Strelka was informed by a manager to be on the “lookout” for a Tea Party case.