Amid a deluge of negative news, the Obama administration seems bent on convincing the media and public that it really is still open and transparent. On Wednesday afternoon, the White House released more than 100 pages of emails between top administration officials showing that the CIA drafted and then redrafted the talking points used to describe what, exactly, happened during the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last September. The House Intelligence Committee requested the talking points to use in interviews with the press.

CNN:

The White House released more than 100 pages of e-mails on Wednesday in a bid to quell critics who say President Barack Obama and his aides played politics with national security following the deadly terror attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The e-mails detail the complex back and forth between the CIA, State Department, and the White House in developing unclassified talking points that were used to underpin a controversial and slow-to-evolve explanation of events last September 11.

You can read all the e-mails here.

But of course, the emails aren't enough for guess who?

Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee which is investigating the matter, told CNN's "Situtation Room" that his staff wants to digest the e-mails. He stressed that they were a selected set of documents as released and the committee is still seeking a range of other information.

I've heard that if you stand facing a mirror after midnight in a dark room and repeat "Benghazi!" three times...Darrell Issa, John Boehner, Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity will appear in your mirror. I advise against trying this at home.

Attribution:DailyKos/GoogleMaps: According to a new PPP survey, 39 percent of people who think Benghazi is the biggest scandal don't know that it is in Libya, including 6 percent who think it's in Cuba.

From Public Policy Polling's latest national survey:

"One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess."

True, these numbers aren't really that big a shock. If you're dumb enough to think that Benghazi is the biggest scandal ever, it's not surprising if you don't know where it is. And 74 percent of Republicans think Benghazi is worse than Watergate.

Just to be clear, the attack on the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, and the fatalities that included U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens were horrific and are not at issue today. What the GOP is trying to make an "issue" of -- and with the willing help of the "Liberal" media -- is their claim that initial speculation that the attacks were a spontaneous response to a video were over-emphasized by the Obama administration, and they are taking issue with the investigation and the response by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And as we've already seen, if there is one thing the Republican party of today is actually good at, it is dragging out absolutely nothing for an incredibly long time.

The poll also showed that most Americans trust Hillary Clinton over Republicans on Benghazi, by a 49-39 margin.

As the 1960s ended, the Seven Sisters -- the major oil companies -- controlled 85 percent of the world's oil reserves. Today, they control a mere 10 percent.

New territory is needed to satisfy their lust for oil and power, and the Sister's gaze turns towards Africa. With "peak oil," wars in the Middle East, and the rise in crude prices...Africa becomes the oil giants' new battleground.

The real story, the secret story of oil, actually begins far from Africa.

In their bid to dominate Africa, the Sisters installed a king in Libya, a dictator in Gabon, fought the nationalisation of oil resources in Algeria, and through corruption, war and assassinations, brought Nigeria to its knees.

Oil may be flowing into the holds of huge tankers, but in Lagos, petrol shortages are chronic.

The country's four refineries are obsolete and the continent's main oil exporter is forced to import refined petrol - a paradox that reaps fortunes for a handful of oil companies.

Encouraged by the companies, corruption has become a system of government - some $50bn are estimated to have 'disappeared' out of the $350bn received since independence.

But new players have now joined the great oil game.

China, with its growing appetite for energy, has found new friends in Sudan, and the Chinese builders have moved in. Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is proud of his co-operation with China - a dam on the Nile, roads, and stadiums.

"Everybody thought there could be oil in Sudan but nobody knew anything. It was revealed through exploration by the American company Chevron, towards the end of the 70s. And that was the beginning of the second civil war, which went on until 2002. It lasted for 19 years and cost a million and a half lives and the oil business was at the heart of it."

- Gerard Prunier, a historian

To be able to export half a million barrels of oil a day from the oil fields in the South, China financed and built the Heglig pipeline connected to Port Sudan. Now South Sudan's precious black crude is shipped through North Sudan to Chinese ports.

And in a bid to secure the oil supplies out of Libya, the US, the UK and the Seven Sisters made peace with formerly shunned Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, until he was killed during the Libyan uprising of 2011. The flow of Libyan oil, however, remains uninterrupted.

Desperately needing funds for rebuilding efforts, Libya is now back to pumping over a million barrels of oil per day. And the Sisters are happy to oblige.

On Tuesday, watch for parts three and four. Or of course, you can view them all at Al Jazeera.

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

The announcement that Harun is in U.S. custody in New York may also shed light on a small part one of the most secretive aspects of U.S. counterterrorism operations during the Bush administration: What became of terror suspects held by the CIA in its network of "black-site" prisons around the world? Or disappeared into foreign cells in extraordinary renditions?

With their indictment of Harun, prosecutors offered a basic account of how the 43-year-old Nigerian – described as "a prototype Al Qaeda Operative" – spent the last decade. He fought U.S. forces in Afghanistan, prosecutors said, before leaving for Africa, where he allegedly conspired to bomb U.S. diplomatic facilities. Harun, also known by his alias Spin Ghul, eventually wound up in Libyan prison for six years before he was released amid the turmoil of the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

Did the U.S. know that he was in Libya, and did they play a role in his detention? Did the CIA work with the Libyans to then obtain information from him?

Testimony from an alleged former CIA detainee, a leaked document from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and evidence from cases of others rendered to Libya suggest that might be so.

A spokesman for the CIA said that the agency "does not, as a rule, comment on matters before the courts." The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York declined to provide information beyond what was announced with the indictment. A lawyer for Harun, David Stern, also declined to comment.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on the fates of most former detainees, publicly accounting for only 16 people of the roughly 100 the agency has said it once held. The U.S. has successfully dismissed lawsuits over rendition and asserted that much about the CIA program is still classified.

President Obama, for his part, ordered the CIA black-site prisons closed when he took office. (He allowed renditions to continue, with pledges of greater oversight of the countries where suspects were sent.) But still, little about the program has been officially disclosed.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as a consequence, have been trying to piece together the details of the CIA's detention and rendition programs for years. In 2009, ProPublica published a list of more than thirty people believed to have been held by the CIA whose whereabouts were still unknown—including a Spin Ghul.

Now and then, the fates of these detainees have emerged in the press or through rights groups, particularly since the upheaval caused by the Arab Spring.

Joanne Mariner, a senior researcher with Amnesty International who worked on identifying former detainees for Human Rights Watch, said that the information in the indictment of Harun lines up with what she knew about Spin Ghul. Operating in an arena of such secrecy, "when all this was going on, we'd get these little clues and bits of information. It's really quite interesting to see confirmation that these people did exist," she said.

Marwan Jabour, who alleges he was held in Afghanistan by the CIA ("Ghost Prisoner,") told Human Rights Watch that he was shown photos of Harun (whom he called Ghul) during interrogations, and was led to believe he was in U.S. custody. Jabour had met Harun in Pakistan in 2003, and described him as an African who spoke Arabic. Jabour was held from 2004 to 2006, during which time, according to this week's indictment, Harun was arrested in Libya.

A 2007 document from Guantanamo, released by Wikileaks, cites detailed information provided by Harun. For example: "Ghul also noted that Saudi authorities had detained Saudi Al Qaeda members…Ghul remarked that these two individuals were Al Qaeda members since approximately 1995." In the document he is identified as both Harun and Ghul, and described as a "Nigerian [sic] national and Al Qaeda operative." The citations refer to CIA intelligence reports, but don't specify where Harun was or when he provided the information.

Since Qaddafi's fall, evidence has emerged of close communication between the CIA and Libyan officials during the Bush administration, despite the Qaddafi regime's reputation for torture and brutal prison conditions. Documents found in the abandoned office of Libya's former top intelligence official refer to the rendition of several people to Libya and the sharing of information. Other "missing prisoners" believed to have been held by the CIA turned up in Libyan prisons. Some of them have given detailed accounts of detention in U.S. custody before being sent there.

"The U.S. delegated a lot of its detention capacity to abusive governments like Libya— they were perfectly happy to have Libya holding these people," says Mariner.

If the U.S. did know he was in Libya, it took authorities some time to catch up with him after he gained his freedom in June 2011.

After his release, Harun told prosecutors, he was placed on a ship full of Libyan refugees bound for Italy, where he was arrested for assaulting officials onboard. Italian authorities agreed to extradite him to the U.S. last fall.

Harun is the latest in a recent string of terror suspects brought to federal court from overseas by the Obama administration – including Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law Abu Gaith, who pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan to conspiring to kill Americans earlier this month.

Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: "the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system."

According to court documents, Harun was interviewed by U.S. officials last September in Italy, with his Italian counsel present. He waived his Miranda Rights before those sessions. The indictment against him remained sealed because the government believed "he may be in a position to provide information…relevant to the national security of the United States."

Harun is scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn this afternoon, and could face life in prison. Whether or not his trial reveals more about the CIA's role, at the very least, Harun can be crossed off the list of the missing.

In Libya, Zahra' Langhi was part of the "days of rage" movement that helped topple the dictator Qaddafi. In their first elections, Libyans demanded a more inclusive law, giving every citizen the write to vote and run, and employed an innovative "zipper ballot," that ensured equal representation from men and women of both sides. Yet the gridlocked politics of dominance and exclusion won out.

"We need a discourse that honors and implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion, compassion, not rage. These are the ideals that a war torn Libya needs to achieve peace, for peace has an alchemy, alternation between feminine and masculine perspectives – that is the real zipper. And we need to establish that existentially before we do so socio-politically."– Zahra' Langhi

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) acknowledged on Wednesday that House Republicans had consciously voted to reduce the funds allocated to the State Department for embassy security since winning the majority in 2010.

On Wednesday morning, CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien asked the Utah Republican if he had "voted to cut the funding for embassy security."

"Absolutely," Chaffetz said. "Look we have to make priorities and choices in this country. We have…15,000 contractors in Iraq. We have more than 6,000 contractors, a private army there, for President Obama, in Baghdad. And we’re talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces. When you’re in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices. You have to prioritize things.”

During the past two years, House Republicans have continued to deprioritize the security forces protecting State Department personnel around the world. In fiscal year 2011, lawmakers cut $128 million off of the administration's request for embassy security funding. House Republicans drained off even more funds in fiscal year 2012, cutting back on the department's request by $331 million.

Consulate personnel stationed in Benghazi had allegedly expressed concerns over their safety in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Chaffetz and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have alleged that those concerns were ignored.

A Yemeni man was shot and killed by gunman on his way to work at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa early Thursday morning. The car carrying Qassem Aqlan, who headed an embassy security team, was shot at by masked attackers on a motorcycle. “This (assassination) operation has the fingerprints of al Qaeda which carried out similar operations before,” a source told Reuters. Assassination attempts have been frequent since Yemen’s army cleared Islamist fighters out of many towns earlier this year, while the U.S. has been high alert for its embassy staff overseas since the ambassador to Libya was killed with three others on Sept. 11 in Benghazi.

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Conservative columnist and Fox News commentator, Michelle Malkin is having a really tough time lately. As she throws gasoline on every fire, or would-be fire that comes up in the media, no one will dance around the flames with her. It seems it's getting difficult to be a right-wing extremist these days.

On Wednesday, Malkin thought she was going to have a great day after catching wind of a couple of reporters who were captured planning to ensure that Romney was asked if he regretted the tone and timing of his statement condemning President Barack Obama’s response to Tuesday’s embassy attacks.

“If it looks, sounds, talks like journo-tools for Obama, it is what it is,” said Malkin.

Imagine her dismay when told that The Hill columnist Juan Williams said that coordinating a line of questioning ahead of a press conference was a common practice among reporters. Perhaps sensing that the flames she was trying to ignite would diminish, she declared to Sean Hannity that she had "seen how the sausage is made in these sausage factories," so maybe when no one will dance around her flames she holds cook outs? Sort of like when life hands you lemons, make lemonade?

It wasn't long for Ms. Malkin to wait before the fatal attacks in Libya lit a spark in her again this week. "These optics suck," she angrily yelped on Fox News. As she blasted the Obama administration for not being psychic and fortifying "these embassies on the 11th anniversary of 9-11," I thought to myself that first of all, it wasn't an embassy that was attacked, it was a consulate that Ambassador Stevens was visiting. Then next, I wondered if she called up George W. Bush every year to blast him for not fortifying our foreign embassies? Probably not, eh?

Next thing I knew, Malkin is literally screaming that basically everyone should be as angry as she is because "Every Friday is riot Friday," and she really wants us to remember that because she seemed really just beside herself as she cried out "Will we ever forget? Never forget!" It was hard to believe that Hannity let her ramble on like that, you'd think he would be rather embarrassed to have her on the show. There was no mention of meat during that episode.

I'm not sure of the date of the next time I caught Ms. Malkin on Fox News, but she was trying to start a fire with Chris Rock, and he's a funny guy. First, Malkin screeches that "Left-wing "Holly-Weirdos" are sooo out of touch with the American mainstream," which made me laugh just a little. A right-wing extremist like Malkin accusing Hollywood of being out of touch with the mainstream? The irony! But then she brings up a graphic with a copy of one of Chris Rock's "tweets" from back on July 4th that said:

"Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but i'm sure they enjoyed the fireworks"

You can see in the video how unhinged she gets over this one as she screams out "Chris Rock, You make a living running your mouth off. Hey! Just like me. That's something to celebrate. You can't do that everywhere else in the world, you know!"

Maybe someone should tell her that Chris is a comedian, and also that he has a point. Now that he mentions it, blacks celebrating "freedom" while they were still in chains in this country...well, I'm just saying, he has a point.

That was all I caught of Michelle Malkin screaming this week, and it sure was more than enough. Even fellow Fox News contributor Tamara Holder said of Malkin, "I don't know her personally, but I am not a fan of her debating style. I think she probably needs to get laid. She's very angry." Malkin mentions this on her Facebook page...blames it on the "Vulgar left." Always with the gas on the fire, and it's always the left's fault.

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Thanks to Heather for the video embed!

Failed former GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) -- truly, in her own element sounding alarms over "extremists" in other nations -- went into full attack mode on President Obama and his foreign policies, calling him the "most dangerous president we have ever had," and directly tying his policies to the violence in Egypt and Libya.

Bachmann, in remarks at the Values Voter Summit at Washington's Omni Shoreham hotel, accused the Obama administration of responding to the chaos - which resulted in the death of four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya - with "weakness and lack of resolve."

"This was an intentional act that was done by radical Islamists who seek to impose their set of beliefs on the rest of the world and we will not stand for it," Bachmann continued. "No one here is suggesting that all Muslims are radical (*cough*) but we should not be ignorant of the objective reality that there's a very radical wing of Islam that's dedicated to the destruction of America, of Israel, and Israel's allies, and what we're watching developing before our eyes today are the direct consequences of this administration's policy of apology and appeasement across the globe."

"I'm no master war strategist," (Indeed!) she said, but "appeasement doesn't work."

Bachmann also accused Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pushing "enforced Islamic speech codes" in U.S. counterterrorism training materials, referring to an FBI probe first reported by Wired Magazine in February that eliminated, wrote Wired, "over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 ... describing 'mainstream' Muslims as 'violent.'"

Those documents, Wired reported, were purged due to "'factual errors'; 'poor taste'; employment of 'stereotypes' about Arabs or Muslims; or presenting information that 'lacked precision.'"

Bachmann then sounded alarms about Egypt's ruling party, the Muslim Brotherhood, before urging the president to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand in solidarity with Israel:

"And as President Obama needs to get his priorities straight, what he needs to do is cancels (sic) his interview with David Letterman – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Beyonce – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Jay-Z and instead agree to meet with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu."(cheers, applause)

Then after tightening up her tin-foil hat, Bachmann declared that the attack on the Libyan consulate this week was part of a 10-year plan “to implement its Sharia-based speech code requirements worldwide.”

A full transcript of Bachmann's rant is below the fold.

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Thom Hartmann explains the simple reason why citizens in Libya and Egypt are rioting - people don't riot when times are good, they only riot when they're pushed. Wednesday evening's "Lone Liberal Rumble" panel discusses day three of the Chicago teachers strike, Romney's latest lie/flip-flop and whether we're headed for another credit downgrade thanks to the Tea Party. In the "Daily Take" Thom looks at how privatizing our country's prisons are not only costing taxpayers more money, but are drastically increasing the number of people incarcerated.

Liberals are leading the pack, Libyan officials said one day after the country held its first free elections in decades. “Early reports show that the coalition is leading the polls in the majority of constituencies,” said an official from the National Forces Alliance, a liberal coalition, as votes were tallied around the country. Leaders from the Islamist Justice and Construction Party acknowledged the lead gathered by liberals, but said it was “a tight race of us in the south.” Liberals held a strong lead in and around Tripoli, where most of the country’s population is concentrated.

[Via]