Policy & Strategy

More than two-thirds of Americans – 69 percent – believe the issues raised by the congressional hearings on Benghazi, Libya, “involve serious matters that deserve to be investigated,” according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

The poll suggests a sharp partisan divide between those who take the issues that Republican lawmakers are raising about last year's terrorist attack on the U.S. mission seriously and those who think they're politically motivated. While 86 percent of self-identified Republicans said it's important to probe the Obama administration's role in the security lapses prior to the attack and its response, only 49 percent of Democrats agreed the story raises serious questions.

The poll of 1,022 adults was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, just as the White House began to ramp up its efforts to dismiss the Republican focus on Benghazi. President Obama called the issue a “sideshow” on Monday, and the White House released 100 pages of internal documents showing the development of talking points late Wednesday.

The president vowed action to stop sexual assault in the ranks, calling it “dangerous to our national security.”

The Topline: President Obama and Vice President Biden sat down at the White House Thursday with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the Joint Chiefs as the White House, Pentagon and Congress decide how to deal with a rise in military sexual assaults.

The meeting came a week after Obama called on the military to do more to fix the problem as the Pentagon’s annual reports showed an estimated 26,000 assaults in 2012 — an increase of more than a third.

The White House has followed up on Obama’s call with two meetings thus far, first with lawmakers last week and now with the military leaders.

Obama hasn’t endorsed any specific proposals, but it’s abundantly clear that he — and lawmakers — want to show signs of progress on the issue.

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America's over decade-long fight to dismantle al Qaeda and other Islamic militant offshoots will continue to be a fact of life of U.S. national security for decades to come, a top Pentagon official told Congress. 

Lawmakers claim the Obama administration's wide-ranging authority to target terror groups worldwide gives the White House a legal loophole to wage war without congressional consent. 

President Obama on Thursday expressed measured optimism about the joint U.S.-Russian call for Syrian peace talks, saying it “may yield results.”

“I do think the prospect of talks in Geneva involving the Russians and [Syrian] representatives about a serious political transition that all the parties buy into may yield results,” Obama said at a joint press conference in the Rose Garden with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“In the mean time, we’re going to continue helping the opposition and the humanitarian situation,” he added.

The New York senator's legislation would shake up the centuries-old military judicial code amid a spike in sex assaults.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Thursday called allegations involving a Fort Hood military sexual abuse prevention officer suspected of running a prostitution ring and abusing other service members “disgraceful and outrageous.”

Gillibrand, who is leading the push to change the Pentagon’s sexual assault policies, said the latest incident highlighted the need to remove such cases from the military’s chain of command.

Lawmakers say it's time to revamp or scrap the law that's guided the war on terror since the 2001 attacks.

The Topline: The White House on Wednesday released more than 100 pages of inter-agency emails on last year’s attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The document dump by the Obama administration was intended to bolster its argument it did not try to hide the fact the attack was the work of Islamic militants in the country. 

The emails discuss the talking points used by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice in television interviews that aired five days after the attack. In the interviews, Rice said the attack stemmed from a protest over an anti-Islam film, and not terrorism.

Officials contend the emails prove that the talking points were originally generated by the CIA, and that the White House along with the CIA and other agencies believed at the time that the attack stemmed from demonstrations.

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