The president "took control and he said exactly what needs to be done" following the Sept. 11 attack, said Emanuel.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday questioned whether the Obama administration was engaged in a Watergate-esque “cover-up” of its handling of the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

“It is a legitimate issue,” Udall said. “But every story leads to political commentary and trying to point fingers."

“Ultimately as Commander-in-Chief I am responsible and I don’t shy away from that responsibility," Obama said in an interview.

The South Carolina Republican said the administration "does play politics with national security," no matter what Obama says.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday that the Obama administration had four hours to deploy a Special Forces team to Libya when the U.S. Consulate was under attack last month.

“The Consulate’s annex in Benghazi was under siege for more than four hours, and this came after the first attack on the U.S. Consulate compound,” Paul said in a statement Friday. “Despite repeated requests for help, dozens of Americans were left to fend for themselves against heavily armed terrorists. With hours to respond, there was more than enough time to dispatch a Special Operations team from Sigonella Air Force Base in Sicily, but no attempt was made.

The British government rejected U.S. requests to use military bases in the United Kingdom as part of a build-up in the Gulf, citing legal concerns that a pre-emptive strike on Iran would violate international law, The Guardian reported.

Citing unnamed U.K. officials, the Guardian reported that the United States has made informal requests for access to British bases in Cypress and British territories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans as part of contingency planning for Iran.

But British ministers have responded with legal advice from the U.K. attorney general’s office that says Iran does not currently represent “a clear and present danger.”

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Thursday slammed a U.N. expert's call for a boycott of private companies accused of profiting from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “irresponsible and unacceptable.”

The U.N.'s special rapporteur on the human-rights situation in Gaza and the West Bank, Richard Falk, singled out U.S. companies including Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard along with other multinationals in a report to the U.N. on Thursday. 

“My main recommendation is that the businesses highlighted in the report — as well as the many other businesses that are profiting from the Israeli settlement enterprise — should be boycotted, until they bring their operations into line with international human rights and humanitarian law and standards,” Falk said in a statement emailed by the U.N.

The Obama administration has been criticized for its shifting story about the nature of the attack at Benghazi.