On Thursday Sept. 13, 2012, a cameraman gets a look at one of the U.S. consulate’s burnt-out offices in Benghazi. — AP

Adam Smith — the Washington congressman not the Scot who promoted a competitive marketplace — called the House investigations into Benghazi “a political witch hunt,” according to Politico.

“It’s time to put this madness to an end,” said the the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and Obama administration ally. “It is my hope that today’s briefing is the last act in a sad attempt to manufacture a scandal,” Smith said today as his panel headed into a behind-closed-doors briefing on the attacks.

The public is split on the GOP-led investigations into that fateful night/early morning when U.S. envoy Chris Stevens, State Dept. information officer Sean Smith and CIA operators Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed in separate attacks, a Washington Post/ABC News poll finds. When asked, “Do you think Republicans in Congress are raising legitimate concerns, or are they just political posturing?”, 44 percent said it was legit and for 45 percent it’s politics. But 55 percent think the Obama administration is trying to cover up the facts, so the president isn’t exactly out of the woods.

Hillary Clinton so far remains unscathed. … Read more »

May 19: Dan Pfeiffer holds a royal flush of Sunday talk shows — making the rounds on ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’ “Face the Nation,” CNN’s “State of the Union” and “Fox News Sunday” –  to repeat that President Obama only learned that the IRS had targeted conservative groups ”when it came out in the news.”

May 10-11: During an American Bar Association Q&A, Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, airs the  IRS’ dirty laundry and the inspector general’s report is leaked to the press.

Week of April 22, 2013: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, citing a senior White House official, report today that the counsel to the president, Kathryn Ruemmler, was informed of the IRS audit of conservative groups.

March 2013: Treasury secretary is told IG’s report is on the way.

October 2012: The IRS discloses on its website that the investigation is on its agenda. Jonathan Weisman in his Times report notes that the IG report wasn’t exactly a secret. Well, if you know how to read IRS-speak, it wasn’t a secret — the Annual Audit Plan for Fiscal Year 2013 isn’t exactly Hemingway.

The British prime minister proclaimed today that “real progress” had been made with Russia on solving the Syrian crisis, the Daily Telegraph reported. ”We have a common interest in putting an immediate end to violence,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters.

As David Cameron trekked to Sochi, Putin’s summer residence in the Black Sea, Russia’s foreign minister announced that Moscow would not deliver a missile defense system to Syria, as reports in Russia had suggested.

Is Putin turning into a pussy cat? Foreign Policy recently had fun with Putin.

Google is using nearly three decades of satellite images to show how Las Vegas has boomed and Saudi Arabia has irrigated the desert city of Dubai.

Interested in the Keystone pipeline? You can see how the oil sands have transformed Alberta.

h/t The Dish

Buried in ancient dialogues of Plato is found the story of Atlantis, an “island larger than Libya and Asia put together” in the Atlantic Ocean. The “great and wonderful empire,” Plato says, ruled the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Europe as far as Naples. ”Violent earthquakes and floods” devastated its civilization 9,000 years ago, the philosopher wrote circa 360 BC., and Atlantis disappeared “in the depths of the sea.” All that’s left of a once mighty empire is a “shoal of mud” making “the sea in those parts … impassable and impenetrable.”

From that mud spawned a thousand tales, by Jules Verne and JRR Tolkein among many others. But could there be a grain of truth in the legend?

Brazilian and Japanese scientists reported this week that a “mass of granite” on the seabed 900 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro may be related to Plato’s “shoal of mud.” Granite typically forms on dry land, the researchers said, suggesting a continent may have existed in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This could be Brazil’s Atlantis,” geologist Roberto Ventura Santos told reporters, according to National Geographic.

Plato was using the legend of Atlantis as a cautionary tale. “Obviously, we don’t expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic,” Ventura Santos said.

But what is fascinating is that adventurous sailors in antiquity may have recognized what planetary scientists say happened 100 million years ago: Africa and South America drifted apart and formed the Atlantic Ocean.

“South America and Africa used to be a huge, unified continent,” said Shinichi Kawakami, a professor at Gifu University who worked with Ventura Santos. “The area in question may have been left in water as the continent was separated in line with the movements of plates,” the Japan Times quoted him as saying.

Translation of Plato’s Timaeus by Benjamin Jowett (rhymes with “know it,” as in “Here come I, my name is Jowett, There is no knowledge but I know it.”)

There were two attacks on U.S. posts in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11 and early morning of Sept. 12. The attacks were hours apart.

According to excerpts released Monday from private testimony given to congressional investigators, the deputy of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the first attack, said that Special Forces in Tripoli were told they didn’t have the authority for a rescue mission. CBS News reports:

(U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa) commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound “when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

Gregory Hicks, who took over as Charge d’Affairs in Libya after the death of Stevens, will be testifying before the Greg Hicks, who took over as Charge d’Affairs in Libya after the death of Stevens, will be testifying before Congress on Wednesday.

Today, with a broadsword — i.e., a hefty special report on the would-be cost of an immigration overhaul — the conservation Heritage Foundation announced that if enacted the bipartisan legislation would cost taxpayers a whopping $6.3 trillion. Read it, but don’t weep (at least not yet).

For on the other side stands the American Action Forum, ready to slice through Heritage’s projected costs on “the amnesty for current unlawful immigrants” with its analysis. Last month, the ‘Burgh’s own Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, found that integrating the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally would be a good thing:

A benchmark immigration reform would raise the pace of economic growth by nearly a percentage point over the near term, raise GDP per capita by over $1,500 and reduce the cumulative federal deficit by over $2.5 trillion.

Holtz-Eakin isn’t alone on the right.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been advocating for an immigration bill for awhile. In October in his keynote address at the Midwest Summit, he called immigration reform:

“… the most important thing to focus on if you’re concerned about the future of the country both as an economic power and as a serious leader of the world, or simply as a successful society. It’s not only good policy to have more immigrants in the United States — dramatically more immigrants than we do today, to having a path forward for those people who are here. It’s not only a good idea, but it’s good politics.”

But Heritage was successful in helping to defeat immigration legislation in 2007. Then Heritage estimated that social programs and entitlements for immigrants would add up to a measly $2.6 trillion. Now led by longtime Sen. Jim DeMint, Heritage is expected to wield clout on Capitol Hill.

Baaah!

What could be more unappetizing than finding out horse meat was being sold in Europe as hamburgers, Swedish meatballs and spaghetti? How about a little rat meat in your Chinese food?

Authorities in Shanghai announced on Thursday that they had cracked down on a meat ring that passed off rat, mink and fox as lamb. Sixty-three  were arrested and 10 tons of “meat” and additives seized.

Chinese who live in Shanghai with a sardonic sense of humor have joked for years, the Daily Telegraph says, that restaurants probably throw cat meat into the hot pot, a kind of stew that should be mainly lamb, but often has some beef and fish.

“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” quipped a Chinese user of Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.

The fake lamb was even sold by street vendors in areas frequented by tourists, according to the Daily Mail.

The authorities said the ring had been operating for about four years.

Al Jazeera may be off the air in Iraq, but it’s on the move in the U.S.

This week alone, Al Jazeera America announced that it will be opening bureaus in Chicago and Detroit, just two out of 12 offices for the upcoming cable channel. New York, Washington, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle have been selected as sites for the other bureaus, according to Politico.

Al Jazeera has said it received about 18,000 job applications for the 170 openings it posted late last year. But so far, Ali Velshi, who was a business correspondent and sometime anchor at CNN, is the only recognizable TV personality that Al Jazeera America has hired.

It was the venerable David Frost, the British interviewer, who lent Al Jazeera some credence when its English-language channel started in 2006. Nonetheless, the channel proved to be a tough sell in the United States and had difficulty getting on cable lineups.  To remedy that problem, Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s Current TV in January. As soon as the deal was signed, however, Time Warner, dropped low-rated Current and the cable giant has not indicated whether it will carry Al Jazeera America.

Despite its negative perception in large swaths of the American media market, Al Jazeera is funded by a U.S. ally. Qatar, whose emir runs the show in the oil-rich nation, maintains such strong diplomatic and security relations with the United States that CENTCOM has a forward headquarters in the capital of Doha, where Al Jazeera is based.

The Arabic channel has encouraged the Arab Spring in places such as Libya, but avoids ruffling feathers in Qatar and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its neighbor, according to the BBC.

So far no word on when Al Jazeera America will debut, but it’s sure to ruffle some feathers, don’t you think?

The real John Hartley Robertson.

If you lived through the Vietnam War and wore an MIA/POW bracelet — stamped with a name and the date he went missing — the story sounded too good to be true. It also had a twisted logic.

The Defense Department admits that there are more than 1,600 Americans who fought in Vietnam and remain unaccounted for. Even though a Senate panel concluded in 1993 that none of those men were alive, you might say to yourself, isn’t the Vietnam jungle big enough to hide an American soldier, sailor or Marine who could survive with some luck, bravery and cunning.

Why couldn’t John Hartley Robertson be that man?

There are now plenty of people on the Internet saying the opposite, that a documentary filmmaker was duped by an old man in Vietnam who claimed he was a Green Beret captured by the Vietcong in 1968. The old guy had vivid accounts of his treatment in captivity, but couldn’t speak English and memory of his life in Alabama was shoddy. The best proof the filmmakers had of his identity was from Robertson’s sister. When he was reunited with his only living sibling, Jean Robertson Holley said she immediately knew it was “Johnny” and that there was no reason to perform DNA tests.

At the end of World War I, there was the case of Anthelme Mangin, the name an amnesiac in a tattered French uniform mumbled when the Germans returned shell-shocked POWs to France in 1918. With his mind, dog tag and identity papers lost, he was sent to an asylum and became famous as the  “living unknown soldier.” In an effort to find his loved ones, his doctor had newspapers publish his picture. In the 1920s, there were grieving parents and wives who met the incoherent Mangin, looked into his eyes and were convinced he belonged to them.

“Families recognized Mangin because they were ready to recognize practically anybody,” wrote Jean-Yves Le Naour in his book on the mystery. ”Contemplating the photo of the amnesiac, all of them were struck by the resemblance to their relative — a resemblance that existed only in the obstinate wills of those in need.”

It’s the stuff of myths and Greek tragedy.

No one was waiting for Odysseus by the time he finally got home. The man of many wiles survived 10 years of the Trojan War, and then a series of travails that prevented him from reaching his family for another decade. After being gone for so long, Odysseus was presumed dead. Only his dog — neglected and flea-ridden — recognizes his master.

I’d like to think that two or three or even four decades later, I would recognize my brother, who was serving in the Air Force in Vietnam when Robertson’s helicopter was shot down. We lost Richard not in battle, but to cancer 14 years after his tour of duty. I would give anything to see his smile walk through the door again.

So when Robertson Holley held an aging man’s face in her hands, looked in his eyes and saw her brother, who could blame her.