We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us...
's administration fought back on Friday against Republican accusations that it covered up details of last year's deadly assault on a US mission in Libya, after a news report that memos on the incident were edited to omit a CIA warning of a threat posed by al Qaeda.
The report by ABC News gave new momentum to the highly partisan flap over whether the administration tried to avoid casting the Sept. 11, 2012, attack as terrorism at a time when the presidential election was less than two months away.
ABC released 12 versions of the administration's "talking points" on Benghazi that appeared to show how various agencies - particularly the State Department and the CIA - shaped what became the Obama's administration's initial playbook for explaining how four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the attack.
The report came two days after a hearing by a House of Representatives committee in which Gregory Hicks, a former US diplomat in Libya, gave a dramatic account of the night of the attack and what he described as a poorly handled response to it.
The hearing was the latest in a series of efforts by Republicans to raise questions about the administration's response to the attack by suspected Islamist bully boys, with an increasing focus on the role of then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as
The Heroine of Tuzlaand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Henry Clay...
, a possible Democratic presidential contender in 2016.
The White House has cast Republican questions as an attempt to manufacture a scandal. But the reaction to Friday's report by those in both parties suggested that Benghazi was not fading as an issue. Obama's administration appeared to acknowledge that on Friday. White House front man Jay Carney held a hastily scheduled background briefing for news hounds, as officials tried to defuse any political fallout from the talking-point memos.