The attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya last week has led to dueling versions of what unfolded that night in Benghazi. To hear the Obama administration tell it, the attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans was spontaneous - and staged by local extremists who saw an opportunity to hijack peaceful demonstrations against an offensive film.

The Libyans have a different view. They say it was a premeditated strike, launched by foreign fighters with ties to al-Qaida.

The divergence in accounts was at the center of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. For the first time, a high-ranking intelligence official described the Benghazi attack as "terrorism" and provided an on-the-record account of what the U.S. knows and doesn't know about what took place over a number of hours on Sept. 11. Also, he allowed that al-Qaida might have had some hand in what happened. This is the first official U.S. confirmation of the group's possible role.

Was It Planned?

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., for his part, got right to the point. "Do we have reason to believe at this point that that terrorist attack was preplanned for Sept. 11, or did the terrorists seize the moment?" he asked Matthew Olsen, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center warned banks to be on heightened alert after Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase experienced unexplained outages of public-facing websites on Wednesday. The warning cited "recent credible intelligence" as the justification for raising the threat level similar to that of the Department for Homeland Security scale from "elevated" to "high."

JPMorgan Chase spokesman Patrick Linehan said that the bank was "experiencing intermittent issues with Chase.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working to restore full connectivity."

Bank of America spokesman Mark Pipitone reported no continuing problems on Wednesday after seeing issues on Tuesday. "Our online banking services have been, and are, up and running. The vast majority of our customers have not experienced any issues."

Electronista spoke with an official at Verizon who confirmed some aspects of the report: "we're seeing attack-related traffic across portions of our network related to financial services." The official declined to provide specific information on the volume or source of the attacks.

France announced Wednesday it will close 20 embassies across the Muslim world on Friday after French weekly Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed naked, amid growing unrest over an anti-Islamic film that has left dozens dead.

The French foreign ministry announced Wednesday that France will close 20 of its embassies in Muslim countries this Friday following the publication of controversial Prophet Mohammed cartoons by satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Major protests in the Muslim world generally take place after Friday prayers.

The illustrations, which show the Prophet Mohammed naked and refer to the incendiary US-made film which has been fueling deadly unrest among Muslim communities for over a week, hit newsstands across France on Wednesday.

The magazine's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, told reporters that the pictures, which are printed on the back page, will "shock those who will want to be shocked."

Operation "Fast and Furious," the controversial undercover operation that allowed U.S. guns to be walked into Mexico, was a "risky strategy" that did not "adequately take into account the significant danger to public safety that it created."

That was the conclusion today from the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Justice, after an investigation that spanned more than a year and a half.

The OIG investigation found that Attorney General Eric Holder was not aware of the strategy and tactics used in "Fast and Furious," and turned up no evidence that Holder tried to cover up the operation, or mislead Congress about it. Holder was held in contempt of Congress earlier this year for allegedly withholding documents about DOJ's "Fast and Furious" investigation from congressional investigators.

In a statement today, Holder said, "It is unfortunate that some were so quick to make baseless accusations before they possessed the facts about these operations -- accusations that turned out to be without foundation and that have caused a great deal of unnecessary harm and confusion."

The IG report did find that a misleading letter that the DOJ sent to Congress was "troubling" because senior officials who were involved in drafting it knew, or should have known, that reckless behavior had occurred.

Washington - The son of a massacre victim at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin asked the Obama administration on Wednesday to begin collecting statistics on hate crimes against Sikhs.

Harpreet Sing Saini, 18, told a Senate hearing he wanted to give his late mother "the dignity of being a statistic."

Saini's mother, Paramjit Kaur Saini, was among six people killed and four wounded by a gunman on Aug. 5 before a service was to begin at the temple in Oak Creek, Wis. The shooter, Wade Michael Page, was shot during a firefight with police and died after he shot himself in the head.

More than 400 people, many of them wearing the traditional Sikh turbans, attended the hearing - a crowd so large that an overflow room had to be used.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill, chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee, said he supported Saini's request and told a Justice Department witness that the government was moving too slowly on requests for the data collection. He noted that Sikh communities have been asking for these statistics for two years.

Roy Austin Jr., an official of the department's civil rights division, said the agency will bring together a wide array of religious groups in October and make recommendations to the FBI on whether the data collection should be expanded to include hate crimes against Sikhs.

Federal law enforcement personnel and a congressional committee are anxiously awaiting an overdue inspector general's report that they believe may reveal the involvement of two White House advance team members in the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia earlier this year.

While much of the attention in the case has focused on the actions of Secret Service personnel, multiple law enforcement and congressional sources tell FoxNews.com that investigators also discovered two White House advance team members checked in prostitutes as overnight guests at a Cartagena hotel in the days before President Obama's April 13 visit.

"Three U.S. delegation members that stayed at the Hilton brought prostitutes back as overnight guests. One of them was ours (Secret Service) and the other two were White House staffers," a high-ranking Secret Service official told FoxNews.com. "We knew very early that White House staffers were involved."

Twelve of the 13 agents investigated for alleged misconduct in Cartagena stayed at another hotel, the El Caribe. Only one of those charged with misconduct had a room at the Hilton, where President Obama and the White House advance team also stayed.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in April, just days after Obama's visit, that there was no indication any White House advance team members were involved in the prostitution scandal.

Manufacturing Dissent is a documentary about the psychological-warfare by the media and political establishment of the west and their allies aimed at facilitating the US, European and Israeli agenda of getting rid of the current Syrian government. It demonstrates how the media has directly contributed to the bloodshed in Syria.

The documentary de-constructs the main allegations those actors have presented, namely that the Syrian government was systematically repressing peaceful protests and that it has lost legitimacy. It shows how such claims are supported by scant evidence and are therefore little more than propaganda to serve the foreign policy interests of their countries.

Manufacturing Dissent includes evidence of fake reports broadcasted/published by the likes of CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and others and interviews with a cross section of the Syrian population including an actor, a craftsman, a journalist, a resident from Homs and an activist who have all been affected by the crisis.

Recent global events give me the distinct impression that those at the top of the pyramid of political and economic power want to see as much trouble in the world as possible. Assuming that to be the case, I find it very strange and counter-intuitive. I mean, you would think that self-interested leaders would prefer to maintain a status quo that provides them with so many privileges and luxuries that the rest of us only dream of. For them to act in ways that appear to stimulate revolutions, economic collapse and regional or global wars is extraordinary, at least to me, because it jeopardizes their position. But maybe it's my fault for forgetting that most at the top think and feel very differently than "the 99%", and that they have trouble with emotions that come naturally to the rest of us. When you're motivated by thrill-seeking and a thirst for power that knows no bounds, empathy and aversion to conflict don't exactly play a part in your worldview. Granted, they have their own psychopathic standards, but, nevertheless, something about their schemes does not sit right with me.

By now you are aware of the American-made trailer of a mysterious movie called The Innocence of Muslims that appeared on YouTube and depicted the prophet Muhammad as a murderous paedophile, and that is said to be the reason for recent riots and demonstrations across the Muslim world against the United States which resulted in the death, among others, of Chris Stevens, the US ambassador in Libya. Let us point out, first of all, that this simplistic explanation overlooks decades of imperialistic intervention of the US in the Middle East, either indirectly or directly through military involvement in Iraq, Libya and currently Syria; its support for dictators and regimes in the region notorious for the abuse of human rights, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia; and its demonization of Arabs and Muslims in general. It also ignores the very low economic and social standards of living that are common in the Middle East - and much of the world - that are a direct result of the US 'management' of its areas of influence. By sweeping all this history and social context under the rug, the Western audience is left to conclude that Muslims are irrational extremists.

The Syrian Army forces discovered and seized a large cache of US-made weapons in Damascus after heavy clashes with armed groups, which led to the killing of over 100 terrorists.

According to FNA dispatches from Syria, 100 terrorists were killed in heavy clashes with the Syrian security forces in Qoutah Sharqiyah district in the capital.

As the Syrian Army forces were purging the city of terrorists, they discovered and seized a large cache of US-made weapons sent to the armed groups in Syria via certain neighboring and regional countries, our dispatches said.

Other reports from different parts of Damascus and its outskirts said that the Syrian forces also killed 68 other terrorists in Hajar al-Aswad district and the Southern regions of the capital.

Earlier reports this month also said that the weapons and military equipment recently discovered and seized by the Syrian Army in Idlib province displayed NATO's arms and logistic support for terrorists in Syria.

Mitt Romney told supporters behind closed doors that he's disadvantaged because he was born to a rich white family, that he'd have a better chance to win if his dad were a Mexican. It's getting hard to decide if Romney is simply a country-club racist or delusional, writes Robert Parry.

Mitt Romney has taken some heat for comments made at a Republican fundraiser disparaging "47 percent" of the American people as leaches who get government benefits and "believe that they are victims." But perhaps even more troubling was his claim that he would be better off politically if his father were Mexican.

The comment suggests that the GOP presidential nominee has no idea the challenges faced in the United States by immigrants and people of color, compared to the advantages that he enjoyed being the son of a wealthy white auto executive who also had a successful career in politics, becoming governor of Michigan.

Given Mitt Romney's limited intellect and his clumsy people skills, the odds are that he never would have made it very far in America if he had not been born into a family of prominence and privilege.