Senate Republicans appear to believe that the U.S. military has the ability to respond to any crisis, at any time, anywhere in the world, as evidenced by frequent questioning during a Senate hearing today why U.S. assets weren’t deployed to stop the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic missions in Benghazi Libya — despite repeated confirmation from top defense officials that there were none to be deployed in a timely manner.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give their long-awaited testimony on Benghazi. Republicans have been attacking the Obama administration for the inability of U.S. troops to reach Benghazi in the seven-hour window of the two waves of attacks. Panetta insisted that “time and distance” were the factors most to blame, strongly quelling ideas of military omnipresence:

PANETTA: The United States military, as I’ve said, is not and frankly should not be a 911 service, arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world.

Despite this, Senate Republicans repeatedly asked why the U.S. military never swooped in to save the Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues seeming to understand neither the process in which troops are deployed or the vastness of Northern Africa. The Republican Senators berated Panetta and Dempsey for alternately for providing satisfactory answers or outright lying. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in particular hit Dempsey for providing “simply false” testimony on the time it took to move troops:

McCAIN: We didn’t take into account threats to that consulate. [...] We could have placed forces there. We could have had aircraft and other capabilities as short a distance away as Soudah Bay, Crete [in Greece].

Watch a small sample of the GOP’s off-base questions here:

If the Republicans had done their homework, or listened to the testimony given, they would have saved themselves a lot of time. For example, the air base McCain referenced is actually used primarily for NATO operations, and did not house forces that could have been used in response to attacks in Benghazi, requiring military personnel to be flown in from Central Europe and Spain to Sigonalla Air Base in Italy. Likewise the time and difficulty in moving those troops has been discussed by Panetta before.

The argument of Senate Republicans that the military ignored glaring warnings Benghazi has likewise been disproved. As Panetta said in his testimony, in the months leading up to Benghazi the National Counterterrorism Center logged 281 threats against embassies and their personnel. At no time was there an explicit threat flagged in the intelligence gathered that indicated that Benghazi was more threatened than other diplomatic locations in Yemen, Sudan, or Egypt.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey said on Thursday that they supported a plan put forth by Obama administration officials to arm the rebels in Syria fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that last summer, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus “were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.” But, the Times added, “Wary of becoming entangled in the Syria crisis, the White House pushed back, and Mrs. Clinton backed off.”

Today during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) asked Panetta and Dempsey if they supported the Clinton/Petraeus plan. “We did,” Dempsey said:

MCCAIN: I would ask again both of you what I asked you last March when 7,500 citizens of Syria had been killed. It’s now up to 60,000. How many more have to die before you recommend military action and did you support the recommendation by then-Secretary of State Clinton and then head of CIA Gen. Petraeus that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria. Do you support that?

PANETTA: We do.

MCCAIN: You did support that?

DEMPSEY: We did.

Watch the clip:

The news is quite significant, seeing that much of President Obama’s national security team supports arming the Syrian rebels, a move that — despite providing non-lethal aid and training — the Obama administration has been reluctant to do.

In an interview with the New Republic last month, Obama explained his thinking on how to handle the civil war in Syria. “Would a military intervention have an impact?” he asked, “And how do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” Obama continued: “You make the decisions you think balance all these equities, and you hope that, at the end of your presidency, you can look back and say, I made more right calls than not and that I saved lives where I could, and that America, as best it could in a difficult, dangerous world, was, net, a force for good.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) appeared on MSNBC this morning calling for greater openness related to the Obama administration’s use of armed drones ahead of today’s hearing on the confirmation of John Brennan as the next CIA Director.

Wyden, a long opponent of over-classification by the intelligence community, has been particularly critical ahead of Brennan’s confirmation. At the heart of Wyden’s concerns is the secrecy surrounding the administration’s targeted killing program.

More needs to be done to ensure that Americans are aware of the justification used by the administration to target those they deem combatants, Wyden told the panel interviewing him on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “What I’m going to be pressing for today and in the days ahead is declassifying more information about those issues,” Wyden said. “I think we can do it consistent with national security.”

WYDEN: Every American has the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them. I don’t think that, as one person said, that is too much to ask. And this idea that security and liberty are mutually exclusive, that you can only have one or the other, is something I reject. So we’re now going to have to begin the heavy lifting of the congressional oversight process by examining the legal underpinnings of this program and to make very clear I am going to push for more declassification of these key kinds of programs. And I think we can do that consistent with national security.

Watch the full interview here:

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — of which Wyden is a member — gets access to information surrounding drones, but struggled to obtain access to a classified Department of Justice memorandum laying out the legal argument for the use of targeted killing against American citizens. The existence of that memo was first reported in 2011, following the killing of American radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. After an unclassified white paper describing the argument leaked on Tuesday, and Wyden hinting that he would be willing to launch a filibuster against Brennan, the Obama administration has agreed to provide the DOJ memo to Congress.

Operations involving drones used by the CIA remain classified, striking at militants and suspected terrorists in places like Pakistan and Somalia. When used by the military as in Yemen, the strikes have been for the most part unclassified, but have included missions from a recently revealed air base in Saudi Arabia.

When he first came into office, President Obama pledged to be a greater proponent of declassifying documents than previous administrations. In his first year in office, Obama signed off on an executive order and accompanying Presidential Memorandum to speed the declassification of documents dating back to World War II and remove the ability of the intelligence community to veto declassification.