Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to "stand down," according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to "stand down."

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

This story was posted on the foxnews.com Internet site sometime on Friday...and I borrowed this [and the next] story from yesterday's edition of the King Report. The link is here.

Is an American General losing his job for trying to save the Americans besieged in Benghazi? This is the latest potential wrinkle in the growing scandal surrounding the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack that left four men dead and President Obama scrambling for a coherent explanation.

On October 18, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared unexpectedly at an otherwise unrelated briefing on “Efforts to Enhance the Financial Health of the Force." News organizations and CSPAN were told beforehand there was no news value to the event and gave it scant coverage. In his brief remarks Mr. Panetta said, "Today I am very pleased to announce that President Obama will nominate General David Rodriguez to succeed General Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command.” This came as a surprise to many, since General Ham had only been in the position for a year and a half. The General is a very well regarded officer who made AFRICOM into a true Combatant Command after the ineffective leadership of his predecessor, General William E. "Kip" Ward. Later, word circulated informally that General Ham was scheduled to rotate out in March 2013 anyway, but according to Joint doctrine, "the tour length for combatant commanders and Defense agency directors is three years." Some assumed that he was leaving for unspecified personal reasons.

The information I [James Robbins] heard today was that General Ham as head of Africom received the same e-mails the White House received requesting help/support as the attack was taking place. General Ham immediately had a rapid response unit ready and communicated to the Pentagon that he had a unit ready.

General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.

This story was posted in the Washington Times on Friday...and updated on their website yesterday. One wonders how deep Hillary Clinton is involved in all this? Up to her neck would be my guess. This is the second story in a row that I borrowed from yesterday's edition of the King Report...and the link is here.

Here are a few graphs from Charles Hugh Smith...and pretty much describe, as he puts it..."If that isn't a death spiral, it is a close approximation of one.". It was posted on his oftwominds.com website on Friday...and I thank reader U.D. for sending it along. The link is here.

How does the US achieve a sustained recovery if “the 99%” continues to suffer perpetual decline in real income?

Other than some obligatory arrests for disorderly conduct, the Occupy Wall Street movement celebrated its one year anniversary this past September with little fanfare. While the movement seems to have lost momentum, at least temporarily, it did succeed in showcasing the growing sense of unease felt among a large segment of the US population – a group the Occupy movement shrewdly referred to as “the 99%”. The 99% means different things to different people, but to us, the 99% represents the US consumer. It represents the majority of Americans who are neither wealthy nor impoverished and whose spending power makes up approximately 71% of the US economy. It is the purchasing power of this massive, amorphous group that drives the US economy forward. The problem, however, is that four years into a so-called recovery, this group is still being financially squeezed from every possible angle, making it very difficult for them to maintain their standard of living, let alone increase their levels of consumption.

One of the central themes that arose out of the Occupy movement was the growing sense of unease among the average American citizen with regard to growing imbalances in wealth within the US. The rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer. That feeling is entirely legitimate. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2011 the median income of US households, adjusted for inflation, fell to $50,054. This is 4.9% below its 2009 level, and 8.9% below its all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999.1 This is not encouraging data. It implies that the average American household is almost 9% poorer today than it was thirteen years ago.

This is the October edition of Sprott Asset Management's Markets at a Glance. It's a much more in-depth version of what Charles Hugh Smith had to say in the previous story. I consider this a must read...and the link is here.

I can only pass on Société Générale S.A.’s work to you once in a while, but the piece for today’s Outside the Box is important enough that its author, Dylan Grice, worked hard to convince his bosses to let me share it with you. Dylan is one of my favorite investments analysts, as well as just an all-around nice guy.

I am more worried than I have ever been about the clouds gathering today (which may be the most wonderful contrary indicator you could hope for…). I hope they pass without breaking, but I fear the defining feature of coming decades will be a Great Disorder of the sort which has defined past epochs and scarred whole generations….

So I keep wondering to myself, do our money-printing central banks and their cheerleaders understand the full consequences of the monetary debasement they continue to engineer?

now the social debasement is clear for all to see. The 99% blame the 1%, the 1% blame the 47%, the private sector blames the public sector, the public sector returns the sentiment … the young blame the old, everyone blame the rich … yet few question the ideas behind government or central banks …

I’d feel a whole lot better if central banks stopped playing games with money….

All I see is more of the same – more money debasement, more unintended consequences and more social disorder. Since I worry that it will be Great Disorder, I remain very bullish on safe havens.

This John Mauldin/Dylan Grice commentary is rather long...but also well worth your time...and I thank Saskatoon, Saskatchewan reader Marvin Wieler for bringing it to our attention. It's posted on the ritholtz.com Internet site...and the link is here.

The only solution to this mess is to allow the US housing market to clear. All the bad mortgage debt must be liquidated, whether via foreclosure or bankruptcy. Banks holding substantial mortgages or mortgage backed assets must face the music and adjust their balance sheets to reflect today's reality. Undoubtedly this will force many banks into immediate insolvency, but such banks must be allowed to fail without receiving another nickel of taxpayer money. Banks took the risks and made money during the bubble years; those that exercised bad judgment must now accept the consequences of their actions."

Well said, Ron. I found his very short commentary in a GATA release yesterday. It's posted on the paul.house.gov website yesterday...and the link is here.

Dr. Dave interviewed me for about 25 minutes on his "Operation Freedom" program on all-talk radio WAAM-FM out of Ann Arbor, Michigan on Sunday afternoon...and the link to the mp3 file is here.

The six affected institutions are Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Caisse Centrale Desjardins, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Royal Bank of Canada is noticeably absent from the list; however, Moody’s already downgraded the bank two notches earlier this year.

The rating agency is now reviewing the other banks because they “face challenges not fully captured in their current ratings,” including concerns about consumer debt levels, housing prices, macro-economic risks and the weight of their capital markets divisions within their business mix.

Don't believe all the wonderful stories you here about Canada's banks...'cuz it just ain't so. They're only a little better than the rest. This story is courtesy of Alberta reader Brad Robertson...and it was posted on Canada's Globe and Mail website on Friday. The link is here.

Greece's international creditors are calling for a new debt haircut for the country so as to bring down its massive debt load. This time, however, taxpayer money from Germany and other donor countries would be involved. Resistance, not surprisingly, is substantial.

For all of the uncertainty surrounding Greece's future in the euro zone and the mixed messages regarding the political and economic reform process in the country, the math is actually relatively simple. Current plans call for Greece's sovereign debt to drop to 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020. But the country's debt load is 169 percent of GDP and it is expected to rise to 179 percent by the end of next year. In absolute terms, that is almost €350 billion ($451 billion).

Paying that down will require nothing short of an extended economic miracle in the Mediterranean country, an eventuality not looking terribly realistic following five years of economic shrinkage and a sixth on the horizon.

This news item was posted on the spiegel.de Internet site yesterday...and I thank Roy Stephens for his first offering in today's column. The link is here.

Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble is confident that Ireland can exit its current troika-funded bailout programme at the end of 2013.

“I am totally confident that Ireland is on track ,” Mr Schäuble said in Dublin yesterday. “No problem at all. I am confident 100 per cent.”

He cited the International Monetary Fund’s latest quarterly report earlier this month, which showed that Ireland continues to meet the terms of the bailout programme.

This falls in the "I'll believe it when I see it" category...but I'm sure the IMF will push for it, even if Ireland isn't out of the woods, because they're so desperate to prove that at least one country is on the mend...with all credit going to the IMF, of course. Time will tell. I thank Roy Stephens for this story as well...and it was posted on the irishtimes.com Internet site earlier this morning. The link is here.

Mario Draghi told Spiegel that he "completely supported" a plan drawn up by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble to bolster the power of the EU's economic and monetary affairs commissioner.

"I am certain: if we want to restore confidence in the eurozone, countries will have to transfer part of their sovereignty to the European level," Draghi told Spiegel in comments published in German.

"Governments have taken steps that would have been unthinkable a year ago. That is progress but it is not enough," added the powerful central bank chief.

He also insisted that European rules on economic governance be respected, which he noted had not always happened in the past.

This third offering from Roy Stephens was a posting in The Telegraph on Sunday...and the link is here.

The bank – working to rebuild its reputation after the exit of chief executive Bob Diamond and chairman Marcus Agius following the Libor scandal – will undertake the drastic measure after a series of reviews into the future of its investment banking arm.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that investment bankers who earn a base salary of between £500,000 and £3m will see their salaries cut by between 30pc and 40pc.

In certain instances, salaries will be cut by as much as half. The reductions – still to be finalised by senior management within the division – will be drafted in at the start of next year following conversations with those concerned.

This was in the Saturday edition of The Telegraph...and I thank Donald Sinclair for sharing it with us. The link is here.

The Chinese currency has taken center stage in some of the economic policy debates leading up to the election. That is because of the perception that China is the source of all our jobs woes as their economy continues to grow at a rate four times as fast as ours. The theory is that by keeping their currency artificially "cheap" against the dollar, it encourages America to import more goods from China -- while encouraging job growth there to make all those products.

China now owns roughly $1 trillion of our $16 trillion national debt. If they stopped buying -- or didn't earn the dollars that they use to buy our debt -- the United States might have to attract other buyers of our debt by raising our interest rates.

And higher interest rates would work against our recovery. So while it might be "politically correct" to harangue against China's currency "manipulation," it's important to realize that the Chinese are helping the Fed "manipulate" our interest rates down to artificially low levels. And any currency war, or trade tariffs, could hurt the United States as much as it would impact China.

Because we're in debt, we're in this together.

I lifted this very interesting story from a GATA release yesterday. It was posted on the Chicago Sun-Times website on Sunday evening...and the link is here.

1. James Turk #1: 15,000 Tonnes of Western Central Bank Gold is Gone. 2. Michael Pento: Here is What Will Fuel the Move Higher in Hard Assets. 3. Robert Fitzwilson: Here is Why Gold & Silver Are Set to Explode Going Forward. 4. John Embry: Truth Exposed About Missing Central Bank Gold. 5. James Turk #2: Central Banks Now Scrambling for Physical Gold. 6. Gerald Celente audio interview...all about gold. 7. Egon von Greyerz audio interview.

[Five] days ago, as a result of recent discoveries relating to Germany's official sovereign gold inventory, we asked a rhetorical question: "Why Did The Bundesbank Secretly Withdraw Two-Thirds Of Its London Gold?" There we presented the chronology of official disclosure regarding the whereabouts of German gold over the past decade, with an emphasis on its reclamation from London-based official vaults to the safety of the motherland, and left off with another open-ended statement that: "what is left unsaid in all of the above is that Germany has done nothing wrong! It simply demanded a reclamation of what is rightfully Germany's to demand."

Nonetheless, the fact that Germany did this has opened a Pandora's box of unanswered questions, and even demands that Germany promptly demand delivery all of its gold - the second largest such hoard in the world only after the US - held abroad. Here is the official response by the Bundesbank...

The plot thickens. As I said in one of my columns last week...we haven't seen the end of this story about Germany's gold...not by a long shot. This must read Zero Hedge story from Saturday was sent to me by reader Marshall Angeles...and the link is here.

In his otherwise spectacularly obtuse commentary the other day about the clamor to audit Germany's gold reserve -- CNBC Senior Editor John Carney stumbled onto a point often made by GATA about the unreliability of central bank claims about gold vaulting. In reference to the foreign gold vaulted at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Carney wrote:

"The compartments do not have labels reading 'Germany's gold' and so on. They are instead numbered, and only a few people at the Fed know what numbers correspond to which country. The Fed says it does this to protect the privacy of the depositors. But this also makes actual inspection less reliable. There's no way for Germany to know that the gold it is being shown is Germany's, as opposed to some other depositor's. In an extreme case -- which I have no reason to believe is true -- miscreants at the Fed could just show everyone who came to visit the same pile of gold."

Of course mere "miscreants" at the Fed are hardly the problem; the problem is policy throughout Western central banking that, in support of the gold price suppression scheme, facilitates the double-counting (or multiple-counting) of gold reserves.

Chris is off on one of his patented rants once again...and I just love it when he's angry. This GATA release from Saturday is also a must read...and it's posted over at the gata.org Internet site...and the link is here.

Zero Hedge calls attention to and mocks a statement given by Carl-Ludwig Thiele, a member of the Executive Board of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, to the German Press Agency (Deutsche Presse-Agentur), that the Bundesbank's gold reserves are stored securely abroad. Zero Hedge notes that the Bundesbank official's statement fails to explain the recently disclosed withdrawal of German gold from the Bank of England.

The Bundesbank's statement further fails to answer the questions GATA long has raised:

1) Does the Bundesbank have gold swap arrangements with any agency of the United States government or any other government?

2) Have such gold swap arrangements ever been implemented and, if so, how and why?

And it gets worse...or better...depending on your point of view! You can read all about it in this GATA release...and the link to that is here.

GoldMoney Research Director Alasdair Macleod today explains why the gold price suppression scheme is only part of a bigger problem, government rigging of all markets, rigging that will end up discrediting capitalism in the public mind when government itself will have been the culprit.

Macleod writes: "All prices are no longer simply set by buyers and sellers but are manipulated by governments and central banks. The system that is failing is not capitalism but price-rigging by governments. Governments will always try to persuade us that it is markets and not them at fault. They have been doing this to varying degrees for a hundred years, ever since the abandonment of the gold standard. We are now on the last lap of this delusion. We face the economic calculation problem identified by von Mises. It was the eventual undoing of the Soviet Union, and we have fallen into the same trap."

I thank Chris Powell for writing the above introductory paragraph. Alasdair's short essay was posted on the goldmoney.com Internet site on Sunday...and the link is here.

A vessel with a nine-person crew and 700 tons of gold ore onboard went missing in stormy seas off Russia's Pacific Coast.

The ship sent a distress call on Sunday as it was sailing from the coastal town of Neran to Feklistov Island in the Sea of Okhotsk, The Associated Press reported.

The vessel, hired by mining company Polymetal, was carrying 700 tons of gold ore from one deposit to another where it was to be processed. Gold ore is the material from which gold is extracted and contains only a small percentage of the precious metal.

Polymetal's spokesman on Monday would not estimate the value of the cargo.

The company said it has shipped ore via that route before, and there was nothing unusual in shipping it by the sea, AP said.

This 5-paragraph AP story was filed from Moscow on Monday...and subsequently re-posted on the nbcnews.com Internet site. You've just read the whole thing. I thank Michael Cheverton for sending it...and the link to the hard copy is here.

Gold trading is unregulated in Malaysia and the central bank says more than 20 so-called gold investment companies are involved in making unauthorised transactions.

Although they have been blacklisted, tens of thousands of people have already sunk their money into these companies.

The bank says it suspects any money they receive in return is not made from gold trading, but from other investors' payments.

However, the bank's decision to seize four of the companies' assets has angered investors.

They are planning a rally later this week demanding the return of their gold and their money.

This is all there is to this short story that was posted on the aljazeera.com Internet site on Sunday...and I thank U.K. reader Tariq Khan for finding it for us. The link is here.

By bringing some of what the World Gold Council estimates are 5,000 metric tons (5,512 tons) of treasure into the banking system -- an amount greater in value than Ireland’s gross domestic product -- Turkey hopes to reduce gold imports and external borrowing, according to Erdal Aral, deputy chief executive officer of Isbank.

“We have to get the gold that’s out there into the financial system,” Aral said in an interview in Istanbul this month. “This is going to be an important step toward solving our current-account problem.”

Turkey’s current-account deficit, the amount its imports exceeded exports, peaked at $77 billion in 2011. The gap narrowed by 23 percent this year to $59 billion at the end of August on a 12-month rolling basis as record gold sales by Turkish companies to the United Arab Emirates and Iran pushed up exports, according to the government’s statistics office.

I don't know what the Turkish translation of the English words "Don't Do It!" are...but I'd love to post them here if I knew. This Bloomberg story from yesterday was posted on the businessweek.com Internet site...and my thanks go out to West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for bringing it to our attention. The link is here.

Yesterday's edition of the Casey Daily Dispatch was all about gold...and written by Metals Team Researcher, Alena Mikhan. It's worth reading if you have the time...and the link is here.

The Royal Canadian Mint announced Monday it will make an initial public offering of C$100 million in silver exchange-traded receipts.

The Mint will offer exchange-traded receipts, priced at $20 each, which can be redeemed for silver or cash.

"The goal is to offer investors an exchanged-traded investment vehicle that tracks the price of silver and makes investing directly in physical silver available to institutional and retail investors," said the Mint.

Each exchange traded receipts represent "an equal undivided direct legal and beneficial interest in silver bullion to be held in custody by the Mint. The silver bullion will be legally and beneficially owned by the ETF Holders and not by the Mint."

Unlike other silver investment products, the purchaser of an ETR owns the actual silver rather than a unit or share in an entity that owns the silver. ETRs holders can redeem their ETRs for physical silver, such as 99.9% pure bars or 99.99% Maple Leaf coins, or for cash based on the future silver price or market price of the ETRs.

A hundred million bucks only adds up to about 3 million ounces of silver...but it's 1.5 days of world silver production that JPMorgan and the Scotiabank/Scotia Mocatta can't get their mitts on. I found this story posted on the mineweb.com Internet site...and it was filed from Reno in the wee hours of this morning. The link is here.

Hurricane Sandy is here and it's huge.

The storm brings "a combination of track, size, structure and strength that is unprecedented in the known historical record," according to Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro.

And the East Coast is in lockdown. Pretty much everywhere is in a state of emergency, parts of New York and New Jersey are evacuated, and everything from the stock market to Starbucks has been shut down.

I said in my WAAM-FM interview on Sunday that this storm, although awesome, will be on the low end of what it could have been...as they got away with only a Category 1 hurricane. One can only imagine the devastation if it had been a lot bigger. The wind and rain is bad enough...but it's always the storm surge that does the big damage...and we can only speculate in horror what a Category 3 or 4 hurricane would have done in the storm surge department. This 'big one' has been predicted for decades...ever since the New England hurricane of 1938...and it was only a matter of 'when'...not 'if' it happened...and coming on a combination of a full moon and high tide to boot! Well, now it has...and as the U.S. East Coast wakes up this morning, we'll find out just how bad it was.

Of course the entire eastern seaboard is built up far more extensively than it was 75 year prior...and combined with currency debasement, I would imagine that the damage will top $100 billion mark with ease.

I thank Roy Stephens for sending me this photo-essay from yesterday...and these photos were taken at least twelve hours before the storm surge hit. It was posted on the businessinsider.com Internet site early yesterday morning Eastern time...and the link is here.