In response to jmel's comment:
In response to miscricket's comment:
Those on the right who are trying to make this into a scandal are simply engaging in partisan political games. Blaming Obama for the deaths in Benghazi is the equivalent of blaming Bush for 9/11. It's simply partisan games.
I saw Ambassador Rice on all the talk shows the Sunday following the attack. It was very clear she was acting on the intelligence received. Heck..if I remember correctly there were no shortage of threads in this forum debating the video. The point is most people thought the same thing. The administration had several credible reports that it was related to the protests over the video. If you stop and think about everything that was going on in the middle east over the course of those days..it's was a perfectly logical conclusion to make.
Those on this site and on the media who are trying to come up with scandals and conspiracies are pathetic and with every word they type...they reveal how little they know about investigations and national security.
In this matter...no one knows who knew what..and when..and where the breakdowns were. Was it a breakdown in process..?? Or human error..?? Did someone lie/coverup..? I don't know the answer to any of these questions..and neither does anyone else on this site. I prefer to let the investigation take place first and then comment on the findings.
Nobody is blaming the president for the 4 deaths.........or certainly I`m not. It`s the cover up. I would urge you to review the data (some of which is right here in today`s Globe). You will clearly see that CIA results and report was "changed at the highest level to omit al Qaeda and terrorist attack". It`s the cover up.
This is really unbelievable. If your stance is that the administration edited the CIA talking points to change terrorist or "Al Qaeda linked militants" to extremists, because it was better PR for the election - that's not outlandish. I don't think that's what happened, but it's not a ridiculous angle to take.
What is ridiculous is that for months you've been convinced that there was never any indication from the intelligence community that Benghazi was linked to Cairo or a youtube video. The administration concocted a fairy tale to deny what was obvioiusly an Al Qaeda revenge killing for Osama bin Laden. You have lived and died by this narrative and it's been disproved by the SAME TALKING POINTS you are now using to launch into your next narrative.
You can't have it both ways! Either the talking points don't matter because the CIA was in on the coverup (some went so far as to suggest that Petraeus had been blackmailed into providing the original talking points) or the talking points were valid except for changing "Ansar al Sharia" to "extremists" (or a similar edit).
If you're going to take the latter approach, then you have swallow the parts of the talking points that completely annihilate your narrative of the past two months. This little nugget was in both versions, edited and unedited (a point made by Jonathan Karl on ABC's This Week, thank you very much) and BTW Petraeus signed off on the final version of the talking points, and was surprised the edit was even a cause for controversy ...
The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US diplomatic post in Benghazi and subsequently its annex.
