Benghazi

[clebro]

Libya's President Magarief said from the start that it was a planned attack. It's hard to trick terrorists into thinking we are clueless when he was publicly telling everyone what happen right after it happened.

 

Everything quoted at the bottom is directly from the link below.

 

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/26/14105135-libyan-president-to-nbc-anti-islam-film-had-nothing-to-do-with-us-consulate-attack?lite

 

"An anti-Islam film that sparked violent protests in many countries had "nothing to do with" a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi earlier this month, Libya's president told NBC News."

 

"Magarief said there were no protesters at the site before the attack, which he noted came in two assaults, first with rocket-propelled grenades on the consulate, then with mortars at a safe house."

 

 

"It's a pre-planned act of terrorism," he said, adding that the anti-Islam film had "nothing to do with this attack."

 

 

Of course this is what Rice had to say:

 

"The Obama administration initially maintained that the attacks were directly linked to protests over the film. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sept. 16, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said: “What happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, prompted by the video.”

[calfoxwc]

I have little use for Geraldo...but he says:

 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/10/geraldo-rivera-my-sources-tell-me-benghazi-was-about-running-missiles-to-syria-rebels/

[clebro]

I have little use for Geraldo...but he says:

 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/10/geraldo-rivera-my-sources-tell-me-benghazi-was-about-running-missiles-to-syria-rebels/

The claim has no merits at this point in time, but would give an obvious motive as to why pretty much everyone involved (aside from the 3 whistleblowers) tried keeping the details as murky and low key as possible. And not that terrorists needed a specific reason to target Americans, but this would be an added incentive with a very specific target.

 

And thinking about it, if the terrorists put that much time, effort and resources into a different type of attack, I'm sure the could have done much, much more harm. So it would make sense that a motive other than mass casualties could have been in play for this attack.

 

And in pretty much every other situation like this, Obama was open about helping the rebels. He took a much more passive role with Syria, so maybe he didn't change his attitude about arming rebels, he just did so in secret.

 

Pure speculation and mere coincidences are probably just as likely, but I don't see major holes in the basis of the claim.

[heckofajobbrownie]

Libya's President Magarief said from the start that it was a planned attack. It's hard to trick terrorists into thinking we are clueless when he was publicly telling everyone what happen right after it happened.

 

Everything quoted at the bottom is directly from the link below.

 

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/26/14105135-libyan-president-to-nbc-anti-islam-film-had-nothing-to-do-with-us-consulate-attack?lite

 

"An anti-Islam film that sparked violent protests in many countries had "nothing to do with" a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi earlier this month, Libya's president told NBC News."

 

"Magarief said there were no protesters at the site before the attack, which he noted came in two assaults, first with rocket-propelled grenades on the consulate, then with mortars at a safe house."

 

 

"It's a pre-planned act of terrorism," he said, adding that the anti-Islam film had "nothing to do with this attack."

 

 

Of course this is what Rice had to say:

 

"The Obama administration initially maintained that the attacks were directly linked to protests over the film. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sept. 16, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said: “What happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, prompted by the video.”

 

At some point you're going to have to face the fact that this is what she was told was the best available intelligence was at the time, and she's overstating the certainty of that assessment (she did a better job on Face the Nation), and to stop posting everyone you can find who said it was clearly a terrorist attack from the start. That's not how this works. You're working backwards from what we know now and substituting it for what we knew then.

 

Unless you're suggesting that we really should have taken the newly installed Libyan president's word for it and called it a day, it really doesn't matter what he thought. It matters what our intelligence agencies thought. When Susan Rice is getting ready to go on those shows she doesn't call Mohammed Magareif, does she? So posting his thoughts is not relevant here, or to this "scandal."

[calfoxwc]

She was going by the best intel >> ??? WHAT?

 

She was going by the intel that was "CHANGED by Obamao's and Hillary's STATE DEPT.

 

So, she was going by a politically expedient watered down version of what the intel said in it's original talking points.

[FairHooker11]

[calfoxwc]

ROF,L..... !

 

The Obamao regime is throwing anybody they can under the bus. Petraeus has nothing to lose

by telling the TRUTH.

 

Here. The truth is, big scandal. Just wait for more testimony: (oh, btw, the comments are really

interesting, too, at the end)

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/12/curl-watch-out-petraeus-benghazi-scandal/

[heckofajobbrownie]

Here is the evolution of the talking points.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Benghazi%20Talking%20Points%20Timeline.pdf

 

You'll notice the first version is the CIA's. And it says that the best available information they have is ....what?

 

"We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and currently available information continues to be evaluated."

 

So even if no one at State revises those talking points, that's still what the CIA was willing to put to paper at the time. You guys would like to believe that they desperately wanted to scream to the world that this was terrorism, dammit! The only problem with that is that 1) it isn't true and 2) it's not much of a scandal even if it were true. But it isn't.

[clebro]

 

At some point you're going to have to face the fact that this is what she was told was the best available intelligence was at the time, and she's overstating the certainty of that assessment (she did a better job on Face the Nation), and to stop posting everyone you can find who said it was clearly a terrorist attack from the start. That's not how this works. You're working backwards from what we know now and substituting it for what we knew then.

 

Unless you're suggesting that we really should have taken the newly installed Libyan president's word for it and called it a day, it really doesn't matter what he thought. It matters what our intelligence agencies thought. When Susan Rice is getting ready to go on those shows she doesn't call Mohammed Magareif, does she? So posting his thoughts is not relevant here, or to this "scandal."

It may or may not have truly been the best information known, but the truth was out there for the taking and it was passed over or down right ignored. Magareif is probably the best friend we have in any Muslim country right now. Even he admits he is only in power because of the US, and he lived in the US for about 30 years. He tried to help us out by making it clear that it was an insurgent attack. According to him a protest never even happened. This is the first true friend we've had in the region in who knows how long (maybe besides turkey). We don't even have to pay him to pretend to like us, he actually does like us. And we ignore him....

 

One of the whistleblowers requested to be interviewed by the original review board. He was denied....

 

Hicks was in contact with the State Department, but it never occurred to them to ask him what happened.

 

I never claimed we use Libya's President's word and his word only in the investigation. But to ignore him and others is absurd. If the people who were actually in a position to know what happened were listened to, Rice wouldn't have had to spread the false claim and Clinton would not have had to say it doesn't make a difference.

 

And then on top of that, the State department slowly got all mention of a terrorist attack removed from the talking points. So it went from a possibility of the attack being because of a video based on an investigation that ignored people who were actually there, to the State Department deleting everything that didn't have the video as the root of the problem for Rice to tell the American people. And that sounds fine and dandy to you?

[heckofajobbrownie]

Pretty much, yeah. I don't buy your summation because it makes it sound more nefarious than it was, when in reality it sounds entirely typical. I keep reading what you type and wonder where you think this huge cover up is occurring. You speak as if there's something devious going on here and it's right in front of our faces. Except I just don't agree with you. This is much ado about nothing.

 

I mean, look at your first sentence: "It may or may not have truly been the best information known, but the truth was out there for the taking and it was passed over or down right ignored."

 

You're literally saying, "In a fluid situation with incomplete information, know whose version of the events are accurate and discount those who are less accurate immediately!" This is craziness. What world is this? This is why we do investigations in the first place. Plus, how many people do you think had information relevant to this attack? How many agencies? How many people on the ground needed to be interviewed? How many intelligence officers? How many analysts? How many assets and sources on the ground? You're talking about hundreds of people. And your gripe is that we should have listen to Magareif and Hicks right away because it turned out their version was right?

 

Come on.

 

Additionally, the question isn't whether or not Magareif is pro-American or not. It's whether we use what he says as the definitive source for information. By holding him up as some sort of evidence that we knew and we ignored what he had to say is just asinine. It's evidence of nothing.

 

Your base assumptions are all wrong - that we knew what this was right away, and if we didn't, we should have because the information was out there. Again, this just ignores the reality of the first few days when we had conflicting informations and were compiling information from all of our sources and analyzing it. That takes time. You want to go back in time, give more people weight than others who had differing opinions, and suggest that not doing so is a huge deal. But it's not. It's just "inside the matrix" crap.

 

You're mad we didn't listen more to Hicks and Magareif more than we did. I get it. You think we should have known sooner by giving more credence to some people and less to others, in retrospect, so that the talking points uttered on a Sunday show would have been more accurate. Okay.

 

If that's all you have, I don't know what else you want me to tell you. I find it bizarre to imagine that this gets labeled a "scandal." On a scandal scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate this about a 1.

[calfoxwc]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/10/what-those-edited-benghazi-talking-points-tell-us/

By Greg Sargent, Published: May 10, 2013 at 11:33 am

ABC News made a big splash this morning by reporting this about the CIA’s now-discredited Benghazi talking points:

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

ABC has helpfully posted the dozen versions of the talking points, so we can track the editing of them ourselves. Here are the main takeaways:

1) The talking points confirm that the intelligence community had determined at the time that the “the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate.” The key words there are “spontaneously” and “evolved.” That assessment does not change in any of the subsequent revisions.

This confirms that the version of events the administration initially offered was, in fact, grounded in the intelligence community’s assessment at the moment (which turned out to be wrong). However, Susan Rice falsely extrapolated from the talking points during her now infamous TV appearances that the anti-Islam video was the cause of the attacks. That isn’t what the talking points say.

They only say the protests were the genesis of them. The talking points don’t mention the video.

2) The talking points clarify exactly how the reference to al-Qa’ida was edited out. In the initial versions, the talking points say that “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” That was subsequently cut down to “Islamic extremists,” and then to just “extremists.”

So it’s true that the reference to al-Qa’ida was in fact deleted. And at one point, the talking points specifically name the group Ansar al-Sharia, which was also deleted.

But ABC reports that a State Department official objected to inclusion of the specific names because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” There’s no clear evidence of any other motive at this point.

What’s more, the talking points never describe the attacks as premeditated terrorism. They just say that “extremists” with ties to al-Qa’ida “participated” in the attacks.

3) The talking points do confirm that they were edited at the urging of the State Department, and a leaked email shows that this was partly out of a concern over appearances. This portion was deleted entirely:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

ABC News reports that an email from State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland shows that she objected to the inclusion of that portion. She said she was “concerned,” because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

So here’s where we are. The talking points were edited more extensively than the White House initially said, and with more direct involvement by the State Department. Indeed, spokesman Jay Carney, in his statement to ABC News, carefully elided this point by claiming that “the only edits made by anyone here at the White House were stylistic and non-substantive.” Emphasis mine; that was not Carney’s original claim.

It’s clear also that worry over appearances was at least partly the reason for at least one of the State-driven edits.

At the same time, the talking points also show that the intelligence community had not concluded at that point that the attacks were pre-meditated terror, believed that they had “evolved” from “spontaneous” protests, and that al Qa’ida extremists had merely “participated” in them. In assessing the situation, the administration (with the exception of Rice’s false implication of the video) was, in fact, largely repeating what the intelligence community believed at the time. It may well be true that the administration was too slow in subsequent days to acknowledge that the attacks were terrorism, but there’s still no clear evidence of any nefarious motive in doing so or that it wasn’t largely taking its cues from the intelligence community’s own evolving assessment.

[Westside Steve]

even Dennis Kucinich thinks its political.

Heck you are getting to be a little like that 85 year old Japanese soldier still hiding out in Okinawa.

 

keep the faith!

 

WSS

[heckofajobbrownie]

Because I usually fall in line with Dennis Kucinich?

 

Trust me, there are lots of people who think this is mostly nothing. You just don't know any. That's different.

[heckofajobbrownie]

Let me score how I feel about the latest bunch of scandals, on a 1-10 scale:

Benghazi: 1.5

IRS: 3, but potential for higher is more is discovered, like direct orders from higher ups.

AP: Can't tell if there's anything here yet, but I don't like it even if laws weren't broken.

By contrast:

Plame outing: 5

US Attorney firings: 3

Administration approval of torture/Abu Ghraib: 7

Bush having advanced warning of 9/11, Bin Laden memo: 1

Halliburton no bid contracts: 1

Misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence: 3

[heckofajobbrownie]

And what do you know. The Weekly Standard got played by a source. Or messed with the information intentionally.

 

"The significance of the email seems to be that whomever leaked the inaccurate information earlier this month did so in a way that made it appear that the White House...was more interested in the State Department's desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and warnings about these groups so as to not bring criticism to the State Department than the email actually stated."

[Westside Steve]

no not because you usually side with Kucinich though I expect you might do it a great deal of the time?

because it seems like everyone, even the guys on the furthest left, thinks there's politics involved. You seem like the only guy who thinks there's absolutely nothing there. It's predictable.

WSS

[heckofajobbrownie]

Dude, after all these years you have no idea what my political views are. It's moderate left. I'm what most people would call a pro-business Democrat.

 

And yes, I think there's close to nothing there.

[heckofajobbrownie]

Here's David Brooks today:

 

 

OP-ED COLUMNIST The Next Scapegoat

By DAVID BROOKS

 

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.

The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department’s Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.

On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.

C.I.A. analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.

The C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level.

At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.

On Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting. Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.

Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.

Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus.

[Westside Steve]

In all honesty I never put you in the lunatic fringe left.

 

Its more like a defend Obama against any and all perceived slights.

 

More of a cult kind of arrangement or chronic debate mode.

 

WSS

[heckofajobbrownie]

What he's writing about here is basically why I don't see this as a scandal, and more like the usual interagency bullshit you see every day.

[heckofajobbrownie]

In all honesty I never put you in the lunatic fringe left.

 

Its more like a defend Obama against any and all perceived slights.

 

More of a cult kind of arrangement or chronic debate mode.

 

WSS

 

You miss the two easier answers:

 

1) The attacks lobbed against the President/liberals/Democrats in here are usually so, so far off base, and usually from a place of such frothing ignorance, that there's rarely going to be a moment where I say, "Hey, what a good point you made."

 

2) I think you're wrong about 90% of the time.

[Stewy]

 

 

1) The attacks lobbed against the President/liberals/Democrats in here are usually so, so far off base,

 

 

 

Yeah soooooooo far off base, after all, he is our Lord and Saviour.

[The Cysko Kid]

 

Yeah soooooooo far off base, after all, he is our Lord and Saviour.

That would be, I believe, "frothing ignorance"

[Westside Steve]

in your own posted article Brooks, the Liberals favorite conservative, asks if evidence was distorted for political purposes and answers his own question: maybe.

I think maybe is an appropriate response.

 

I would doubt that the president arranged and ordered it personally.

WSS

[heckofajobbrownie]

An insider account on the talking points.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/15/an-insider-account-of-the-creation-of-the-benghazi-talking-points/

[calfoxwc]

some? Benghazi emails have been released. And, absolutely, the talking points were

 

edited those 11 times, because they wanted to avoid having the Obamao regime seen

 

in a bad light because of the election.

 

Huge scandal. If it wasn't, the Obamao regime would come clean.

 

"Most transparent"...just another huge ass lie.

[heckofajobbrownie]

John Dickerson in Slate:

 

 

I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I’m hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind.

The most incendiary charge aimed at the president is that, in order to insulate himself in an election year, he and his team made up a fake story about a "spontaneous uprising" in Benghazi and downplayed intelligence that it could have been a premeditated attack by known terrorist organizations. There has been so much spinning from the president and his staff in the aftermath of the attack, this storyline seems possible—when the public spin is this bad it is easy to imagine deeper rot. The emails help your imagination along. They destroy the impression left last November by White House spokesman Jay Carney that only a single word was changed in the process, which can get your adrenaline up. But when you pull on the thread in search of evidence for the Big Story, your heartbeat slows. The emails show a lot of CIA and State Department action, but comparatively little White House meddling, and certainly nothing near the level of meddling that would be required to put in the big fix.

One of the challenges of figuring out what's a cover-up, what's a lie, and what's just spin in this Benghazi drama is that this entire discussion is about media talking points. Talking points produced to guide members of Congress in their conversations with the media are not the product of sodium pentothal. They are created to put the best face on an event and to coordinate spin so that everyone in the administration, campaign, or party caucus has the story straight. That means if you don't see bureaucratic ass-covering and efforts to make the interesting appear bland, you're not reading talking points. So, for example, when House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama have a contentious meeting, their aides agree on talking points in which they tell the media the two men had a "frank exchange." Not a lie, but not an expletive-laden transcript either. In this case, the talking points were being created on the fly as information was coming in about the attack and an investigation was underway. So, in addition to the normal massaging of language, there was a good deal of imprecision, too.

Given that context, what do the emails tell us about the Obama election-season cover-up story? First there is the matter of the "spontaneous demonstration" that ignited the violence.The president’s critics contend that the Obama team put United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows to promote a false story about a link between the violence in Benghazi and the demonstrations in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video. If this were true, it would indeed make the whole business a cover-up. Talking points may not be suitable for stone tablets, but you're not supposed to actually lie. But the one thing that is consistent throughout the talking-point editing process is the very first sentence of the CIA assessment: "The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo."

[calfoxwc]

Stay tuned. There is now email proof of a feud between the CIA and the State Dept over changes

to the talking points paper.

 

Guess what. They have been also found to be concerned over how Clinton and Obamao looked ...

 

Petraeus is upset with the changes by the state dept. Which is run by Clinton, who is run by Obamao.

[heckofajobbrownie]

Republican staffers changed the emails to make them look more incriminating than they actually were, then leaked those to the press. Then the actual emails came out and they don't show anything but the usual bureaucratic squabbling.

 

You can always count on Republicans to overplay their hand. Which is why many, like Krauthammer, are out there telling all of you to cool it.

 

But you can't! This is what you do.

 

Start those calls for impeachment! Bring it on!

[White Dog]

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/10/what-those-edited-benghazi-talking-points-tell-us/

By Greg Sargent, Published: May 10, 2013 at 11:33 am

ABC News made a big splash this morning by reporting this about the CIA’s now-discredited Benghazi talking points:

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

ABC has helpfully posted the dozen versions of the talking points, so we can track the editing of them ourselves. Here are the main takeaways:

1) The talking points confirm that the intelligence community had determined at the time that the “the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate.” The key words there are “spontaneously” and “evolved.” That assessment does not change in any of the subsequent revisions.

This confirms that the version of events the administration initially offered was, in fact, grounded in the intelligence community’s assessment at the moment (which turned out to be wrong). However, Susan Rice falsely extrapolated from the talking points during her now infamous TV appearances that the anti-Islam video was the cause of the attacks. That isn’t what the talking points say.

They only say the protests were the genesis of them. The talking points don’t mention the video.

2) The talking points clarify exactly how the reference to al-Qa’ida was edited out. In the initial versions, the talking points say that “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” That was subsequently cut down to “Islamic extremists,” and then to just “extremists.”

So it’s true that the reference to al-Qa’ida was in fact deleted. And at one point, the talking points specifically name the group Ansar al-Sharia, which was also deleted.

But ABC reports that a State Department official objected to inclusion of the specific names because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” There’s no clear evidence of any other motive at this point.

What’s more, the talking points never describe the attacks as premeditated terrorism. They just say that “extremists” with ties to al-Qa’ida “participated” in the attacks.

3) The talking points do confirm that they were edited at the urging of the State Department, and a leaked email shows that this was partly out of a concern over appearances. This portion was deleted entirely:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

ABC News reports that an email from State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland shows that she objected to the inclusion of that portion. She said she was “concerned,” because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

So here’s where we are. The talking points were edited more extensively than the White House initially said, and with more direct involvement by the State Department. Indeed, spokesman Jay Carney, in his statement to ABC News, carefully elided this point by claiming that “the only edits made by anyone here at the White House were stylistic and non-substantive.” Emphasis mine; that was not Carney’s original claim.

It’s clear also that worry over appearances was at least partly the reason for at least one of the State-driven edits.

At the same time, the talking points also show that the intelligence community had not concluded at that point that the attacks were pre-meditated terror, believed that they had “evolved” from “spontaneous” protests, and that al Qa’ida extremists had merely “participated” in them. In assessing the situation, the administration (with the exception of Rice’s false implication of the video) was, in fact, largely repeating what the intelligence community believed at the time. It may well be true that the administration was too slow in subsequent days to acknowledge that the attacks were terrorism, but there’s still no clear evidence of any nefarious motive in doing so or that it wasn’t largely taking its cues from the intelligence community’s own evolving assessment.