Benghazi
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Actually, NO. Petraeus was shocked at seeing that the WH and State Dept deleted references to terrorism.
The intel version was BLUNT about the reasons being terrorism. The State Dept, and obviously, Obamao, authorized
politically friendly changes, and sent those friendly changes to Rice. And, Obamao tried to fly with them on Letterman.
It was to protect the WH and State Dept from accountability. The State dept memo even admitted it.
Bigtime scandal now. They were lying to save their butts. Accountability is a must, to prevent this from happening again,
and to hold liars and those responsible for denying those at Benghazi a rescue. And yes, rescue was available. Obamao and Clinton
did it out of political expediency.
Obamao's Watergate.
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CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version—produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers—was a shadow of the original. -
Even the BBC editor admits it's a blow up scandal now.
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Once again, you're ignoring Petraeus in favor of the theory you prefer. You're also ignoring the other part of this story which mentions the reasons they were taken out - so as not to interfere with the investigation.
Until you produce someone like Petraeus who says there was no reason but politics to change these talking points you don't have anything. But that's going to be hard to do since Petraeus is already on record saying the reason these mentions were left out was to assist the investigation.
Other than that, you've got nothing more than the usual interagency squabbling and an embarrassed press secretary.
Once again, you're ignoring Petraeus in favor of the theory you prefer. You're also ignoring the other part of this story which mentions the reasons they were taken out - so as not to interfere with the investigation.
Until you produce someone like Petraeus who says there was no reason but politics to change these talking points you don't have anything. But that's going to be hard to do since Petraeus is already on record saying the reason these mentions were left out was to assist the investigation.
Other than that, you've got nothing more than the usual interagency squabbling and an embarrassed press secretary.
There was no reason to eliminate everything about it being a terrorist attack. If they really just wanted to act dumb for the terrorists who attacked, they would have said it could have been the protestors, it could have been a militant operation by terrorists, but ultimately that's all we have at this time. Instead they completely deleted everything about Al Queda and claimed that they knew the protestors were responsible. They didn't decline to go into basic details in order to protect the investigation. The went deep into details that weren't true. There's a huge difference.
Nuland's email stating that evidence should be hidden to protect the State Department seems to be pure politics. And Jay Carney admitted the 12 drafts were changed under direction of the State Department. The CIA was happy with their first draft. The State Department is when the push to start removing details began.
Nuland's email stating that evidence should be hidden to protect the State Department seems to be pure politics. And Jay Carney admitted the 12 drafts were changed under direction of the State Department. The CIA was happy with their first draft. The State Department is when the push to start removing details began.
Nuland is a career State official who served as deputy foreign policy advisor under Dick Cheney and is married to Robert Kagan. Do you know who Robert Kagan is? He co-founded the Project For a New American Century. He's one of the original neo-cons. If she's playing politics, she must some sort of double agent worthy of Hollywood.
She's not playing politics. She's playing bureaucratic infighting. And if you think this is the first time this has ever happened you haven't spent a day in Washington, or ever read a newspaper.
As for this: "If they really just wanted to act dumb for the terrorists who attacked, they would have said it could have been the protestors, it could have been a militant operation by terrorists, but ultimately that's all we have at this time."
....Wha?? That's pretty much exactly what they said!
MS. RICE: So we’ll want to see the results of that [FBI] investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy– –sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.
BOB SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with him that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?
MS. RICE: We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.
MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with [the previous guest, the president of Libya’s general national congress] that al Qaeda had some part in this?
MS. RICE: Well, we’ll have to find out that out. I mean I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.
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"joined in" ???
There were no protests about the video outside of Benghazi.
And, they had rocket launchers, machine guns.... well armed.
That is pre-planned.
Coverup. Whitewash. Damage Control. Protecting the "success" image of this
president's regime.
I mean, seriously. Clinton has all the reason in the world to cover up the word "terrorism" on her and Obamao's watch -
she is protecting her chances of running for president herself.
There are even more "whistleblowers" who want to testify.
And Obamao just went to Mexico, and blamed American guns for the violence there, AFTER the "Fast and Furious" scandal?
And they are scandals. They are not driven by the media, that's a major diminishing factor. Another is misdirection and cover-up.
But that boat is sinking despite the patches.
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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.
"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.”
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I have little use for Geraldo...but he says:
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I have little use for Geraldo...but he says:
I have little use for Geraldo...but he says:
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.
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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.
"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.”
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.
"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."
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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.
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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/
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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.
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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.
"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."
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?
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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.
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By Greg Sargent, Published: May 10, 2013 at 11:33 amABC 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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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."
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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
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