The Prof
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Dozens of e-mails released by the White House reveal that Obama administration officials were behind the crafting of a false narrative about the attack in Benghazi, Libya. The communications raise questions about who called the shots and why, say an analyst and a lawmaker involved in the investigation.
According to the documents, officials at the State Department, CIA and White House national security staff heavily revised a CIA memo to remove all references to Islamist extremists known to have participated in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.
Among the unknowns:
Why were the revisions made?
Why did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testify before Congress that the edits were a product of the intelligence community when State officials had made many of the requests for alterations?
Why did the White House say it made no substantive edits when the e-mails show officials there helped lead the process for changes?
Where did the story come from that the attack grew from a protest against an anti-Islam video? The video was mentioned once in 100 pages of e-mails, but it was a central theme of Obama's and Clinton's description of the event.
The e-mails from Sept. 14-15 show that the State Department was "the key driving force for the revisions," says Thomas Joscelyn, an analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy in Washington.
The White House has since acknowledged what the CIA stated from the beginning: The Benghazi attack was a planned terrorist attack.
Chaffetz says many more documents need to be released to explain why the truth didn't come out right away.
Major revisions to the CIA memo were requested by Victoria Nuland, then-spokeswoman for the State Department, who said changes were needed to "resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership." The e-mails do not state what leaders she referred to.
Though White House spokesman Jay Carney has insisted the White House made almost no changes to the original memo, the e-mails show that Tommy Vietor, then-spokesman for the White House's national security adviser, wanted State Department concerns about the memo to be addressed.
Members of Congress "all think it was premeditated based on inaccurate assumptions or briefings. ... We need to brief members/press and correct the record,"Vietor wrote in an e-mail Sept. 14.
Nuland said in e-mails that the CIA memo's references to previous terrorist activity near the consulate and in the region could be construed by Congress as evidence that the State Department ignored the safety of its staff in Benghazi.
The CIA retorted in the e-mails that the FBI "did not have major concerns" with the memo's findings. Evidence for its conclusions that the attack was preplanned by an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group came from the claims of terror group Ansar al-Sharia and witness accounts forwarded by the CIA station chief in Tripoli.
Chaffetz said one e-mail, which was sent the day after the attack by Beth Jones, State's acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, to several high ranking State Department officials, described how she corrected the Libyan ambassador to the United States for suggesting the Benghazi attack may have been perpetrated by loyalists to ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Jones wrote to her supervisors, Chaffetz says, that the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan group Ansar al-Sharia was behind the attack.
Obama and Hillary lied to the faces of the grieving families and told them their loved ones died because of a Youtube video
Liberals don't have a problem with that
Obama nowhere to be found for 8 hours while Americans fought for their lives and were murdered by terrorists
Liberals don't have a problem with that
Obama lied to the American People when he blamed a youtube video
Liberals don't have a problem with that
The Obama Administration spent 70K running ads in pakistan blaming the youtube video
Liberals don't have a problem with that
The guy (scapegoat) who made the 10 min youtube video is still rotting in jail
Liberals don't have a problem with that
Anyone who has tried to reveal the truth has been harassed and intimidated by the Obama Administration
Liberals don't have a problem with that
A stand down order was given twice when American lives were in danger
Liberals don't have a problem with that
I could go on and on but why bother. Clearly the Left cares more about Obama than murdered Americans and the truth.
usatoday yesterday:
Benghazi emails released by the White House unleash flood of questions
usatoday, huh?
i couldn't have written it better myself
worry
In case you missed it they just found out that none of that happened and it was all a republican lie.
Your selective blindness is awesome.
rice knowingly lied on the talk shows.
we are looking for the person(s) who directed that lie and their motivations.
I think we are being led on a wild goose chase at this point....Not only do we need to know who ordered "stand down", but what were they in Benghazi for that day in the first place? Can anyone say arms running? And better yet, who's bird brained idea was it to "Normalize" security for that region of Libya?
The upshot here is that while ABC reporter Jon Karl's account of the email suggests Rhodes had voiced concern over the State Dept.'s suggested edits to the talking points, the full email obtained by Tapper suggests he did not single out the State Dept. and merely wanted to address the concerns of everyone involved in the editing process.
But ABC News says the new Rhodes email is not necessarily at odds with its initial report, which -- as Karl stated at the time -- was based on "summaries" of White House and State Department emails. (The piece was certainly lacking for clarity; see Update below.)
"Assuming the email reported by CNN is accurate, it is consistent with the summary quoted by Jon Karl," Jeffrey Schneider, the senior vice president and spokesman for ABC News, told POLITICO.
The new email doesn't change the fact that the White House and State Dept. were involved in the revision process, nor that the State Dept. voiced specific concerns about references to terror. Indeed, it doesn't even prove that Rhodes wasn't concerned about the State Dept.'s concerns about "terror."
So what's going on here? Tapper's "U.S. government source" is likely drawing attention to the discrepancy between Karl's summary of the email and the actual content of the email in order to discredit ABC's report and Karl's sources. Indeed, on Tuesday afternoon the White House accused congressional Republicans of fabricating the emails cited in Karl's report.
One thing you'll learn if you study political communications: Nothing seems to work so well as using one small error in a report to discredit the entire report. CNN's "U.S. government source" must be overjoyed that Tapper used the word "inaccurate" four times** when referring to a report that is, for the most part, accurate.
CNN has since removed three of the four uses of the word "inaccurate" from its report.
Despite the centrality of the YouTube video to the administration’s public discussion of Benghazi, it goes virtually unmentioned in the nearly 100 pages of emails between the nation’s top intelligence and Obama administration officials as they reshaped the talking points provided by the CIA. The film trailer is included as part of a list on the first page of the documents and again at the very end, in the subject line about a meeting of high-ranking officials on Saturday morning: “SVTS [Secure Video Teleconferencing System] on Movie Protests/Violence.”
As the top U.S. officials discussed what to include in the talking points that would shape their case to the country on the attacks in Benghazi, the video was absent. Whose idea was it to make it the centerpiece? The Obama administration still has a lot of explaining to do.
usatoday yesterday:
Benghazi emails released by the White House unleash flood of questions
usatoday, huh?
i couldn't have written it better myself
worry
You do realize
In case you missed it they just found out that none of that happened and it was all a republican lie.
Your selective blindness is awesome.
You do realize that this was the resut of Republicans leaking falsified emails to the press.
In case you missed it they just found out that none of that happened and it was all a republican lie.
Your selective blindness is awesome.
It all happened. Not my problem you refuse to accept reality.
This thread and now this push by The Left to counter Benghazi is laughably pathetic. No emails were edited. A summary was given that was consistent with the emails. Somehow this is a massive scandal that has liberals screeching like Harpies, but 4 murdered Americans (including an ambassador) whose deaths could have prevented and the FACT that their grieving families were lied to and misled is "nothing". Americans fighting to protect and save their own (against stand down orders) left to die without any help from the Obama Administration is "not a scandal" to the Obama cultists.
The real question is how do you sleep at night supporting and defending such corruption and dishonesty tererun? Just curious
I think we are being led on a wild goose chase at this point....Not only do we need to know who ordered "stand down", but what were they in Benghazi for that day in the first place? Can anyone say arms running? And better yet, who's bird brained idea was it to "Normalize" security for that region of Libya?
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Well....I must defend my political opponent, Jack Hays, on this one.
We're all just opinionating here.
The majority of links are from partisan sites.
One can always find some sort of link--credible, or not-- to support an opinion.
If sweet, naïve Jack wants to believe Issa is a fact-finding crusader for the truth....so be it.
----------------Very true. You may be vulnerable if you post links because you tie yourself to that link's credibility. But if you state your opinion as fact and never support it... that is no argument. There are people on forums that often take the tact of playing the never-ending refutor. Then just say "it can't be done" or "no it isn't" which is the lazy path. And one where you don't need links. He's chosen that path. And when he tries to take a stance he NEVER backs it up. Then of course he claims to be on level with Aristotle. lol
Even the old philosophers needed history to back them up. He has none of these.
----------------
Maybe Jack was comparing himself to Aristotle Onassis?
ABC’s Jonathan Karl regrets that he was caught lying about Benghazi
Karl’s story purported to “prove” that the White House had made partisan hay with the Benghazi talking points in those first few days after the deadly attack on our consultate in Libya. In fact, Karl’s story, we now know, was a lie, fabricated by congressional Republicans who are out to get President Obama, and aided by Karl having intentionally misled ABC’s audience in his reporting on the matter.
You got nothing after-birthers... but keep fishing. Maybe eventually you'll trip across a stained blue dress or something.
Very true. You may be vulnerable if you post links because you tie yourself to that link's credibility.
ABC’s Jonathan Karl regrets that he was caught lying about Benghazi
Karl’s story purported to “prove” that the White House had made partisan hay with the Benghazi talking points in those first few days after the deadly attack on our consultate in Libya. In fact, Karl’s story, we now know, was a lie, fabricated by congressional Republicans who are out to get President Obama, and aided by Karl having intentionally misled ABC’s audience in his reporting on the matter.
You got nothing after-birthers... but keep fishing. Maybe eventually you'll trip across a stained blue dress or something.
... Since Jay Carney stated that congressmen could view and take notes but not copy or photograph the emails:
Would 'taking notes' on an email verbatim constitute 'copy' (which was forbidden)?
If yes, did the GOP have any other choice but paraphrase the emails? And having 'paraphrased' did they have any other choice but furnish this to Karl? Further, IF they had released the email's text verbatim wouldn't they be under scrutiny for violating there 'no copy rule'?
If no, then why didn't the WH just release the emails during the Brenan confirmation? I mean there out now what's the difference between then and now?
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney, 05/10/2013-
Q Since you bring it up, why were those emails provided in a read-only fashion?
MR. CARNEY: It is, I think, a standard procedure for administrations of both parties, going back decades, that internal deliberations are generally protected -- is generally protected information that is not something that is regularly shared with Congress, and then that’s -- to allow for a deliberative process in the executive branch. In this case, to answer just these concerns that members of Congress had, particularly Republican members of Congress, that step was taken and provided. And they were able to review all of these emails, which they have, of course, now leaked to reporters, but they were able to review all of these emails for as long as they wanted, take extensive notes if they chose to.
ON THE SAME PAGE no less:
you used a blog site...?
vulnerable indeed...:lamo