Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference

[Marcus Aurelius]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/exclusive-benghazi-talking-points-underwent-12-revisions-scrubbed-of-terror-references/


When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

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 (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/ambassador-susan-rice-libya-attack-not-premeditated/) the Sunday after that attack.



The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/10/white-house-responds-to-release-of-real-time-emails-about-benghazi-attack/) in November.
“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”




State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:


“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, 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.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information 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? Concerned …”
The paragraph was entirely deleted.




After the talking points were edited slightly to address Nuland’s concerns, she responded that changes did not go far enough.
“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership,” Nuland wrote.




One other point: The significant edits – deleting references to al Qaeda and the CIA’s warnings – came after a White House meeting on the Saturday before Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday shows.



heads really need to roll.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/exclusive-benghazi-talking-points-underwent-12-revisions-scrubbed-of-terror-reference/





heads really need to roll.

Waste of time if not starting at the very top. Obama is behind all this muslim support and cover.-Tyr

[aboutime]

4969 Nothing more needs to be said.

[Marcus Aurelius]

If this guy were President when the attack on Benghazi occurred, and everything happened exactly the same way...


http://africaglobalstage.webs.com/george-bush-official-2.jpg


...libtards would be screaming for impeachment... and they all fucking KNOW it.

[aboutime]

If this guy were President when the attack on Benghazi occurred, and everything happened exactly the same way...


http://africaglobalstage.webs.com/george-bush-official-2.jpg


...libtards would be screaming for impeachment... and they all fucking KNOW it.



Marcus. Oddly enough. I suspect even the die-hard liberal-democrats silently know that is true. But they fear being labeled as Turn-coats, Racists, or Inbred Terrorists if they even hint at agreeing to such a thing.
They'd all rather hide their wished-for honesty, than have anyone like them come forward to finally admit...Enough is enough, as if they actually had any feelings for their Own Nation...as it is slowly being destroyed...right out from under them.

[red states rule]

http://images.rcp.realclearpolitics.com/188366_5_.jpg

[red states rule]

People are forgetting the DOJ and Obama arrested, smeared, and jailed the innocent maker of the You Tube video they tried to blame for the attacks

And we have 3 1/2 more years of this kind of government

[red states rule]

New Obama Bumper Sticker Idea


Hope and Change The Subject

[jimnyc]

heads really need to roll.

I agree with this 50,000%, but am on the verge of realizing that once again they will give nothing more than talking points and then bury it. They say they allowed congressional leaders to view or take notes on WH emails back in January. Well now the tide has turned and there is much new information as to what really took place that day/night - but now they say they won't let anyone get copies or be able to view again? This whole thing stinks of incompetence and coverup. And sadly, 75% of the TV stations out there are barely touching this at all.

[red states rule]

I agree with this 50,000%, but am on the verge of realizing that once again they will give nothing more than talking points and then bury it. They say they allowed congressional leaders to view or take notes on WH emails back in January. Well now the tide has turned and there is much new information as to what really took place that day/night - but now they say they won't let anyone get copies or be able to view again? This whole thing stinks of incompetence and coverup. And sadly, 75% of the TV stations out there are barely touching this at all.

Nobody has lost their job. Nobody has been transferred out of the State Dept. It seems running out the clock, and blaming Republicans is the new game plan.

[Gaffer]

The new TASS is in full swing and cover up mode. It will be buried as quickly as possible. The only way anything will ever be changed is by a million man armed march on DC.

[red states rule]

The new TASS is in full swing and cover up mode. It will be buried as quickly as possible. The only way anything will ever be changed is by a million man armed march on DC.

The toothpaste is oozing out of the tube. While they will try as hard they can - the liberal media cannot put the paste back in the tube

[Kathianne]

I don't know that Benghazi is 'going to go away,' I do know that many more people will be reacting to the IRS problem. Even dithering idiots realize that if under Obama the IRS can target associations, demanding individual member's information, it can happen to any associations they are aligned with down the road:

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/guest-lineups-sunday-news-shows-183815643.html


WASHINGTON (AP) — Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows:
ABC's "This Week" — Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Jack Reed, D-R.I.
___
NBC's "Meet the Press" — Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; former diplomat Thomas Pickering, who helped lead the State Department's review of the attack against the U.S. in Benghazi, Libya.
___
CBS' "Face the Nation" — Pickering; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.
___
CNN's "State of the Union" — Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the State Department's accountability review; Reps. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii.
___
"Fox News Sunday" — Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Adam Smith, D-Wash.; Rep.-elect Mark Sanford, R-S.C.

[red states rule]

At least a few in the liberal media are starting to report on this

Perhaps they are PO'd that they were lied to and not so much four Americans were murdered





There is no escaping the fact that, where Benghazi is concerned, there is blood in the water and the mainstream media has (at long last) picked up the scent. Yesterday, the sharks representing the three major TV networks circled Press Secretary Jay Carney (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/10/white-house-scrambles-to-contain-benghazi-gate-fallout/?test=latestnews), bombarding him with questions that were uncharacteristically tough.


ABC’s Jonathan Karl (http://libertyunyielding.com/2013/05/10/benghazi-talking-points-underwent-twelve-12-revisions/), who broke the story that the talking points underwent twelve revisions, had the aspect and attitude of a man scorned and determined to set the record straight as much to clear his own name as to ascertain the truth. When Carney attempted to weasel out of his claim earlier in the week that the White House had merely made minor “stylistic” changes (http://libertyunyielding.com/2013/05/08/carney-edits-to-benghazi-talking-points-were-stylistic/) to the talking points, Karl was adamant and unrelenting.


While there are now premature suggestions that impeachment (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/10/top-gop-senator-says-obama-could-be-impeached-over-most-egregious-cover-up-in-american-history/) may be in the president’s future, there is no dismissing the fact that this is a major cover-up whose potential for harming administration members present and past (that means you, Hillary!) should not be underestimated. As Mark Steyn (http://libertyunyielding.com/2013/05/11/the-benghazi-lie/) reminds us, in January, Clinton “denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that ‘1.43 million cables come to my office’ — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any,” adding:

Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all ‘Chris this’ and ‘Chris that,’ as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#) personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.


Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m.call? Four years later, the phone (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#) rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.


Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#) to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, ‘Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.’ Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

That includes Obama, who was off to a big campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#).


Yet, the view from the liberal blogosphere is still “Nothing to see here.” The expectation that the testimony before the House Oversight Committee (http://oversight.house.gov/hearing/benghazi-exposing-failure-and-recognizing-courage/) by three whistleblowers (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#) on Wednesday would “break the dam that would lead to President Obama’s eventual downfall (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/huckabee-benghazi-will-drive-obama-from-office-90964.html)?” Pure fantasy. That was how Hayes Brown of ThinkProgress (http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/05/08/1982151/witnesses-debunk-benghazi/) summarized the hearings. If anything, Brown wrote, “these witness [sic] actually served to debunk several theories that the right-wing has pushed on Benghazi, leaving the hearing a fizzle for the GOP.”


Much of his post was devoted to the testimony provided by Gregory Hicks, a Foreign Service Officer and the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya. Most analysts after the fact found Hicks’s testimony to be among the most riveting and politically toxic to the administration. But not Brown. In his view, Hicks’s account was but a feeble attempt to connect the dots between the White House and the deaths of four Americans in Libya last Sept. 11 collapsed altogether under a withering cross-examination by ranking committee member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).


You’d think with Hicks’s evisceration at the hands of an experienced statesman, there would be no need for a follow-up column. Yet on Friday, Brown delivered a second post-mortem (http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/05/10/1986251/benghazi-whistleblower-hicks/?mobile=nc), quoting a former staffer under Hicks who called him “the worst manager I’ve ever seen in the Foreign Service.” Another of Hicks’s former underlings is reported to have said, “Literally every single one of us begged for him to be removed from post.”


The question is why bother devoting column inches to defaming a man who has already been discredited — whose testimony, if anything, vindicates the president and his successor, Hillary Clinton? Could all the president’s acolytes have lapsed into denial, the first of the five stages of grief? Or is this just a case of shooting the messenger? We will learn the answer in the weeks and months to come. The Benghazi cover-up is not going away.


Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-portnoy/2013/05/12/liberal-panic-now-benghazi-fiasco-finally-getting-real-coverage#ixzz2T4g9czXe

[red states rule]

Since Obama cannot run for a third term, the liberal media is throwing their support behind Hillary

<iframe width="500" height="281" title="MRC TV video player" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/121203" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

[aboutime]

Since Obama cannot run for a third term, the liberal media is throwing their support behind Hillary

<iframe width="500" height="281" title="MRC TV video player" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/121203" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>






Not a surprise red states rule. Most all of us have suspected HILLARY the Wicked WOULD be running. The day after Obama repeated his LYING OATH of office, and he Rewarded her by making her Sec State.
Nothing new with this. Nothing at all.

[red states rule]

Not a surprise red states rule. Most all of us have suspected HILLARY the Wicked WOULD be running. The day after Obama repeated his LYING OATH of office, and he Rewarded her by making her Sec State.
Nothing new with this. Nothing at all.

Well if lying is a requirement for Hillary to win the Dem nomination - who better to coach her then her hubby Bill and Obama?

[red states rule]

While some in the liberal media are at least admitting there is a problem with the administration's comments on Benghazi - other liberal "reporters" blame the right wing media for the liberal media ignoring the story




Asked on Sunday’s Reliable Sources if the wider media dismissed the Weekly Standard story, by Stephen Hayes about the Benghazi talking points getting altered to take out any references to terrorism, because of his affiliation with conservative media, The Hill newspaper Managing Editor Bob Cusack (http://thehill.com/contact/about-us/bob-cusack) agreed.

Then he turned his criticism on his colleagues: “If you look at the time line of how this administration dealt with Benghazi, there’s been a lot of contradictions from the get go. So, the media hasn’t looked at it as extensively as they should have.”


Refreshing to hear, but quite an understatement.


Former Time magazine reporter Margaret Carlson, not so surprisingly, blamed the conservative media for why the Washington press corps ignored the Hayes story only to pounce on a similar one when reported days later by ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “The right wing went so far on this story, ‘it’s Watergate, it’s impeachable,’ we couldn’t hear Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard. It did take somebody who is just a meat and potatoes reporter.”

Cusack also scolded not conservatives for dragging Hillary Clinton into the scandal, but the media for not earlier recognizing her relevance: “I think the focus on Hillary Clinton was a bit delayed. I think a lot of news organizations didn’t realize, or didn’t report, that this really could be an issue for her going forward and, of course, in 2016, in a political context.”



Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2013/05/12/hill-s-cusack-recognizes-media-failure-benghazi-carlson-blames-rig#ixzz2TAWDWXfh

[aboutime]

While some in the liberal media are at least admitting there is a problem with the administration's comments on Benghazi - other liberal "reporters" blame the right wing media for the liberal media ignoring the story


red states rule. Saw a short video yesterday that proves how defensive the Liberal-Democrats really are. Watched CA. Senator Barbra Boxer DEFEND Hillary, and literally BLAME Republicans for cutting back on the funding for the State Department. EVEN after the spokeswoman...a Democrat, denied FUNDING played any part in what took place in Benghazi.

I also noticed how Boxer never quite got around to mentioning how Democrats in Congress DENIED the placement of U.S. Marines around our Oversea's Embassies due to FUNDING???

[red states rule]

While committing random acts of journalism, CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson was PO''d the WH. Which shows me she is doing her job






CBS's Sharyl Attkisson Says Team Obama 'Perfected' Delaying Info Release And Has 'Quit Talking to Me Altogether'

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson did several interviews last week that discussed her investigative work on CBS, especially the Benghazi scandal. On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Monday, Attkison said the Obama administration has "perfected" delaying public release of information, and reported the White House has "quit talking" to her altogether.

In an interview with David Brody of CBN News (http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/cbs-attkisson-there-hasnt-been-an-appetite-for-the-stories-ive-offered-on-benghazi_b179488), Attkisson admitted that's not her only roadblock: “there hasn’t been an appetite for the stories I’ve offered on Benghazi” to the CBS morning and evening newscasts.


"I’ve received a lot of encouragement from the top executives,” she told Brody. “Jeff Fager, who’s our CEO, and David Rhodes, who’s our president, have certainly never said anything to try and interfere with the coverage. They’ve complimented a lot of my work and strongly supported it. On the other hand, every story you present as a reporter has to be bought by a broadcast, meaning not purchased for money, but you have to get them interested in it.… there hasn’t been an appetite for the stories that I’ve offered on Benghazi [on the CBS morning and evening newscasts] so I’ve published a lot online because there’s unlimited content space online and I’ve done a lot of my reporting there.”



Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2013/05/18/cbss-sharyl-attkisson-says-team-obama-perfected-delaying-info-release-an#ixzz2Tot8QFyi