Posted on 10/24/2012 5:14:49 PM PDT by kristinn
It was, from the start, about as hard an intelligence problem as you can find. The date was September 11, and the CIA was stretched thin, monitoring anti-American protests in no fewer than 54 countries that day, according to Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper. Post-Gaddafi Libya itself was still chaotic, caught up in the fog of war, and indeed Ambassador Chris Stevens, at great personal risk, had journeyed to his old Arab Spring-era stomping ground in Benghazi to assess the situation himself. Still, Clapper recently told an annual conference of intelligence professionals that there was no warning to Stevens or anyone else that he was about to be targeted by an organized extremist attack.
SNIP
...There's only one problem with that view: No evidence has surfaced so far to support the idea that the Obama Administration deceived the public deliberately. On Wednesday a new spate of stories emerged, quoting unclassified emails sent to the White House and State Department only hours after the attacks that indicate the extremist Libyan militia Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility.
SNIP
But that story doesn't hold up well either. The emails in question contained nothing more than "raw" intelligence, uncorroborated and unverified, that often flows in after an event. Intelligence officials typically don't deliver their assessments until they have "finished" reports based on multiple sources, and corroborated evidence,...
SNIP
Interestingly, even Romney seems to have grown a bit tired of the Benghazi story, as he indicated on Monday night when moderator Bob Schieffer made Libya question No. 1 in his final debate with President Obama and the GOP nominee basically ignored it. Nonetheless, the story of what senior administration officials knew and when they knew it doesn't seem to go away. Perhaps it will after November 6.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I just watched/listened to the Obama UN speech on Sept 25, 2012. He absolutely and repeatedly refers to a root cause of the violence in Benghazi being the video slandering the prophet of islam.
He does it from the 13 minute mark through the 21 minute mark in the 30 minute speech. The key quote is at 20:36.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73EQoIsKwCw
If there is any blessing to the grossly incompetent and authoritarian Obama Administration, it’s that the Main Stream Media has irretrievably squandered their already questionable credibility.
From this point on, Conservatives can ridicule stories from ABCCBSNBCCNN with the same confidence as sources as impeccable as “The View” and “Dr. Phil.”
The first two words that came to mind after reading this piece were: knee pads.
5.56mm
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