Benghazi: The changing talking points

 This story will not be news to anyone who has been closely following the Benghazi scandal but the original talking points after the attack were changed to downplay al Qaeda’s role in the attack and focus the issue around a youtube video that nobody had seen.

  Here is some of what I wrote last November about the talking points:

While testifying under oath last week David Petraeus stated that he knew the attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist attack almost immediately. He also stated that the original talking points memo the CIA  drew up about the attack contained references to the attack being related to al Qaeda but that someone edited the memo prior to the White House sending out Susan Rice to advance the cover up.

We are now being told the reason for the change is because the al Qaeda connection was still ”tenuous” five days later even though David Petraeus, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton knew the truth almost immediately. We know the real reason why the terrorist link was omitted so shortly before the election, and it had nothing to do with the link being tenuous, but now that we know who edited the memo it is time to move on to the more important questions surrounding the terrorist attack in Benghazi because the cover up–while bad enough–isn’t the most important question here.

  The The Weekly Standard has acquired the timeline–including email correspondence–of the changing timeline:

Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom.

As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.

  According to the article senior officials in the Obama regime were extremely unhappy the CIA had concluded that al Qaeda was  linked to the attack and asked to have the talking points softened one day before Susan Rice made her infamous appearance on all the Sunday shows and lied about the motive behind the attack.

  If you click on the first link above–and I highly recommend you read the entire article–you can view the original talking points, the second draft of the talking points, and the final version of the talking points the Obama regime approved and you can see clearly that the Obama regime was trying to downplay al Qaeda’s role in the attack.

  At the Democrat Convention the Democrats spent a week dancing on Osama bin Laden’s grave while claiming that al Qaeda was on the run and this attack ran counter to that claim and if the truth was learned by the American people Barack Obama’s reelection bid might just have been derailed. So the truth was hidden from the American people to protect Barack Obama because the Democrats care more about staying in power than they do with giving the American people the truth about what happened on that fateful day. If the Obama regime has put in the same effort to protect Chris Stevens before the attack as they put in to protect Barack Obama after the attack perhaps Chris Stevens, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Tyrone Woods would be alive today.

  Is it any wonder that after denying the strength of al Qaeda for so long, and after putting our heads in the sand after the Benghazi attack, that the Boston Marathon was the target of a terrorist attack?