freeman3 wrote:Uh, go back and look at the timeline, Tom. The information officer was killed within 30 minutes after the attack started and contact was lost with the ambassador. It is not exactly clear when the ambassador succumbed to smoke, only that a doctor tried to revive him starting at 1:15 am It is speculative to make an assumption as to whether he could have been revived at an earlier time.
As for some group claiming responsibility--so what? They later denied responsibility, right? Moreover, the CIA made an assessment and the White House was entitled to rely on that.

"On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy [in response to an anti-Muslim video] and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy." And the CIA drafters noted that the "currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests" in Cairo and "evolved into a direct assault" on the "US Consulate and subsequently its annex."

freeman3 wrote:In response to your question, once the CIA says that the Benghazi attacks spontaneously arose due to the Cairo protests, the only reasonable conclusion one can make is that the Benghazi protests started spontaneously because of the video. If you want to try and argue that protesters in Benghazi would have spontaneously protested due to the Cairo protests but not due to the video, then you can do so but I doubt very much most reasonable people would agree with you.

Petraeus apparently was displeased by the removal of so much of the material his analysts initially had proposed for release. The talking points were sent to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to prepare her for an appearance on news shows on Sunday, Sept. 16, and also to members of the House Intelligence Committee.

"No mention of the cable to Cairo, either?" Petraeus wrote after receiving Morell's edited version, developed after an intense back-and-forth among Obama administration officials. "Frankly, I'd just as soon not use this, then."

freeman3 wrote:It doesn't matter what went into making the "sausage" when the CIA processed the information it came out with "Benghazi attack arose spontaneously from Cairo protests." Petraeus may have been unhappy with what was decided to be included or excluded but none of that had to do with the conclusion that the Benghazi attack started spontaneously as a result of the Cairo protests. That was there in the first until the 12th talking points.

These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law.

According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”

This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.

The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.

He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.

Regarding General Ham, military contacts of the diplomats tell them that AFRICOM had Special Ops “assets in place that could have come to the aid of the Benghazi consulate immediately (not in six hours).”

Ham was told by the White House not to send the aid to the trapped men, but Ham decided to disobey and did so anyway, whereupon the White House “called his deputy and had the deputy threaten to relieve Ham of his command.”

The White House motivation in all this is as yet unclear, but it is known that Ham retired quietly in April 2013 as head of AFRICOM.

Tom,. what you say eventually came out. But we're talking about in the immediately aftermath of the incident. The intelligence community was trying to figure out how much reliance to place on intercepted cables. I am not aware of any videotape of the attack on the embassy showing how it started, so the intelligence community had to piece it together. To get a fully accurate picture witnesses have to be examined and their credibility determined (which would be done by the FBI, I think).

They also had to decide whether to release information about the intercepted cable from the terrorist who said he joined in after watching the Cairo protests. Probably they were influenced in part by the common-sense interpretation that the Benghazi protest was related to the video since there had been protests about the video in Muslim countries.

All that happened in Benghazi was that an initial common-sense interpretation turned out to be wrong. I guess you can criticize the CIA for getting it wrong but it does not appear that they had been able to get credible first-hand accounts of people who had been there at the start of what happened. I'm not sure that is really the CIA's specialty, going out and interviewing people. That is what the FBI does and they had just started their investigation when Rice went on the air.

freeman3 wrote:I am not gullible, but your evidence as to what information the CIA had regarding what actually happened on the night of the attack is scant. The best evidence is either film or testimony of people who there were and saw what happened. And you need to specify when that information became available. E-mails and intercepts of telephonic traffic are secondary evidence and not as reliable.

freeman3 wrote:And where did Hicks get his information? First-hand information from "witnesses" is what is important. Conclusions from disgruntled employees don't add up to much. Stevens said he was under attack but that could have come from a spontaneous protest or from a terrorist group. I am sure as a law enforcement veteran with many years of experience that you are familiar with assessing the relative importance of different types of evidence. I find Hick's statement that Ansar Al-Sharia was in control of the hospital to be incredible--how in earth could he know that with any level of confidence? I would expect with some one with as much as experience as Hicks to be very hesitant about making such a definitive claim with such limited evidence.

The CIA scrubbed portions from the talking points and came up with this, the White House may or may not have had a part in this scrubbing but let's say they did not. The talking points were what were released but the President was fully appraised of the situation, he knew the details. Yet here we have some suggesting he only knew what we knew and that simply is not the case, if this were true, then Obama should be impeached today if not sooner, no way he can be that incredibly unaware and/or ignorant.

The controversy over the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack last year began at a meeting over coffee on Capitol Hill three days after the assault.
It was at this informal session with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the ranking Democrat asked David H. Petraeus, who was CIA director at the time, to ensure that committee members did not inadvertently disclose classified information when talking to the news media about the attack.
“We had some new members on the committee, and we knew the press would be very aggressive on this, so we didn’t want any of them to make mistakes,” Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.) said last week of his request in an account supported by Republican participants. “We didn’t want to jeopardize sources and methods, and we didn’t want to tip off the bad guys. That’s all

Included was a six-point draft that began, “We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired” by anti-American demonstrations elsewhere “and evolved” into assaults against “the U.S. consulate and subsequently its annex.”

It followed with a reference to previous attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi and a mention of Ansar al-Sharia, a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda. That information, put in at Petraeus’s request, would become the chief source of tension between the agency, the State Department and the FBI.