ABC News: Benghazi Talking Points Revised 12 Times - Scrubbed of Terror Reference


See ABC Video at link:

After doing its best to ignore Benghazi for eight long months, the mainstream media is finally playing catch-up and reporting what has now become abundantly clear:

Deliberate actions were taken by the Obama Administration to conceal the truth surrounding the attack from the beginning – and a cover-up of those actions has continued ever since.

The mainstream media is finally beginning to report the news vs. running cover for the Administration.

From ABC News: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 sheappeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. 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 in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. 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.”

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points. 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 Qaeda 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 have 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, 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?

The paragraph was entirely deleted. Continue reading…From Breitbart.com: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department apparently did most of the editing. In his Good Morning America report Friday morning, Jonathon Karl said that emails have been read that to him… …

that show that many of these changes were directed by Hillary Clinton spokesperson at the State Department, Victoria Nuland. In one email she said that information about CIA warnings ‘could be used by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that. After that email, all references were deleted.

Clearly, after eight months, the Administration’s version of the events surrounding the terrorist attack that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and four other brave Americans dead is finally unraveling. While the mainstream media has come late to the party, it’s good that they’ve finally arrived.

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/05/5144...ror-reference/