Why are they so adamant about standing by this absurd theory that a movie got Ambassador Stevens killed, and that a coordinated attack with mortars and RPGs was “spontaneous”? It seems to me like a sure way to piss away his credibility on national security issues. If it was an al Qaeda attack, does that make him look worse than claiming that a movie did all this?
Didn’t you hear? We’re talking about something else this week.
Well, there are a few possibilities:
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It really was spontaneous and they’re telling the truth.
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It was planned and the movie was used for cover but there aren’t enough facts to say this for sure yet. Such facts likely won’t come out in the next 50 days, so I don’t see how there could be a “administration lied” moment.
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It was planned and they know it but they also have security or strategic reasons for not saying so at this time. The Libyan and Egyptian governments are both somewhat precarious and there could be diplomatic reasons for the statements from State.
In the end, the public doesn’t really know or care too much about this. Things are shitty in the ME but everybody already knew that. Almost nobody is voting on foreign policy this election. And Romney stepped in it so bad on this issue that even with the potential prevarication voters like Obama’s response to the attack way better than Romney’s.
The administration is trying to cover up the fact that it got warning of the attack three days beforehand and did nothing.
On the one hand doing nothing may be understandable because we probably get lots of warnings about things that never come to pass, but on the other hand the administration can’t very well say “Well, this time the threat was credible. Who knew?”
My problem is with the fact that the White House is attempting to continue this fiction despite the fact that everyone knows better. It’s an insult to the intelligence of the electorate and it makes the administration look like lying, dishonest fools.
None of the “facts” in that post are facts yet. They may well prove to be true, but you can’t state them with certainty like that.
And trust me, “everyone” does not know better. A lot of people don’t even know that an attack happened or that an American was killed. Some are sure it’s because of the video. Some think it was in Egypt. Others that know it was in Libya think it was at an embassy, not a consulate.
The number of voters that have anything remotely close to an accurate picture of what happened and the timeline of events and the various factions involved in very, very small. And the number of those that think that the Admin is lying about getting advanced warning and the nature of the attack is smaller still. Much smaller than the number that think Romney blamed the President for the attacks (which is also, of course, not exactly true, but was the first thing that two different “low info” voters I’ve talked to about this opened with).
I tried googling this and I don’t know what the hell you guys are talking about. Can someone post a link to the administration’s weird spin?
Or a cite for the warning 3 days beforehand?
Like I said… 
You pretty much have to read hard-right blogs or papers to have any idea what the OP (and SA) are talking about. Here’s a link from the UK Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/libya-we-gave-us-threeday-warning-of-benghazi-attack-8145242.html
It cites unnamed Libyan security officials and is denied by State. Claiming it’s a fact is misleading in the extreme.
ETA: The “spin” is in the article. It’s about Susan Rice and others at State maintaining that the attack was initiated by the video protests and was hi-jacked. As opposed to being pre-planned and then having the video protests created as cover.
What the fuck. Can someone please move this thread to Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share?
Point yours! 
I don’t read “hard-right blogs or papers.” I do read Fox News online, Drudge and the Washington Post. To wit:
Note the assertion of a pre-planned attack is being made by Libyan president Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf, and that the administration is ever-increasingly dancing on the head of a pin in regard to its original claims in light of statements coming out of Libya as to what actually happened.
This stuff has been in the news for days…at least on the sites I read. (I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that posters inside the MSM bubble are ignorant of developments in this case. :))
The fact that you believe the Independent is a “hard-right blog” makes me question your intellectual honesty. Apparently, 'hard-right" now means anything which paints the current administration in a negative light.
Of course it’s going to be denied by the state. Do you expect them to come out and say, “Yeah, we fucked up. Oh well!”?
No, it’s not. Even the damn Libyan government has said it warned the U.S. administration three days before the attack. Are they lying? It’s a sad state of affairs in the U.S. when we have to get most of the news regarding this from an outside news source (because the American media refuses to touch it).
I don’t see this having any effect on the election. Whatever the truth is here, it’s too complicated for a soundbite, and unless the situation gets markedly worse, it’s going to fall off the news. Another protest in BFDastan today. Yawn.
Jobs and the economy is what is going to drive this election, and Romney needs to tell the voters why he is going to do any better than Obama. So far, he has not done that.
Uhh. They’ve just been caught with their asses hanging out to the extent that the US Ambassador has been killed in their country by their nationals.
If they knew 3 days previously why didn’t they do anything about it?
Sounds like a whole lot of Libyan ass-covering going on to me.
If it was jobs and the economy, then Romney would be ahead in the polls just on protest votes. I think people were reminded how bad things were 4 years ago. They were reminded of the chances Obama took to pull us out of that nosedive. And Paul Ryan reminds them how obstructionist the Republicans in congress have been.
Romney had to make a case for himself coming out of the gate and instead he seemed to assume the slow economy would hand him the election if he kept talking about it and reminding people he was a successful businessman. He forgets we already had our MBA president and it didn’t work out so good.
You are correct - The Independent is a UK paper that leans rightish on foreign policy but leftish on other issues. I grabbed the first “official looking” cite I could find - the others were all partisan.
In the US media this story has been pretty heavily hit on righty sites (NRO’s Corner, Freerepublic, Newsmax, WND, etc). Obviously you will have different opinions than I do about why this is so. From what I can tell the “3-day warning” claim all refer back to the Independent story.
When I am forced to chose which side to believe, an unnamed Libyan “security official” (the only source of the specific warning claim) or the US State Department I will tend to believe my own country first. Similarly, when the Libyan president says one thing and the US president says another, I tend to trust the American one until the facts are clear. YMMV.
Here is the US response to the Independent story: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/09/14/obama-intelligence-libya/70000353/1#.UFie8kI7t8E
No, that isn’t right. The Libyan government has claimed that they think the attack was pre-planned, not that they warned the US about it. The “warning claim” comes from unnamed sources via the Independent. Although I did find one other mention of a named source, but he merely claims that he was making generalized warnings that things weren’t safe - not a specific warning of an attack on the consulate.
There will undoubtedly be more investigations, and I’m sure as facts are revealed assessments will change. But to call Susan Rice’s statements so far “spin” or “lies” is, IMO, inaccurate.
Is it your opinion then that the information they contain is false? If not, and White House backpedaling certainly makes it appear not, then what difference does it make where it comes from? And is it not an indictment of the American mainstream media that information on this incident, and questions about it, have to come from right wing blogs and sites rather than from them?
Even though the American one backtracks further and further as more and more information from Libya comes out?
The more time that goes by, the more it becomes apparent that the attack was most likely a planned al Qaeda attack weeks if not months in the making, very possibly staged to coincide with 9/11. The nature of the attacks, the number of people involved in them, the artillery brought to bear, and El-Magariaf’s own words all support this theory rather than the “inflamatory film” theory put forth by the administration. In other words, I think the facts as they are being revealed increasingly support El-Magariaf’s claims than those of the administration, American or not. Plus I would remind you that the administration’s version of the bin Laden mission and how it went down has been pretty much debunked by now. Frankly, given the number of lies and spin coming out of the White House’s version on things, I’m beginning to wonder just how much of a hand the Clintons may have had in crafting them.
“As facts are revealed assessments will change”??? Do you not realize what you are saying here? You’ve more or less admitted that the administration’s version of accounts is, uh, unreliable and uninformed, to say the least.
Why? They may or may not be lies, but every indication based on the facts as they come out and the administration’s backpedaling on its previous position, all indications are that Rice’s statements are most definitely “spin”.
Having said all that, I agree that this incident isn’t likely to affect the election. I do hope that the mess Obama will inherit this time around (:D) might pursuade people that it’s time to give the guy with actual executive experience a try.
My position, such as it is, is that it’s been one week since the attack and very little in the way of solid evidence has been presented that this was an intensely planned conspiracy. It’s certainly possible, but I’ll wait for evidence. Until then I think it’s wise that the State Dept not go hypothesizing about what might have happened and rather state what we know in fact did happen.
I can’t being to understand what you think is so surprising about the idea that within the first week of a rather complicated incident there may be a shortage of actual verifiable facts. Or that assessments of what actually happened that day may change as additional facts are discovered. That’s how diplomacy and statesmanship is supposed to work - facts first, policy and response second.
As to the media side argument - I think that the right-wing blogs have gotten worked up over an unsourced statement from a UK newspaper. It’s rather obvious why they have, since if in fact there were actionable warnings in the hours leading up to the attack that would reflect poorly on the administration. It’s equally unsurprising to me that main-stream news organizations might be reluctant to cite those same unnamed sources in their articles. You will note that there have been reports at mainstream sites re: the Libyan presidents comments and other more vague warnings made by named Libyan sources.
My problem is not that the administration may be somewhat in the dark as to the facts. My problem is that the administration has been actively promoting a scenario that largely lets it off the hook and protects Obama from suffering the effects of continuing al Qaeda assaults and American intelligence failure in the face of the upcoming election, and that it retreats from that scenario only as much as it has to as more facts come out.
As the bin Laden mission has shown, the administration cannot be relied upon to furnish facts. Instead, it will attempt to portray things in as Obama-friendly a way as possible whether that portrayal is true and factual or not.
Still, this incident will like have no impact on the election, and I’ve already spent more time on it than I intended when I first posted so I think I’ll bow out now. The floor is yours. 
What was false about the way the administration reported the bin Laden mission?
The way they gave Obama all the credit, obviously.