Ok, so it's been established that what Susan Rice had to say five days after Benghazi was the same thing that the Intelligence Community released for public consumption. That they knew it was a "terrorist attack" pretty much right away, but not that they knew exactly who did it, although they were pretty sure it wasn't al Qaeda.
And it wasn't.
Today Ambassador Susan Rice sat down with the Three Senate Stooges - McCain, Graham and Ayotte - who have continued to pound the sands of scandal with little success. After the meeting, even with the active CIA Director sitting next to her to corroborate what she said, not much has changed.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/...
"I'm more disturbed now than I was before," Graham told reporters following the meeting. "I think does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight clearly was completely wrong. But here's the key, in realtime, it was a statement disconnected from reality."
The problem of course is that the ones
disconnected from reality are named, McCain, Graham and Ayotte.
As I documented back in October and a few actually journalists have noted, Susan Rice never said that the Video Demonstration was the reason for the attack, she always said that there were two separate events.
Gregory: you talked about this as spontaneous. can you say definitively that the attacks on our consulate in lybia that killed ambassador stevens and others there was spontaneous? was it a planned attack? was there a terrorist element to it?
Rice: let me tell you the best information we have at present. first of all, there's an fbi investigation that's ongoing and we look to that investigation to give us the definitive word as to what transpired. but putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video. what we think then transpired in benghazi is that opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding. they came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately, are readily available in post revolutionary libya. and it escalated into a much more violent episode. obviously, that's our best judgment now.
Here's the thing, Graham's claim that Rice should have said "we don't yet know what happened" - happens to be exactly what she said. They didn't know and she said so. She said the
FBI Investigation Would Be Definitive, so clearly what "we think now" was likely to change and be updated.
The claim that Susan Rice was attempting to "Lie" to the American people for political reasons in order to support the claim that "al Qeada's leadership has been decimated" is simply false. al Qaeda's Leadership has been decimated, but this was something different. This group is New. The talking points weren't manipulated or changed by the White House, they had nothing to do with it.
Why send her to talk about it? They actually didn't send her for that, she was on the air because that was the week of the UN Summit. Also those people like the Secretary of State and Director of National Intelligence who knew more than Rice were really KINDA BUSY working on the issue right then.
This entire argument isn't about what Susan Rice did and did not know. It's about the fact that the classified version of the report went into far more detail than just "extremists", and the intelligence community - as a whole - decided not to include those details in the declassified version of the report.
If Ambassador Susan Rice had STRAYED FROM THE TALKING POINTS as the Stooge Brigade insist she should have - She Would Have Been Illegally Revealing Classified Information on National Television.
It's just that simple.
What they're attacker her for, is for not being a Traitor.
Y'know, like Darryl Issa.
We know that many second term Presidencies are rocked with scandal be they Watergate, Iran Contra or much too randy interns - but this situation isn't one of those.
This is Bullshit that the Stooges are destroying their own credibility and legacies with, period.
Vyan