The 94-word intelligence summary emerged from a daylong email debate between more than two dozen intelligence officials, in which they contested and whittled the available evidence into a bland summary with no reference to al Qaeda, an assessment the administration now acknowledges was wide of the mark. …
A detailed examination of how U.S. assessments were turned into the talking points reveals a highly cautious, bureaucratic process that had the effect of watering down the U.S.’s own intelligence. The same process was slow to change conclusions when evidence shifted, in particular about links to al Qaeda and whether the attack grew out of a protest.
Naturally, President Obama’s hands are far from clean in this matter. He defended Rice by saying that she “had nothing to do with Benghazi.” So why was she the one chosen to explain the matter to the public? For the very reason that she was ignorant.
It appears that the CIA was/is up to its neck in the Benghazi disaster. According to Michael Walsh at the New York Post, the U.S. “consulate” in Benghazi “now appears to have been a CIA station operating under flimsy diplomatic cover.” Was it a good idea for the CIA to be operating openly in a country that we had recently “liberated”? Why did Ambassador Stevens feel the need to go there, particularly on September 11? Why weren’t “intelligence” agents smart enough to know that they might be under attack? These are all questions that John McCain and other national security buffs could and should be asking the CIA, but, naturally, they aren’t. They’d rather bellow at a black woman for covering the CIA’s ass.
Afterwords
The cream of the jest is that if Gen. Petraeus had stepped forward with the same talking points that Rice used, and then slowly walked them back (“further analysis now reveals”) no one on the right would have complained. “He’s the head of the CIA. It’s his job to lie to us. For our own good!”
