Bob Schieffer:
"Susan Rice . . . had no connection whatsoever to the events that took place in Benghazi, and yet she was sent out, appeared on this broadcast and other Sunday broadcasts five days after it happens, and I'm not here to get into an argument with you about who changed which word in the talking points and all that. The bottom line is, what she told the American people that day bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed."
Dan Pfeiffer:
"But . . . what she said, and now that the talking points have been released, or the e-mails and the talking points have been released, we know that what she was saying was what the CIA believed at the time. When we got additional information, we put that out. We tried to get it as right as we could, and as we got new information, we showed it to the American people."
The CIA believed at the time that the Benghazi assault resulted from a spontaneous demonstration provoked by an Internet video? Sorry, no way. We still don't know who was responsible for interjecting the Internet video into the matter, but we do know that the West Wing, the State Department and the CIA removed any mention of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia, an organization affiliated with al-Qaeda, from the talking points.
As reported by Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/petraeus-email-objected-benghazi-talking-points-220924269.html):
"Then CIA-Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points the Obama administration used after the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, because he wanted to see more details revealed to the public, according to emails released Wednesday by the White House.
Under pressure in the investigation that continues eight months after the attacks, the White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails and a single page of hand-written notes made by Petraeus' deputy, Mike Morell, after a meeting at the White House on Saturday, Sept. 15. On that page, Morell scratched out from the CIA's early drafts of talking points mentions of al-Qaida, the experience of fighters in Libya, Islamic extremists and a warning to the Cairo embassy on the eve of the attacks of calls for a demonstration and break-in by jihadists.
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."
Yes, Pfeiffer's fabrications at this late date, in flagrant denial of the facts and falling far beyond the realm of "spin," make me nauseous.
Apparently Pfeiffer believes that by engaging in "speed talk," he can obscure the truth.
How is it that a man as smart as Obama is incapable of understanding that those around him are burying whatever is left of his credibility?
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