The endless right-wing fist-shaking over Benghazi still seems to come down to this:
Documents from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, first published in the May 13 edition of "The Weekly Standard," showed that senior officials from those agencies decided within days of the attacks to delete all references to Al Qaeda's known involvement in them from "talking points" being prepared for those administration officers being sent out to discuss the attacks publicly.So one set of Muslims was initially blamed for causing the violence, when in fact it was another set of Muslims? It amuses me to no end that the right is counting on the American public to be aghast at that.
Those talking points -- and indeed, the statements of all senior Obama administration officials who commented publicly on Benghazi during the early days after the attacks -- sought instead to depict the Americans' deaths as the result of a spontaneous protest that went awry. The administration later acknowledged that there had been no such protest, as evidence mounted that Al Qaeda-linked terrorists had participated in the attacks.
The right spent most of the Bush years bamboozling the American public into believing that there was no difference between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda. President Bush repeatedly spoke of "the enemy," as if the two wars we fought were waged against one group of adversaries. This notion persists in the newly opened Bush presidential library:
Iraq and Afghanistan are not their own sections. Instead, they are conflated with the so-called "Global War On Terror" in a room called "Defending Freedom."This effort worked spectacularly, and continues to work: a poll conducted lass fall shows that nearly half of Americans think Iraq was "directly involved" in 9/11.
And now the hope is that Americans will keep track of, and get worked up about, precisely which Muslims were initially deemed responsible for the Benghazi attack? Yeah, good luck with that.
