Weekly Standard Disproves Central Right-Wing Benghazi Claim
A central facet of the right-wing media's criticism of the Obama administration's response to the September attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya has been inadvertently disproved by The Weekly Standard.
For months, the right-wing media has suggested that the Obama administration had for political purposes attempted to link the Benghazi attacks to an anti-Islam YouTube video. According to this theory, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and other high-ranking members of the administration had highlighted the video as a "diversion tactic" to downplay the attack's connection to terrorism and cover up the supposed failure of American foreign policy that would indicate. But the original draft of talking points on the attacks generated by the CIA -- released last week by The Weekly Standard in an effort to demonstrate how those talking points were changed "to obscure the truth"-- prove that the intelligence community itself believed that such a link existed.
In the Weekly Standard article, Stephen F. Hayes highlighted how specifics about the involvement of members of an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that were included in an initial September 14 draft of talking points by the CIA's Office of Terrorism Analysis were later removed by administration officials. Included in Hayes' report are images of the various versions of those talking points, which serve to drastically undermine the right-wing media's critique. Here's the first bullet point from what The Weekly Standard terms "Version 1":
In the final version of the document, that bullet reads:
A central facet of the right-wing media's criticism of the Obama administration's response to the September attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya has been inadvertently disproved by The Weekly Standard.
For months, the right-wing media has suggested that the Obama administration had for political purposes attempted to link the Benghazi attacks to an anti-Islam YouTube video. According to this theory, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and other high-ranking members of the administration had highlighted the video as a "diversion tactic" to downplay the attack's connection to terrorism and cover up the supposed failure of American foreign policy that would indicate. But the original draft of talking points on the attacks generated by the CIA -- released last week by The Weekly Standard in an effort to demonstrate how those talking points were changed "to obscure the truth"-- prove that the intelligence community itself believed that such a link existed.
In the Weekly Standard article, Stephen F. Hayes highlighted how specifics about the involvement of members of an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that were included in an initial September 14 draft of talking points by the CIA's Office of Terrorism Analysis were later removed by administration officials. Included in Hayes' report are images of the various versions of those talking points, which serve to drastically undermine the right-wing media's critique. Here's the first bullet point from what The Weekly Standard terms "Version 1":
In the final version of the document, that bullet reads:
