Has the Obama Administration Given "Conflicting Stories" About Libya?

     Although Romney has continually shot himself in the foot when trying to take aim at the President on the Benghazi attacks, I see that many in the media continue to insist that this is a tough issue for the Obama Administration and that they need to explain "shifting stories" about what happened.

     Chris Cillizzia gives us this narrative in a post this morning:

      "The conflicting stories coming out of the Obama administration over the Sept. 11 attack that left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead should make for a potent Romney attack line. And yet, he has swung and missed twice on the issue. First, his campaign released a decidedly political statement before the news of Stevens’s death broke. Then he lost the Libya back-and-forth in the second presidential debate as he tried to corner Obama and wound up cornered himself. If, in the final debate, Romney takes another big swing on Libya and comes up empty, his campaign may well look back on those three moments as one of the critical missed opportunities of the election.

       http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/in-last-presidential-debate-foreign-policy-skills-likely-to-prove-pivotal/2012/10/21/a2352a3e-1b93-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_story.html

      See I disagree that it is a legitimately potent attack line. What Cillizza seems to assume is that there is some simple met-narrative about what happened in Libya that can be explained in a political soundbite. If the stories have seemed to shift that's because what is known is pretty tentative and fluid-ie, our knowledge has shifted. This kind of opportunistic politicizing of tragedies like this are not welcome by those in intelligence.

     "The Benghazi flap is the sort of situation that intelligence officers dread: when politicians are demanding hard “yes” or “no” answers but evidence is fragmentary and conflicting. The political debate has focused on whether the attack was spontaneous or planned, but the official said there’s evidence of both, and that different attackers may have had different motives. There’s no dispute, however, that it was “an act of terror,” as Obama described it the next day."

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/10/cia-reports-on-libya-backs-up-susan-rice.html

      Romney and his GOP friends have done everything they can to give us a meta-narrative about what happened. However, their story is much less in line with what the CIA has been saying than the Obama Administration has been-which is what you'd expect. The Obama team after all is privy to the intel reports that Romney and friends are not.

      In the interest of decency and for that matter national security, they have been very wrongheaded in politicizing this. They don't know what happened and are simply engaging in story-telling. Yet for a month they were insisting the President never used the word "terrorism."

      Now that this urban legend has been debunked, now we hear the media claiming that semantics don't matter and that even if Romney was wrong about one word-which he had belabored so much over the course of a month and turned out to be flat wrong about-still the Administration has some "splaining to do."

     What is a fact is that the Romney narrative is contradicted by the recent disclosures by the CIA. They don't believe the attack was planned well in advance and, yes, they do think that notorious anti-Muslim video had an important part to play in the attack.

     Yet a big part of the criticism from Romney and friends is that the Obama Administration was dead wrong in claiming that that video had any importance whatever. In fact what seems to have happened is that what happened in Benghazi was influenced by what happened in Cairo and that there was a lot of rage about that video and some terrorists groups exploited this opportunistically.

    Nor for that matter is there very much hard evidence that this was an al Qaeda operation.

    Probably no single speech by an Obama official has been knocked more than what Susan Rice said back in September. Friday's CIA "talking points" demonstrates that what she said was totally in line with what the CIA was thinking on that same day.

    So it isn't just that Rommey had gone about it wrong. It's wrong that he's gone about it at all. If you believe what two of the four parents who lost sons that day in Benghazi. Both slain navy Seal Brian
Doherty's mother Barbara Doherty and slain Ambassador Chris Stevens' father, Jan Stevens, have spoken out against the Governor's politicization of this tragedy and asked him to stop.

    It used to be said that politics stops at the water's edge. However, this has been overturned in the zeal to give Mitt Romney a political issue.