Who changed those Benghazi talking points?

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Not the White House or the State Department.

Republicans have accused [Susan] of making misleading statements by referring to the assault as a "spontaneous" demonstration by extremists. Some have suggested she used the terminology she did for political reasons.

However, an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too "tenuous" to make public....

"The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." DNI spokesman Shawn Turner tells CBS News. That information was shared at a classified level -- which Rice, as a member of President Obama's cabinet, would have been privy to.

It's one thing to chose not to specify which terrorist organization it was, quite another to spread a phony story about protesting over a video. Now, there seems to be an attempt to glue the true story to the phony story with the word "extremists," having it cover both organized terrorists making a military attack and a bunch of hotheads suddenly demonstrating because they're enraged by some YouTube video. Those are obviously 2 very different things! And Susan Rice took the lead in a very serious deceit. Right before the election.

So I don't get the "however" in the indented quote above. Maybe it relates only to the suggestion that there was a political motivation for omitting the part about terrorists. But it doesn't undermine the accusation that Rice's statements were misleading (indeed false).

"Petraeus Says U.S. Tried to Avoid Tipping Off Terrorists After Libya Attack."

Here's the NYT article to pick through.

At some point in the process — [David] Petraeus told lawmakers he was not sure where — objections were raised to naming the groups, and the less specific word “extremists” was substituted.

“The fact is, the reference to Al Qaeda was taken out somewhere along the line by someone outside the intelligence community,” Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican, said after the House hearing. “We need to find out who did it and why.”...

Democrats said Mr. Petraeus made it clear the change had not been done for political reasons to aid Mr. Obama. “The general was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said that Mr. Petraeus explained to lawmakers that the final document was put in front of all the senior agency leaders, including Mr. Petraeus, and everyone signed off on it.

Including Mr. Petraeus, who had the motivation of trying to keep his job, which he was deprived of immediately after the election. Now, he has the motivation of trying to regain his honor.

Ms. Feinstein, read the final unclassified talking points to reporters:

“The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.

“This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.

“The investigation is ongoing, and the U.S. government is working with Libyan authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens.”

"Over the weekend, the newest, and by far the most disturbing, revelations surrounding the Benghazi attack were revealed."

An item at FrontPageMag.com:

Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over the Benghazi terrorist attack and the administration’s botched handling of the region.

The decision to stand down as the Benghazi terrorist attack was underway was met with extreme opposition from the inside. The Washington Times's James Robbins, citing a source inside the military, reveals that General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, who got the same emails requesting help received by the White House, put a rapid response team together and notified the Pentagon it was ready to go. He was ordered to stay put. “His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow,” writes Robbins. “Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.”

If true, Ham has apparently decided he wants no part of the responsibility for the decision not to help those in harm’s way. He is not alone. As the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol revealed late Friday, a spokesperson, “presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus,” released the following statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

"I'm pretty sure Obama owes Nakoula an apology."

Indeed.

We're barraged by new distractions, so let's catch things that are slipping down the memory hole. It's not just Nakoula. It's Chris Stevens. Our ambassador was murdered, and he was murdered after he was targeted and he was not given security.

Shame on those who disrespected Nakoula's freedom of speech. Their faults are apparent and need to be remembered. But what happened to Chris Stevens? I don't trust that we've learned the whole story. Why wasn't he protected? Was he an inconvenient man? We saw such an effort to create static around his death. Look — riots over here, here, and here! Offensive video on the internet! Man with a "towel" around his face! And hey check out the most important thing that happened all week: Romney said "47%" to some people back in May!

The very fact that we're thinking about Nakoula — and futzing with Romney rhetoric — makes me feel that Chris Stevens got stuffed down the memory hole.

Who wanted that forgetting and why?

"Here is a lesson in creative writing."

That's the heading for a short bit of text by Kurt Vonnegut in "A Man Without a Country," which I just downloaded in Kindle because we were talking about punctuation in the comments to the "phony balance" post and I half-remembered something he said about semi-colons. The short bit under the heading goes like this:

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I’m kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I’m kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Is he kidding?

Here a list of worst college majors for making a living.  All the art ones are in there. You don't have to work.

Here's where we were talking the other day about the teacherspeak word "creative."

And here's last night's reminder that Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crud," which (I say) teaches respect for bad art — even/especially when it stirs al Qaeda attacks (in reality or in the minds of flag wavers).

And here's something about what dancing is doing to us right now.

The U.S. kills an al Qaeda leader... after releasing him from Guantanamo.

It's a nice achievement for the Obama administration... except that the man — Ali al-Shihri — could have been in detention all these years, instead of contributing to terrorism. Exactly when was he released? WaPo says:

Shihri was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and spent nearly six years as a prisoner at Guantanamo. He was released to the custody of the Saudi government as part of a rehabilitation program for militants. In 2008, however, he decamped for Yemen and helped to revive al-Qaeda’s organization there.

The Bush administration released him. There's better detail in the UK Telegraph:

The Saudi was among the last survivors of al-Qaeda's pre-September 11 generation. Shihri trained in a camp in Afghanistan under bin Laden's guidance as early as 2000, before fleeing the US onslaught that followed the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

He was arrested while trying to cross the border into Pakistan in December 2001. After two months in Pakistani custody, Shihri was handed over to the US and consigned to a prison cell in Guantánamo Bay for six years.

When the Bush administration tried to reduce the number of inmates inside this bitterly controversial detention centre, Shihri was released in 2007 and sent back to his home country, Saudi Arabia.

Here, the authorities placed him on a course designed to rehabilitate even the most hardened al-Qaeda operatives. The kingdom has trumpeted the alleged success of this scheme, which often allowed its beneficiaries to walk free if they recanted.

Shihri appears to have been released in 2009, whereupon he immediately crossed into neighbouring Yemen and joined AQAP, rising to occupy its second highest position.

"Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets..."

"They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing," says Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, "the top Republican on the intelligence committee," quoted 2/3 of the way down in a NYT article that forefronts Obama's professorly thoughtfulness as he takes responsibility for the "final moral calculation" in deciding whether to take advantage of an opportunity to kill somebody on the list al Qaeda kill list.

John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obama’s liberal reputation and “softer packaging” have protected him. “After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians,” said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes.

The take-no-prisoners approach avoids dealing with the problems — which include, for Obama, political problems — of detention and interrogation. The NYT interviewed 3 dozen of Obama's "current and former advisers" and says:

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing.

Is there really a paradox here? He has chosen not to close Guantanamo, but to make it a low-profile political issue by never sending anyone there, and to build his reputation as tough on terrorism by regularly blowing somebody away. The careful "moral calculation" in the individual cases isn't reexamining the general policy; it's about the risks of screwups:

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said [William M.] Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

"So the Obama administration... deliberately put the life of a British agent in jeopardy... someone who had infiltrated al Qaeda."

A much more serious breach of security than the case of Valerie Plame that everyone once cared so deeply about.

Osama bin Laden saw opportunity for al Qaeda in the Arab spring.

So he said, in his last private letter, written after the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt had fallen:

“The fall of the remaining tyrants in the region was inevitable,” he continued, and said al-Qaeda must increase efforts by “educating and warning Muslim people” about “half solutions” touted by the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups. If al-Qaeda were successful in recruiting the newly freed rebels, bin Laden said, “then the next phase will [witness a victory] for Islam”. 

He said al-Qaeda could capitalise on the revolutions, including “inciting people who have not yet revolted and exhort them to rebel against the rulers” and calling for jihadis to unite in a broader media campaign to that point.... 

He did not call the people involved with the revolutions “mujahidun” or “warriors of faith”, but instead referred to them as “free revolutionaries” or “thuwaar ahrar” taking part in a “liberation (tahrir) enterprise”.

Bin Laden worried that the "human lawn mower" "conflicted with his vision for what he wanted al-Qaeda to be."

"The idea was to attach rotating blades to the front of a pickup truck and drive the contraption into crowds."

This is what WaPo forefronts in the article headlined "Bin Laden’s last stand: In final months, terrorist leader worried about his legacy," but if you keep reading to the very end, you'll see that the main image problem that troubled him was false oaths:

When Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad tried to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in May 2010, his attempt, widely hailed by jihadists, drew a surprising rebuke from bin Laden, who took a rare break from his self-imposed seclusion in central Pakistan to denounce Shahzad. 

It wasn’t the prospect of civilian deaths that upset bin Laden, but rather the fact that Shahzad had planned the act after swearing a loyalty oath to the United States as a newly naturalized citizen. 

“You know it is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemy,” bin Laden wrote... Complaining of the “negative effects” to al-Qaeda’s image, bin Laden noted that jihadists already were under suspicion in parts of the world for “reneging on oaths, and perfidy.”

"Merah is certainly a monster, but he was a French monster."

"Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we were never accepted here. No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope and nothing to lose. It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah. It was France."

"Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we are never accepted here."

"No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope, and nothing to lose."

Running out of targets...

... in the assassinate-an-al-Qaeda-leader game.

"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday appeared to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq as part of the war against al-Qaeda..."

"... an argument controversially made by the Bush administration but refuted by President Obama and many Democrats."

IN THE COMMENTS: Geoffrey Firmin said:

Isn't that use of "refuted" pretty hilarious? I thought that word used to mean "proved false" rather than "denied."

They were trying to think of "repudiated," and they got as far as "refudiated," realized therein lies mockery, and retreated to "refuted."

"We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place."

"We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government."

Obama's Afghanistan speech.

Andrew Malcolm comments:

The president is in a mess of his own making. He built his initial national political persona on opposition to Bush's Iraq war because, the former U.S. senator argued, it distracted America from the far more important conflict against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorism in Afghanistan, which was the haven for Al Qaeda's 9/11 training.

Bush's Iraq surge worked, however, enabling Obama to proclaim victory and transfer those troops. This, in turn, enabled Vice President Joe Biden, the candidate who wanted to slice Iraq into three parts, to go on cable TV and with no sense of irony call Iraq one of Obama's "great achievements."

That left the Afghanistan war, 10 years old this fall, where Al Qaeda forces were making gains against the invisible central government. When Obama became commander-in-chief, the United States had 32,000 troops there. Today it has 100,000.

"John [Lindh] was a scapegoat, wrongly accused of terrorism at a moment when our grieving country needed someone to blame because the real terrorist had gotten away."

"Now that Bin Laden is dead, I hope President Obama, and the American people, can find it in their hearts to release John, and let him come home. Ten years is enough."

A NYT op-ed by Frank R. Lindh, a lawyer.

Rush Limbaugh says — about OBL — "Here's a guy with three wives living in a pigsty. One ought to be enough to keep it clean."

One of his assistants warns him he's going to get in trouble with the feminists, and he reacts:

No, no, no! Don't do that to me. Do not look at me that way. We're talking about the Muslim religion. We're not talking about feminized America. Even warning you, I got the reaction I was warning you not to bother me with. You know, it's suicide to tell a joke today about how a dirty place is because a woman won't clean it.

I'm not stupid enough to do that, but over there? What else do they do? You know, that and run around in the kitchen. That's exactly it. Osama had three of them over there, and the place is still a pigsty....

To live in squalor like that, it's almost a choice, but then to hear the President of the United States... 

The President said "This guy was living in a million-dollar compound in a residential neighborhood," and the point Rush is trying to make is that the place was a mess:

I mean, for crying out loud, dirty windows, half eaten food on the floor, filthy clothes shoved under the unmade bed.  I mean it looked worse than a teenage kids room.  It looked like a crack house.

So why are the media (and the President) acting like it was a fabulous mansion? Rush's point is that they're building up OBL to amplify the President's achievement.

[But t]his guy huddled in a cheap blanket wearing a ski cap watching television in his big sty.  He looks like a bum in a homeless shelter somewhere.  And now... they are trying to convince us that he was in total charge of Al-Qaeda....

Rush is trying to minimize Obama's achievement, of course.

"I believe that with sufficient and efficient, sufficient and efficient use of airpower, we can bring Gadhafi to his knees. "

"It's ideal terrain and situation for doing so.  Have no doubt, though, that he and his forces are adapting to this situation by hiding in houses and doing various things that prevent the airpower from being so effective.  But I'll tell you, when you're flying around at 25,000 feet, it's pretty hide--it's pretty easy to hide from them.  But we need to recognize the government as a legitimate voice of the Libyan people so they can have access to the funds that we have frozen of Gadhafi's.  We need to help them with communications, we need to help them with humanitarian assistance.  We need to--my view, would be very helpful if we took out Gadhafi's television because when the Libyan people see Gadhafi on television it scares them.  This guy is, you know, in the--by the courthouse in Benghazi, there are pictures of the 1,200 people that he had massacred in one day in a prison.  And so we need to, we need to be more helpful, but troops on the ground is out of the question."

John McCain, in full babble mode, on "Meet the Press" this morning. I'm only reading the transcript. I didn't watch it on the television, which I don't find very helpful, because when I see  John McCain on television, it scares me. Maybe you can explain what he's saying. Libya has "ideal terrain and situation" for doing what we need to do from 25,000 feet in the air. No boots on the ground ever ever ever. But because we're only in the air it's easy for them to hide from us, despite the "ideal terrain and situation." But surely if we're sufficient and efficient — such a cute phrase, he said it twice — we'll somehow get rid of Gadhafi and find the right people to give Gadhafi's frozen money to, because people are dying there, and we need to help them. But we can't go anywhere near them, so here, catch, it's $30 billion. Thrown from a plane! Hope the right people catch it!

David Gregory asks whether airpower alone is enough, and McCain says:

I think you can do it with airpower and sufficiently trained and equipped liberation forces.  Look, these people hate Gadhafi.  That's why I think there's still hope and a chance he may crumble from within.  But the longer we delay, the more likely it is there's a stalemate.  And if you're worried about al-Qaeda entering into this fight, nothing would bring al-Qaeda in more rapidly and more dangerously than a stalemate.

So they're already there, in all likelihood.  As long as we're talking about things one can still hope for, I hope al Qaeda doesn't get the $30 billion.

"[I]t remains possible that Uthman was... kind of Forrest Gump in the war against al Qaeda."

Orin Kerr is "generally skeptical of movie and pop culture references in judicial opinions," but he likes that one.

We're fighting for al Qaeda?

The Libyan disaster.