Talking about Benghazi

The furore over the Benghazi talking points continues. Republicans still see them as the main event in a campaign to embarrass President Obama. The president,for his part,calls them a sideshow. Finally,on Wednesday,the White House released more than 100 pages of internal emails that showed,in excruciating detail,exactly how the talking points were edited8230; Prepared by intelligence officials and revised in interagency discussions,the now-famous talking points were the basis for UN Ambassador Susan Rices comments five days after the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya that the siege had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to protests in Cairo over an anti-Muslim video. Republicans and other critics have made much of the fact that an early version of the talking points specifically mentioned participation in the attack by Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda and referred to five previous attacks on Western interests in Benghazi. Those passages were cut from the final version proof,critics say,of a conspiracy by administration officials to disguise,for election-year purposes,that the attacks were a premeditated terrorist operation8230; Did the administration cling too long to the explanation that the attack was inspired by the video? Obviously,and its possible that wishful thinking and political self-interest made that explanation attractive to Obama. But the mixed signals sent out by the administration about the involvement of al-Qaeda or other Islamic militant groups fall far short of the conspiracy to deceive the American people that Republicans have desperately clung to.

From a leader in the Los Angeles Times