And the deception continues.
National Security Advisor Susan Rice defended her initial comments on the Benghazi attack during an exclusive interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Rice first claimed the attack was a spontaneous eruption resulting from an anti-Islam YouTube video.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Rice on Sunday defended her remarks, saying she shared “the best information that we had at the time.”
“The information I provided — which I explained to you was what we had at the moment, it could change, I commented that this was based on what we knew on that morning – was provided to me and my colleagues and indeed to Congress by the intelligence community,” she said. “That’s been well-validated in many different ways since. And that information turned out in some respects not to be 100% correct. But the notion that somehow I or anybody else in the administration misled the American people is patently false, and I think that’s been amply demonstrated.”
Rice’s broad based defense of her initial interviews on September 16, 2012 and the administration’s is outrageous. The administration did mislead Americans about the origins of the attack.
James Rosen’s Fox News story, “The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest,” revealed that according to Congressional testimony, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told President Obama on the day of the assault that is was a “terrorist attack.”
Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was him who informed the president that “there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi.” “Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?” asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. “There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack,” Panetta replied.
Rosen’s story also makes it clear that the military considered it an attack from the beginning as did State Department officials that were monitoring the attack as it was happening.
Despite the knowledge of these administration officials on September 11, 2012, President Obama continued to muddy the waters about the nature of the attack for weeks following the assault and he allowed Rice to go on national TV to spin the tail about the YouTube video.
It’s also noteworthy that Rice’s exclusive interview was given to NBC News whose parent company, Comcast, is seeking government approval for its acquisition of Time Warner Cable.
Anybody wondering why Rice was not challenged by “Meet the Press” host David Gregory?
