Allahpundit @ Hot Air:
Not just on the day he died, mind you. Multiple times before, too. I’m near the point now where I want to abandon the whole “pre-planned attack versus spontaneous protest” line of inquiry just because it’s steering us away from the more important topic of State’s negligence on his security. Besides, we already know, more or less,why Carney and Rice pushed the “spontaneous protest” theory. Ask Saxby Chambliss:
“Talking points distributed by the administration [in the immediate aftermath] are nearly identical to intelligence assessments within hours of the attack, except in one important way: the intelligence judgment that the attackers had ties to al-Qa’ida was excluded from the public points,” [Saxby] Chambliss said in a statement on Friday.
“The administration omitted the known links to al-Qa’ida at almost every opportunity … Whether this was an intentional effort by the administration to downplay the role of terrorist groups, especially al-Qa’ida, is one of the many issues the Senate Intelligence Committee must examine,” Chambliss said.
The guy who got Bin Laden and knocked out Qaddafi didn’t need a storyline in the middle of a campaign about AQ affiliates killing the American ambassador in the heart of the “new Libya.” That’s straightforward, and that’s almost certainly why the “spontaneous protest” theory got traction initially. (“Al Qaeda is on the run” used to be part of Obama’s standard stump speech, in fact. That line has been quietly dropped lately.) What’s not straightforward is why State refused to boost Stevens’s security despite countless warnings about the danger, some from the man himself. It’s inexplicable. It’s not a budget issue, either: Charlene Lamb testified to thatbefore the House. She also testified that State had “the correct number of assets in Benghazi,” which literally no one but her seems to believe is true. So, once again: Why didn’t Stevens have more security? What were they waiting for before making a decision to either send him a more professional force or end the American presence in Benghazi? Was that politicized too, i.e. State didn’t want abandon the consulate over security fears because that would have made for some bad headlines about conditions inside the “new Libya”?