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malaise

(294,466 posts)
19. That's the reason for Iraq not Benghazi - check this out
Wed Jun 18, 2014, 03:48 AM
Jun 2014
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/07/rice-right-about-benghazi-video.html#

New Evidence Links Benghazi Attack to Anti-Muslim Movie

US President Barack Obama’s appointment of Susan Rice as his new national security adviser has added fuel to the fire of a controversy over Rice’s role as US ambassador to the UN in communicating administration “talking points” in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2012, attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya. Five days after the attack, Rice famously went on Sunday talk shows and suggested that the attack had been a “spontaneous” response to an anti-Islam YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims” — a matter of a demonstration that “spun out of control.”

The anti-Islam video did indeed play a role. Examination of contemporaneous chatter on Libyan websites shows that locals really were in an uproar about the video in both the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack. This finding is all the more significant inasmuch as the chatter in question comes from precisely the same extremist milieu as the presumed assailants. In the hours immediately preceding the attack, local Islamists were calling on their brethren to “do something” in response to the video. From both the source and tenor of these appeals, it is clear that they meant something more emphatic than just a peaceful demonstration.

Early versions of the “talking points” drafted by the CIA on Sep. 14, 2012, referenced indications that Islamic extremists were involved in the attack on the Benghazi mission and potential links to Ansar al-Sharia, a local al-Qaeda-affiliated militia. As explained by the Interim Progress Report issued by the chairs of five House committees, these points were omitted from the final version used by Rice.

Ansar al-Sharia appears to have maintained no less than three Facebook pages before the attack occurred. Unfortunately, all three disappeared from the Web shortly thereafter. But a kindred Facebook page, that of the Libyan Ansar Minbar, or “supporters platform,” remains online and provides an important window into the agitation embroiling the local Islamist scene around the time of the attack.


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