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This illustrates why this debate is pretty fruitless. The guys killed weren't active military, they were former military who were working as CIA security who went to defend what was, in reality, a CIA operational outpost. But you never hear a Republican refer to them as "CIA security" because that doesn't create the illusion of brave soldiers running unbidden to stop the terrorists while Clinton and Obama do nothing. "SEALs" are the heroes who killed bin Ladan, CIA are the jerks trying to hack your cell phone.

Benghazi was an attack on a CIA operation and we aren't going to get the complete story about it... probably ever. The GOP will continue to exploit this as they've done in previous hearings because they know it can't be fully responded to. The administration will continue to give partial answers because they're not going to say "Yeah, that was a classified operation posing as a diplomatic building that just happened to be running a skeleton State Department crew and about five times as many CIA employees and conveniently a mile away from a CIA annex building."

Meanwhile you still have dopes calling it an "embassy" when it technically didn't even classify as a consulate. SEALs defending an embassy makes a better narrative though.

Edited, Oct 14th 2014 5:19pm by Jophiel

Could you please stop using spoiler tags to hide quotes? It's really annoying.



I honestly have no clue what you're trying to say here. Was this just a bad edit? It's like scrambled post or something.




I just provided exactly that scenario. You're choosing to ignore it. That's on you.



What? Again, it's like I have to read freaking tea leaves to figure out what the heck is going through your brain.

Can we bottom line this and agree that if Clinton runs, this subject will be brought up, and her statement about "what does it matter?" will hurt her politically? Seriously. Is this even in doubt? It was a dumb thing to say. She knows this. Every political pundit knows this. Only the most politically naive wishful thinkers try to pretend that it wont come back to haunt her if she runs. Even if you don't think it's a big deal, there are enough people who will, and enough different ways to use it against her, that it will influence others.

Edited, Oct 15th 2014 6:34pm by gbaji

Which makes me wonder why the Republicans (and you, although I doubt you knew any of that) aren't honest about it if they believe it "doesn't matter".

Well, you have a 0-2 record for the last couple presidential elections on what will "absolutely" hurt the candidates. End of story.

Well, you have a 0-2 record for the last couple presidential elections on what will "absolutely" hurt the candidates

Don't be silly, Jeramiah Wright and Birth Certificates are SUPER INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT. SCOTUS should rule on them any time now.

Once this Odinga thing goes public, people will see Obama for who he really is.

We're not sure. Are you going to stop posting nonsense?

Is that one of those Anne Romney types of "done"? Or a legitimate "done"?

Side note. It's amazing how an individual is clinging on a phrase so much as detriment, but can't even accurately quote it.

As I mentioned mentioned before, this is another "you didn't build that". Remember that? GOP went nuts? Based their entire presidential convention theme around the phrase because they were so damned sure it was a killer quote. Ran with it hard in an election cycle where the economy was the number one issue. It was the phrase that was going to put Obama in the ground and show everyone the truth about him.

The negro had his feet on the desk, Joph. Not enough people saw the photo, clearly.

I'm actually writing that page of text though. You're copying it and adding to it. For the same amount of time and effort you're spending putting tags around stuff, you could just trim the text you're responding to instead. Then, everyone could figure out what you're responding to without having to read the entirety of my post again.

What's annoying isn't the volume of text, but that you think you're saving anyone any time or effort by putting it in spoiler tags.



And I provided one. Yay!



The part I don't understand is why you think this is relevant. My position has never been about the security of the embassy, but the spreading of false information to the public. I'm reasonably certain I've already told you this at least two times already. Remember when I posted a link to the transcript of the conversation leading up to the "What does it matter?" outburst to show you that the question was not about what could have been done to protect the embassy from attack, nor what could have been done during the attack on the embassy, but why Rice went on the talk circuit and told the American people that the attack grew out of a protest in response to the protest in Cairo when this was not actually the case.

You're the one who keeps insisting that it only matters if it could have helped protect the embassy. But that has never been the issue.



Again with this "would it have protected the embassy" bit. That's not the issue. And btw, the scenario I outlined did touch on the idea that if we focus our response on going after the guy who made the film rather than on gathering intelligence on the group that attacked us, we will leave ourselves more vulnerable to future attacks. No one is arguing that the reasons behind the attack would have changed the outcome of that attack. Still not sure why you keep obsessing over this.



I'd reverse that and say that only people who are biased think that why they attacked is irrelevant. A large portion of diplomacy is about figuring out what people want and why. The "how" is more operational. That's important, of course, but "why" is even more so. If you can figure out why someone is doing something, you can figure out how to get them to do something different. If all you figure out is "how", you can only ever defend from attacks, but never prevent them in the first place.

It's just surprising to me because liberals sure seemed to care about "why" a whole lot when their argument was that our actions in Iraq were simply resulting in more recruitment for Al-queda. Clearly, they were talking about "why" people join terrorist groups, right? Or more broadly, "why" some people hate us and want to attack us. Baring some need to defend the current administration and everyone associated with it (ie: massive bias), I can't imagine any reason one might argue that the "why" doesn't matter. I'd argue that for the State Department, "why" is the most important thing.

Wow. Um... Maybe I just don't hang out with a gullible crowd? I was joking. Of course they're CIA. What the heck else do you think a couple of former SEALs are doing at an embassy building in Libya? I guess I need to be more direct with you. Every single person I know automatically interprets "Former SEALs working at a foreign embassy" to mean "CIA wet team members". Now maybe ma and pa Odie from Chicago (dontcha know) think that this is just some post military career path that people do and that they're like filing papers or something, but the rest of the sane world gets it without having to make a big deal about it.


Was anyone really not sure about this? I just assumed it wasn't said overtly because we just don't normally blurt out stuff like "I'll bet those former SEALs working at our embassies are CIA operatives".

Again, I suspect you miss the point that us conservatives don't fail at all to recognize exactly what these guys were doing there. We just don't see the need to advertise it.



If you did, I missed it. The CIA angle, and presumed covert actions angle, and possible weapons deal angle, and everything else angle, ware all covered pretty extensively in our media (yes, even on Fox news). I didn't think anyone was attempting to conceal this or misrepresent it. Maybe if you actually watched Fox news sometimes you might realize that it's not the information vacuum that you seem to think. There was tons of discussion about all of this stuff, including speculation that a desire to conceal what was going there may have lead to the decision to try to blame the whole attack on a protest gone awry.

The problem is that it still makes no sense. There was no reason to do that if the intention was just to prevent folks from questioning what was going on at that annex. In fact, it arguably drew more attention to it than if they'd just said it was an attack. This analysis (yeah, we conservatives do that you know) is part of what lead to the idea that this was less about protecting some foreign policy actions and more about the Obama campaign spinning the attack in a way that benefited their election math. There's no value to be gained whether it's a protest or a planned attack from the point of view of protecting covert CIA stuff. There's a lot of value having the public tie it to hate speech in the US rather than a miscalculation of the threats abroad from a campaign point of view.

It's almost certain that the decision to pin this on the video came from the Obama campaign and not the Obama white house. And that's a problem.

Yeah, we all know how much you hate being verbose.