Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Do you honestly believe it was something else?
Yes. As mentioned in previous threads on the topic. Heck, I even quoted a column by a former Bush-era CIA analyst discussing exactly why it was not only plausible but extremely likely that the talking points reflected what was thought to be accurate at the time.
Sure. And in the absence of a mountain of evidence that nearly everyone in the intelligence community knew that this was a planned attack and didn't derive spontaneously from some protests over a film, you'd have a great point. Which I seem to recall was more or less my response back then.
And even if we accept that someone actually believed that this was a result of the protests, it still does not explain why days later, after it was clearly known that this wasn't the case, the false story was being repeated. It also doesn't explain why weeks later Obama himself was still repeating the same false story either when he spoke to the UN. The whole thing smacks of this being the story they wanted more than the story they got. If it had just been the story that came from the intelligence, then they would not have been so incredibly resistant to changing it as the facts became clearer. But they clearly did cling to that version of events long after it was abundantly clear that it wasn't true.
So yeah. In the face of that, it's hard to swallow the idea that they had nothing to do with that story being created in the first place. They had every reason to invent it, and no one else did.
Edited, May 16th 2013 5:26pm by gbaji