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Busting Myths About Benghazi

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on

In the meantime, political partisans back here at home have the luxury of cherry-picking information that raises suspicions about the administration, even when they sometimes trip over the facts.

That's what happened to Obama's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, in the second presidential debate when he claimed, "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror." No, the president corrected him by simply citing the transcript, available on the White House website, of his speech in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12.

He also could have cited the transcript of his campaign speech the next day in Golden, Colo., where he was even more specific about the "act of terror" that "killed our fellow Americans."

Or he could have cited a CBS' "60 Minutes" interview he taped just before he stepped into the Rose Garden on Sept. 12, in which he discounted the video and instead suspected "folks involved in this who were looking to target Americans from the start."

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice aroused the political right the following Sunday by mentioning the anti-Muslim video on TV talk shows. But she also added, that "soon after that spontaneous protest" the best information indicated "extremist elements" joined the mob "with heavy weapons." U.S. intelligence had uncovered evidence that same weekend that discredited earlier reports of a video-inspired protest but the new information did not get to Rice before her talk show appearances, CBS News and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on Oct. 19.

 

All of this needs to be investigated, but investigations take time. Unfortunately, the worst time for a slow-moving investigation is during a tight presidential race, but it's a great time for paranoid politics.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.


(c) 2012 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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