Vice President Joe Biden came out in favor of declassifying a secret report on the U.S.’ use of torture during the Bush administration on Friday, raising expectations that the Obama administration will back the report’s release.

Biden was speaking at an event in Sedona, AZ, appearing on stage in a conversation with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). During the McCain Institute event, according to Roll Call, the conversation shifted to a recently completed report on the United States’ use of torture in combating terrorism in the post-Sept. 11-era.

“[Torture] offends the fundamentals of what kind of country we are, and the practical side of it is, don’t think it didn’t damage the United States’ image in the world in ways that we’ll be paying for for years to come,” McCain said, echoing his previous support for the report’s wide release. Biden quickly agreed:

“It is not resolved yet, John, but I’m where you are. I think the only way you excise the demons is you acknowledge, you acknowledge exactly what happened straightforward,” Biden said. He explained his position that issues related to torture must be laid out before a country can move beyond them, citing the war crimes committed in the Balkans and other acts of torture overseas.

“The single best thing that ever happened to Germany were the war crimes tribunals, because it forced Germany to come to its milk about what in fact has happened,” Biden said. “That’s why they’ve become the great democracy they’ve become.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved the nearly 6,000-page report approved the nearly 6,000-page report back in Dec. 2012, which was then sent to the Executive Branch for “review and comment.” According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, that includes going “to the White House, to the attorney general, to the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], to the CIA for possible technical amendments.” Only after that review is complete will the Senate consider declassifying the report.

Vice President Biden’s comments come just weeks after a bipartisan group determined that the U.S. did, in fact, utilize torture — also euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation” — on detainees in order to gain information in the years after 2001. That panel’s conclusion that not only did the United States engage in torture but it was ineffective as an information gathering tool seems to fall in line with those from the Senate’s, according to a 2012 report from Reuters.

Should the Obama administration wind up siding with Biden on releasing the report, such a move would help mute criticism the administration has faced over refusing to launch investigations into Bush-era torture.

A new report in the Wall Street Journal makes clear that it was the CIA, not the White House, who ultimately removed references to al Qaeda from a controversial set of talking points on the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Congressional Republicans and conservative commentators alike have spent weeks wondering just who edited the now infamous talking points, accusing officials across the Obama administration of lying to cover-up the truth about Benghazi. Instead, what they have labeled a political decision to play down the role of al Qaeda by the Obama administration was actually a much more complicated process:

The officials said the first draft of the talking points had a reference to al Qaeda but it was removed by the Central Intelligence Agency, to protect sources and protect investigations, before the talking points were shared with the White House. No evidence has so far emerged that the White House interfered to tone down the public intelligence assessment, despite the attention the charge has received.

Edits and revisions of estimates continued on even as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice was preparing to make her appearances on several Sunday morning news shows to discuss them on Sept. 16:

On Sept. 15, Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director and now acting director, spoke with the CIA station chief in Tripoli, who expressed concern that the agency’s reporting was off the mark. The station chief said there was no protest ongoing at the time of the attack, and he didn’t think the attack was spontaneous. Mr. Morell asked the chief to summarize his views in an email so the analysts at Langley could evaluate his take along with more than a dozen other internal intelligence reports, Mr. Morell later told lawmakers.

Officials placed the talking points that day in a binder that was hand-delivered to Ms. Rice at around 8 p.m. at her home in Washington, where she was making last-minute preparations before making the rounds of the news shows the following morning.

In addition, despite repeated right-wing insistence that the Obama administration mislead the public about the role an anti-Islam video played in the launch of the attack, the new story makes clear that members of the intelligence community “still believe the attack was inspired in part by the earlier protest in Cairo over the video.”

This new reporting solidifies previous stories that tanked Republican theories of official cover-up. By firmly pointing to the CIA, the reports also clarify the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s statement on Nov. 19 that the “intelligence community” edited the talking points, not the White House and that the CIA had approved of the changes.

A slew of new reporting this morning debunks Fox News reports claiming that the Obama administration withheld assistance during the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya. With these revelations, the combined conservative narrative as led by Fox News — that the Obama administration failed to respond adequately during the attack and that mainstream media has not covered Benghazi enough — is in further disarray.

The Los Angeles Times’ version of the CIA’s role focuses the most heavily on pushing back on Fox’s spin:

“At every level in the chain of command, from the senior officers in Libya to the most senior officials in Washington, everyone was fully engaged in trying to provide whatever help they could,” a senior intelligence official said in a statement. “There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support.”

Fox reporter Jennifer Griffin claimed in an “exclusive” report last week that the CIA denied Tyrone Woods, one of the four Americans killed in the attack, permission to help repel the assault. Griffin’s reporting spun off into a bevy of conspiracy theories on the far right. The Pentagon, White House, and CIA had all previously denied refusing requests for support. The New York Times reports on the Pentagon’s involvement:

[A] senior official also sought to rebut reports that C.I.A. requests for support from the Pentagon that night had gone unheeded.

In fact, the official said, the military diverted a Predator drone from a reconnaissance mission in Darnah, 90 miles away, in time to oversee the mission’s evacuation. The two commandos, based at the embassy in Tripoli, joined the reinforcements. And a military transport plane flew the wounded Americans and Mr. Stevens’s body out of Libya.

The new reports also contain previously unreported details about the CIA’s role in Benghazi. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta did order U.S. forces into the region, but the CIA was the first to respond to the attack, arriving on the scene in under half an hour.

The lack of security at the outpost in Benghazi, far removed from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, has been the subject of inquiry by both Fox News and Congressional Republicans. The Wall Street Journal sheds new light onto why that was the case. The CIA and State Department had entered into a series of secret deals in which the Agency would provide emergency security to the diplomats operating within Libya.

While the State Department primarily relied upon local Libyan militias for day-to-day protection, as well as contracted British private security, the arrangement between it and the CIA explains why the outpost seemed under-protected. The revelation also will prompt a renewed look at the State Department’s decisions to remove Department of Defense-provided security from the Embassy in Tripoli, which were highly scrutinized during Rep. Darrel Issa’s hearings.

The primary role of the CIA was intelligence gathering and covert operations within Benghazi. Agents there operated out of an annex originally reported to be an offshoot of the diplomatic mission, revealed officially — and accidentally — during Issa’s highly politicized hearing into the Benghazi attacks. The Agency’s large presence may also help explain why the diplomatic compound was open to journalists and looters for weeks after the attack, as more vital intelligence documents were collected.

Washington Post’s David Ignatius has gone as far as to produce a detailed minute-by-minute timeline, of the events that night. These reports together give the clearest picture yet of the events in Benghazi. Rather than the Obama Presidency unraveling as the news organization has claimed, it appears to be Fox News’ narrative that is coming undone instead.

An impassioned plea to halt the politicization of the attack in Benghazi came from surprising quarters this morning. Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera, appearing on Fox and Friends, rattled through several right-wing talking points about what the Obama administration could have and didn’t do during the Sept. 11 assault, debunking each of them.

Rivera was primarily responding to statements just minutes before by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), who sits on the House Government and Oversight Committee. In his remarks, Kelly claimed that the Pentagon was unable or unwilling to respond to the attack, which wound up killing four Americans, despite “real-time” information coming in. Rivera pushed back on Kelly’s claims and the idea that military assets could have made it to Libya in time:

RIVERA: I think we need to stop this politicizing, we’re getting away from the real issue, which is why wasn’t there security before it happened. But these preposterous allegations, reckless allegations, that somebody — They paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV. You heard him describe it, Congressman Kelly. I think that’s really beyond the pale.

Watch it:

“In terms of the military, stop these politicians” from telling the military what they could have done, Rivera went on. Kelly’s claims centered around a recent idea that the U.S. could have launched a military assault from a base in Europe to counter the attack. Rivera pointed to statements from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that indicated that information on the ground was not clear enough to warrant sending U.S. forces into harms way.

Rivera also took flack for agreeing with various Republican Senators that the current political climate was not conducive to holding an investigation into Libya. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has instead scheduled hearings into possible intelligence failures prior to and during the attack for after the election.

The hosts of Fox and Friends were not as willing to acknowledge these facts as Rivera, repeatedly attempting to bring him back on the narrative. At one point Brian Kilmead insisted that the State Department is wrong in not immediately issuing a judgement on precisely what happened in the incident, as “al Qaeda isn’t waiting.” This isn’t the first time that Rivera has gone off the conservative narrative on Libya, with Fox News hosts failing to rein him in.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice broke with the majority of her party last night on Fox News, as she tried to hit the brakes on the right wing’s politicization of the recent attack in Libya.

Host Greta Van Susteren asked Rice directly and repeatedly about a set of emails uncovered by Reuters. In what has been dubbed “Benghazi-Gate,” the conservative media has jumped on the emails as definitive proof that the Obama administration has been lying about what it knew and when in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Rice’s response was likely not what Van Susteren expected:

RICE: But when things are unfolding very, very quickly, it’s not always easy to know what is really going on on the ground. And to my mind, the really important questions here are about how information was collected. Did the various agencies really coordinate and share intelligence in the way that we had hoped, with the reforms that were made after 9/11?

So there’s a big picture to be examined here. But we don’t have all of the pieces, and I think it’s easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here. It’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work.

Watch Rice’s full interview here:

Throughout the interview, Rice highlighted the difficulty that comes in a “fog of war” situation, with multiple stories coming in which need to be processed and verified. Her statements strongly align with the evolution of the Obama administration’s understanding of what happened in Benghazi. Rice also joined current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in dismissing the big picture importance of the emails from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, as a small portion of the overall communication between the mission and the State Department.

With her reasoned response, Rice stands apart from other former Bush administration officials, including former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both Rumsfeld and Bolton have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration has performed a cover-up of the events in Benghazi.

Less than a day after conservatives definitively called a set of emails from the State Department hard evidence that the Obama administration misled the public over the Sept. attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, the accuracy of the emails’ content is coming under scrutiny.

While many on the right have labeled the email, which says that the Ansar al-Sharia militia had claimed credit for the assault in Benghazi on Facebook and Twitter, as a
“smoking gun,” the truth may be more complex than that. Aaron Zelin, Richard Borow fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, extensively tracks jihadist groups’ presence on the Internet. In an interview with CNN, Zelin indicated that he’s seen no evidence that backs up the email’s claim that Ansar al-Sharia had taken responsibility for the attack:

Zelin, who said his RSS feed sends him any new statement from the group, provided CNN with a copy of [his RSS] feed. It shows no Facebook update between September 8 and September 12, when a posting late that afternoon first referenced the attack. Zelin notes that the posting referred to a news conference the group had held earlier that day in Benghazi in which it denied any role in the assault on the consulate, while sympathizing with the attackers.

Accompanying a posting of the news conference on YouTube, a commentary says that the attack on the consulate was “a wave of rage for Allah and his Prophet, it came from the Muslim youths.”

The posting continues: “Ansar al-Sharia brigade did not officially participate as a military body, nor received any orders directed from the brigade.”

According to Zelin, the militia’s Twitter feed likewise did not display any posts between Sept. 8-12. He has also stated via his own Twitter account that there have been instances in the past where posts deleted on social media sites have been captured by his RSS. While there is also a group known as Ansar al-Sharia based out of the Libyan city of Derna, they maintain no social media presence whatsoever.

Zelin’s evidence calls into question the accuracy of the State Department’s initial email, and leaves unanswered the question of what the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli saw to tell State that it had seen claims of responsibility. In any event, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday dismissed the claim that such a Facebook post would count as a new facet to the investigation, as “[p]osting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence.”

The new doubts raise once more the issue of how clouded the initial indications coming out of Benghazi were at the time of the attack. The right-wing argument from Sept. 19 on has been one that finds the idea of an attack being precipitated by an anti-Islamic video and being a terrorist attack as being mutually exclusive. Likewise, it depicts any change in the official story from the Obama administration as being due to intentional misleading. However, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the GOP narrative over-simplifies the highly complicated procedure of analyzing intelligence.

A new report that the White House knew within hours that an Islamist group had claimed credit on Facebook and Twitter for an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya has renewed the right-wing’s furor towards the administration’s handling of the incident. Ansar al-Sharia — the militant group now suspected of carrying out the attack — posting on social media is the sole new detail in the emails obtained by Reuters and others. Despite that, the conclusion is being drawn by the right, again, that the Obama administration misled the American people. (A screenshot of the email does not indicate further corroboration of the militia’s claim.)

Soon after the emails’ release, Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren bluntly accused the White House of lying about the attack in Benghazi. And Fox News contributor Liz Cheney joined in this morning, claiming falsely that the Obama administration definitively blamed an anti-Muslim YouTube video rather than saying that an investigation was ongoing. Cheney wanted even more pressing answers as well:

CHENEY: Mr. President, did you go to sleep that night while you knew that attack was underway? Our consulate was under attack, our Ambassador was missing, did you go to bed without any action, doing anything to prevent that attack, doing anything to stop the attack and save those people. And if so, why did you wait seven hours?

Watch Cheney’s interview here:

But the reality is that the new emails reflect the current knowledge on what the administration and the intelligence community knew in developing their response to Benghazi. According to talking points prepared by the CIA for the Obama administration and Congress, initial analysis indicated that the “Innocence of Muslims” played a large role in the impetus for the attack on the mission in Benghazi. More recent reporting has confirmed that the video played at least some role in the genesis of the assault.

Processing raw intelligence into a coherent analysis involves combing through multiple reports, sifting for corroboration between stories and attempting to thread them together into a narrative. The initial report is almost always heavily hedged and changes frequently as more information is acquired. The new emails were likely part of the initial analysis and were deemed unable to be confirmed. It’s worth noting that in one of the emails, Ansar al-Sharia also called for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, which never materialized. While interesting, the new emails remain a data point, not the start of a new narrative on Benghazi.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) managed to contradict two right-wing attacks on President Obama’s handling of last month’s assault in Libya within less than two minutes.

The major Republican talking points are that the Obama administration waited 14 days to refer to the attack in Benghazi as terrorism and that the President did not specifically describe the attack in Benghazi in his Sept. 12 address in the Rose Garden.

On CNN last night, King both stuck with those talking points and undermined them. The New York Republican acknowledged that Obama referred to the Benghazi attack as “an act of terror” on Sept. 12. But now, King is incensed that Obama waited 4 minutes to say it (thus, a significant step back from the previous 14 days GOP talking point). King then said the whole thing doesn’t matter anyway because he wouldn’t “expect” Obama to have a totally informed assessment of the incident as soon as Sept. 12, the day after the assault:

KING: I’m going to use my words very carefully. I think the president’s conduct and his behavior on this issue has been shameful. And — first of all, as far as it being an act of terror, the president was almost four minutes into his statement on September 12th before he mentioned an act of terror. It followed a paragraph in which he was talking after September 11th.

When he — earlier in his statement, when he was talking about the attack in Benghazi, he didn’t say anything about terrorism at all — nothing about an act of terror. It wasn’t until he was well into the remarks and anyone looking at it will be confuse, is he talking about Benghazi or is he talking about September 11th or all acts of terror? [...]

And I don’t expect the president to be able to say on September 12th, this was definitely a terrorist attack. But to deny the fact, to ignore the fact that al Qaeda affiliates from that region, there had been terrorist attacks before, to me, this was politics at its worst, because you’re talking about the loss of American life.

Watch King’s remarks here:

Following the debate, Obama was subsequently deemed a liar by the right-wing for his accurate claim about his Sept. 12 remarks. King’s statement effectively narrows the time-frame under attack by Republicans from two weeks to a period of four minutes. The admission that he would not expect Obama to definitively call the attack terrorism on Sept. 12 does manage to track more closely with the opinion of intelligence experts, in that intelligence reporting often changes as new information is analyzed.