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.

Six weeks following the assault on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya, many questions remain regarding the nature of the attacks, what the Obama administration knew and when, and the way that knowledge was delivered to the public. Adding to that confusion is the GOP’s desire to politicize the issue in the run-up to the presidential election.

Mitt Romney was widely scorned for criticizing Obama in the assault’s immediate aftermath for allegedly sympathizing with the attackers. But days later, Romney, his allies and other pundits found an opening to again criticize the administration. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice claimed that the attack in Libya was an outgrowth of the protests in Cairo against an anti-Muslim film. But the administration’s story soon changed.

This shift in story — while always likely given the nature of intelligence — launched a new round of condemnation against Obama. Accusations and speculation of administration lies and cover-ups have been the major focus of the narrative since then.

But the reality is much more nuanced than what the built-up narrative suggests. The following is a timeline of not the attack itself, but the response to it, by the Obama administration, Mitt Romney’s campaign and the right-wing:

THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

September 11, 2012: Protests take place at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The anger was reportedly sparked by a video, purported to be the trailer of a full-length movie, called “The Innocence of Muslims,” that portrayed Islam in a highly negative and derogatory light. This demonstration will soon spread to other cities throughout the Middle East, including Khartoum, Sanaa and Tunis.

September 11: Dozens of armed militants launch an attack on an American diplomatic outpost in the Libyan city Benghazi.

September 11: Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign issues a statement condemning the Obama administration’s response to the global protests:

ROMNEY: “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

September 12: Initial reports surface that Ambassador Chris Stevens has been killed, along with other American citizens. The story of how continues to shift throughout day as details emerge.

September 12: In the immediate aftermath of news of Ambassador Stevens’ death, Republicans criticized the Romney campaign’s statement. But the campaign stuck to its attack. When asked about the statement, Romney foreign policy advisor Richard Williamson, replied, “It was accurate.”

September 12: The New York Times reports that “[f]ighters involved in the assault…said in interviews during the battle that they were moved to attack the mission by anger over a 14-minute, American-made video that depicted the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as a villainous, homosexual and child-molesting buffoon.” The Times continues to stand by its story.

September 12: President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton give remarks on the death of Ambassador Stevens and others. Both pledge justice against the perpetrators of the attacks. In his speech, Obama refers to the attack as an “act of terror”:

OBAMA: No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

September 13: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says during a press briefing and a later press gaggle that the protests around the world were due to reaction to the video. In the gaggle, Carney made clear he didn’t want to speculate in light of the ongoing investigation. His remarks were later taken to mean that the Benghazi attack was based on video.

September 13: President Obama, at a campaign rally in Denver, CO, reiterates the previous day’s statement, referring to the events in Benghazi as an act of terror:

OBAMA: So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pushed back on Tuesday against critiques of the intelligence community in the aftermath of September’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Speaking to a conference of intelligence professionals and contractors at the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, Clapper said, “If people don’t behave, emit a behavior or talk or something else ahead of time to be detected, it’s going to be very hard to predict an exact attack and come up with an exact attack.”

The Obama administration has been criticized in the weeks following the attacks for not providing enough security at the consulate and being unable to foresee the assault. In rebutting those claims, Clapper read at length from a recent article by former intelligence analyst Paul Pillar, noting the difficulties inherent in intelligence gathering and prediction and the immediate demand for clear answers. Pillar wrote:

The seemingly endless public rehashing of the attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans is not taking a form that serves any useful purpose. That would be true even without the political slant that was stemmed from efforts to turn some of the recriminations into a campaign issue. The loss of the four public servants was a tragedy. The rehashing does not alleviate that tragedy.

Watch Clapper speak here:

Pillar’s views are shared by other former intelligence practitioners. In an article at The Atlantic, Aki Peritz, a CIA analyst during the Bush administration, said that “[b]laming the president for not having instantaneous and perfect information is a ridiculous political stunt.” Both Pillar and Pertiz stress the hedging against certainty that intelligence analysts place into their work and that information is never perfect nor immediate in the aftermath of an incident.

Clapper’s remarks came ahead of a Wednesday hearing by the House Government and Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), into the administration’s actions leading up to the attack. Democratic members of the committee have already said that they believe the hearings to be partisan in nature.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler today again criticized his Post colleague and American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen for continuing to promote the debunked claim that President Obama is not sufficiently concerned about U.S. national security.

In a Sept. 10 Washington Post opinion piece, Thiessen — citing a recent “study” finding that Obama has attended about half his personal daily intelligence briefs (PDBs) — claimed that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Obama’s right-wing critics picked up the attack and on Monday, Kessler wrote a scathing article, calling the claim “bogus” and “misleading.” “Obama reads his PDB every day, but he does not always require an in-person briefing every day,” Kessler noted.

This particular practice has precedent with previous commanders-in-chief, including Ronald Reagan, whom Kessler noted chose to forgo the CIA in-person brief 99 percent of the time (Thiessen had compared Obama’s practice to President Bush’s, claiming Bush “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”)

Instead of accepting the obvious defeat, Thiessen dug in, responding on the Post’s website today saying basically, “Yeah, well. … 9/11!”:

Kessler ignores one giant difference between then and now: Sept. 11, 2001.

Comparing lax presidential briefing habits before and after 9/11 is like comparing lax presidential security habits before and after the Kennedy assassination. After terrorists killed 3,000 people in our midst, everything changed — and the president’s daily intelligence meeting took on dramatically increased importance. President Bush made it a priority to sit down with his senior intelligence advisers every day to discuss overnight intelligence on threats to the country. President Obama has not.

Hopefully putting the matter to rest, Kessler was again forced to debunk his colleague, calling Thiessen’s response “an interesting, if not very factual argument. (Reagan, for instance, suffered the loss of 241 servicemen in Beirut as a result of a terror act.).” But Kessler also noticed something else. In his original piece, Thiessen claimed he received his data on Obama’s PDBs from a “conservative” research organization. But in his response to Kessler, that story changed:

We also find it curious that he now discloses the study was done at his request, by his business partner, and that he now describes the Government Accountability Institute as “nonpartisan” whereas in his earlier column he had called it a “conservative investigative research organization.”

Upon reflection, we now realize that the GAI report had a bit of a math problem. The White House public schedule does not list meetings on weekends, so Obama automatically loses 28 percent of the “meetings” because of that fact. Thiessen had earlier claimed Bush had oral intel briefings six days a week–though no actual schedule is available to confirm that–so at the very least GAI should have subtracted one a day week from Obama’s numbers to make a valid comparison.

“We had nearly given this data Four Pinocchios and in restrospect we were perhaps too generous with Three,” Kessler wrote, adding in a tweet today at Thiessen, “9/11 is not excuse to wipe out history.”

American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen has been pushing a recent finding that President Obama has not attended about half of his daily intelligence briefings as evidence that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Theissen based his claim on a recent study by the conservative Government Accountability Institute, which said that Obama has attended only 43.8 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs, or PDBs. “By contrast,” Thiessen wrote, “Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”

This particular statistic, however, doesn’t mean a whole lot. President Obama may not physically get briefed by intelligence officials every day but he does receive and read the PDBs, a point Theissen himself acknowledged when reporting the White House’s response to the charge.

“This is how it was done in the Clinton administration,” Thiessen’s Post colleague Dana Millbank noted, “before Bush decided he would prefer to read less.”

Yet Dick Cheney, John McCain, the right-wing blogs and others picked up on Thiessen’s hook anyway, not seeming to care that the charge has little credibility. The claim eventually made its way to an attack ad by Karl Rove-led SuperPAC American Crossroads which caused Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler to get involved. Kessler called the attack “misguided,” noting that President Reagan rarely attended daily intelligence briefings:

Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.

Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process — how does the president handle his intelligence brief? — into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor.

As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time.

It should come as no surprise that Thiessen is hawking “bogus” claims, as his own newspaper described the daily intel charge, and it’s unlikely he will show any signs of remorse. And while the Post should be commended for publicly calling out one of its own and shaming Thiessen, the paper is ultimately responsible for publishing his false claims and baseless attacks. As former Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin said in response to Kessler’s article today on Twitter, the Post op-ed page “is a facts-optional zone. Shame on them.”

Before facing heat this week for her paranoid quest to root out Muslim Brotherhood influence on the U.S. government, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) got support from the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers. But today, Rogers distanced himself from Bachmann’s allegations about Muslim-Americans.

In an interview with the USA Today, Rogers responded to a wave of criticism about Bachmann’s allegations about Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Rogers said:

That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee, and I can say that on the record. I have no information in my committee that would indicate that Huma is anything other than an American patriot.

This was not an activity that was sanctioned as any intelligence committee matter.

Rogers was singing a different tune earlier this month when he appeared on a radio show hosted by Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, a sometime Bachmann advisor and source of her attacks. Gaffney asked him about the Brotherhood’s “influence operation” within the government, particularly about the cleansing of Islamophobic F.B.I. training materials. Rogers said:

Well we are revisiting some of those decisions and a member of my committee Michele Bachmann is kind of taking the lead on this particular issue and going through and trying to figure out what they took out of the training materials and what they left in and why did it get changed? And why the agressive language change and how we teach about the Islam religion and radicalism in Islam.

All of that stuff is very, very important to go through and determine if they have been politicized or not.

Bachmann and Gaffney, for their parts, have stuck to their charges. Bachmann took more bipartisan heat this weekend for doubling down and accusing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) — who has led the charge to demand evidence of Bachmann’s allegations — of being “associated with… the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Criticism of the Obama administration’s drone program has heated up in recent weeks after the New York Times published a lengthy article highlighting some of its troubling aspects, particularly how and why suspected terrorists are targeted and the methods to which civilian casualties are documented. While many have since called for increased oversight of the program, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Congress has been in the loop for more than two years:

The regular review of some of the most closely held [drone strike] video in the CIA’s possession is part of a marked increase in congressional attention paid to the agency’s targeted killing program over the last three years. The oversight, which has not previously been detailed, began largely at the instigation of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said.

The lawmakers and aides with the intelligence oversight committees have a level of access shared only by President Obama, his top aides and a small number of CIA officials.

In addition to watching video, the legislative aides review intelligence that was used to justify each drone strike. They also sometimes examine telephone intercepts and after-the-fact evidence, such as the CIA’s assessment of who was hit.

In response to a Los Angeles Times piece questioning the drone program, Feinstein wrote the paper saying top intelligence officials in Congress “receive notification with key details shortly after every strike,” adding:

“Committee staff has held 28 monthly in-depth oversight meetings to review strike records and question every aspect of the program including legality, effectiveness, precision, foreign policy implications and the care taken to minimize noncombatant casualties.”

Two top United Nations human rights officials recently criticized the Obama administration for the drone program’s lack of transparency and accountability and questioned its legality.

The Los Angeles Times reports that “the drone program is under far more scrutiny than in the past” and participants in the congressional briefings “say their review has made the CIA more careful.” “I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything that we thought was inappropriate,” one senior intelligence committee staff member said.

A New America Foundation analysis found a 17 percent “non-militant fatality rate” in drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan since 2004 and ProPublica recently reported that the administration’s claims on civilian casualties “do not add up.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has seen the drone strike videos and told the Los Angeles Times that he wasn’t convinced that every person killed has been a militant but added, “If the American people were sitting in the room, they would feel comfortable that it was being done in a responsible way.”

The former chief of Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency, Meir Dagan, has already said that he thinks “an attack on Iran before you’re exploring all other approaches is not the right way to do it.” He has spelled out some of his objections clearly, noting that he doesn’t think Israel faces any “existential threat,” that an attack would “ignite… a regional war,” and that such a strike would only delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions — not halt them.

But today, during a conference at an Israeli think tank closely associated with the country’s security establishment, Dagan further explained his opposition to a strike. He told the audience there — in line with previous U.S., U.N. and Israeli estimates that Iran has not yet made a decision to produce a weapon — that attacking Iran would spur the Islamic Republic into accelerating its nuclear program and push for a bomb. Dagan said:

A strike could accelerate the procurement of the bomb. An attack isn’t enough to stop the project. …

We would provide them with the legitimacy to achieve nuclear capabilities for military purposes.

In a sign of a consensus emerging among former top Israeli security officials, Dagan shares the newly expressed view — that attacking Iran would give the Islamic Republic every reason to boot out U.N. nuclear inspectors, make a “dash” for a weapon, and rally its population to that goal — with other former security chiefs. Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence head Shlomo Gazit and former internal security chief Yuval Diskin have expressed nearly identical sentiments. In addition, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Thomas Pickering has expressed such views as well.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike — not least the one raised by Dagan today — have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis. Perhaps Dagan’s latest comments will lead to a broader discussion about the possible consequences of an attack on Iran.

Many of Washington’s more hawkish voices have sought to downplay or drown out discussions about a possible military attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Even as the Obama administration has kept all options on the table regarding iran’s nuclear program, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign attacked the administration for trying to have an honest discussion of the possible consequences of a military strike.

Now, three Members of Congress — Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Keith Ellison (D-MN), and Barbara Lee (D-CA) — are introducing an amendment to an intelligence authorization bill that would demand a government report about the possible consequences of an attack. Conyers and Ellison, among others, also used the amendment process to tag the Defense authorization — another big appropriations bill likely to pass — with language stating that Congress was not authorizing war with Iran.

The first public comments by members on the amendment, which has the support of pro-peace groups, could come this afternoon when the Rules Committee meets to decide on its inclusion in the larger bill. The amendment, Section 306 of the new bill, reads in full that:

Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall submit to the congressional intelligence committees a report containing an assessment of the consequences of a military strike against Iran.

The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has already said that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon — an estimate in line with reported U.S. assessments and also the U.N. atomic watchdog and Israeli assessments — and made clear that he thinks Iran can be dissuaded from building a bomb.

But his views on the consequences of a strike are unlikely to satisfy militaristic voices in Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a prominent hawk on Iran, publicly disagreed with Clapper’s Iran assessments during a hearing this winter. Last year, Graham called on Clapper to resign.

While President Obama, like others, considers a potential Iranian nuclear weapon a threat, this Spring he lamented the “loose talk of war” and called on those who are pushing an attack on Iran to hold open discussions about the possible consequences:

If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so and they should explain to the american people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be.

Instead of hawkish bluster, the Obama administration maintains its options while pushing a negotiated diplomatic solution, which the administration considers the “best and most permanent way” to end the crisis. That’s because Israeli and American experts have noted that attacking could push Iran into building a weapon, and potentially ignite a regional war. Those are exactly the sorts of potential consequences of an attack on Iran that the Obama administration has called for a forthright conversation on, which Conyers, Ellison and Lee are now bolstering. And its exactly the conversation the hawks don’t want to have.