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.

As GOP foreign policy hands balk at Mitt Romney’s statements about the attacks on American diplomats in Libya and Egypt, the governor’s campaign and its surrogates continue to push the line that Obama’s “weak” foreign policy and his purported “apologies” for America invited the violence:

– LIZ CHENEY: “Apologizing for America, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies and slashing our military are the hallmarks of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.” [Romney Press Release, 9/12/2012]

– SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): “The United States is weak and withdrawing and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of leaders reacting.” [Today Show, 9/13/2012]

— SEN. JIM INHOFE (R-OK): “What foreign policy? The policy of appeasement. Yes, it’s happening as a result of that.” [The Hill, 9/13/2012]

But there is little correlation between perceived “weakness” and attacks on US embassies/consulates or terrorism more broadly. Six times as many attacks on American embassies and consulates took place during the Bush administration than during the Obama administration to date and experts on terrorism suggest that the causes of terrorism are complex and multifaceted, ranging from political grievances to ideology and strategic rationality to the social circumstances of potential terrorists.

Obama also “has not made” apologizing for America a centerpoint of his foreign policy, nor has he shirked from using military force and coercion in foreign policy. The president helped lead a coalition to topple Muammer Qaddafi, greatly expanded the controversial use of drones and special forces against al-Qaeda in several countries around the world, escalated the ground war in Afghanistan, and brought down significant international pressure on the Iranian nuclear program.

Neither the President nor the Secretary of State approved the supposedly apologetic statement from the Cairo Embassy condemning the anti-Islam movie that may have infuriated the mobs in both Egypt and Libya. The reaction was issued before the attacks began and closely echoed Romney’s own sentiment. As his campaign said in talking points on Wednesday, “Governor Romney rejects the reported message of the movie. There is no room for religious hatred or intolerance.”

With the ink barely dry on her contract, Liz Cheney took up her new role as a Fox News contributor in an interview with Fox and Friends‘ Eric Bolling. Cheney came out swinging, telling viewers that President Obama’s proposed cuts to military spending would damage the U.S. military in ways that the Taliban and al Qaeda had been unable:

ERIC BOLLING: Let’s talk about these drastic cuts in military [sic]. Weigh in on that. Do we become a much more vulnerable nation?

LIZ CHENEY: There’s no question. I think in fact what President Obama is doing is something that America’s enemies — the Taliban and Al Qaeda — have been unable to do, which is to decimate the fighting capability of this nation.

Cheney went on to conflate Iraq and Iran — asserting that “Iraq is months, not years, away” from enriching the uranium required for a nuclear weapon — and claimed that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey hadn’t clearly stated that the U.S. would respond militarily if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Watch it:

Indeed, Obama proposed a $487 billion cut to military spending, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey told a Duke University audience yesterday, “This is something we the Joint Chiefs have endorsed as best for America.” He did not comment on whether the cuts in defense spending would serve the interests of the Taliban and al Qaeda but he also said last week that the military’s leadership is supportive of Obama’s plan and, not as Liz Cheney suggests, suffering a “decimat[ion]” of their fighting capability.

Cheney also got it wrong on the statements issued by Dempsey about the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, the New York Times reported:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this past weekend that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” which could be accomplished only by military means, including minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially airstrikes. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops in Texas on Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Iran’s closing of the strait.

While Cheney is broadening her professional credentials, her debut appearance as a Fox News contributor showed her as a commentator who pays very little attention to the administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s actual positions on the issues she covers.

This week, the Obama administration delivered another significant blow to al Qaeda by successfully killing terror propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. AS MSNBC notes, “No president since George H.W. Bush has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama.” Today on CNN’s State of the Union, Vice President Dick Cheney firmly agreed with host Candy Crowley that Obama has waged a successful war on terror and that he has secured more successes than the Bush administration. But Cheney slammed Obama for failing to call his anti-terror efforts “what it is,” a “war on terror.”

Citing Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 in which he criticized the Bush administration for “overreacting to the events of 9/11″ and called for a ban on torture when “we [the Bush Administration] were never torturing anyone in the first place,” Cheney said he felt that Obama owes the Bush administration an apology. Insisting that enhanced interrogation techniques helped identify the location of Osama bin Laden, his daughter Liz Cheney added that “he slandered the nation” in Cairo and “he owes an apology to the American people”:

Watch it:

For the record, the Bush administration actually admitted to using torture techniques in 2008 and, as Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted, those techniques did not lead to the location of Osama bin Laden.

Keep America Safe, a Bill Kristol and Elizabeth Cheney-led organization, added its voice to the list of critics of the Obama administration’s troop drawdown timeline in Afghanistan. Their new ad, which only appeared on YouTube — the Weekly Standard says it will air in Washington, DC later today — repeats the factually baseless claim that “President Obama ignor[ed] his generals’ advice.” The ad quotes Iraq surge architect ret. Gen. Jack Keane saying Obama is “asking our troops to do more with less. [...] And what does that mean? That actually means more casualties.” Watch the ad:

But the ad’s arguments fall flat when examined more closely.

If casualty numbers are of any significance to Kristol and Cheney then they should examine the dramatic increase in American deaths occurring during the Obama administration’s 30,000 troop surge announced in December 2009. At the time, Kristol and his fellow hawks embraced the president’s announcement and heralded him as a “war president.” Recent casualty figures show 1,002 U.S. troop died in Afghanistan under Obama and two-thirds of all American casualties in Afghanistan occurred during this presidency.

The contradictions in the ad go even deeper when examining the role played by neoconservatives, such as Kristol, in diverting U.S. troops and resources from Afghanistan by advocating for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Middle East Progress director Matt Duss wrote in 2009 that neocons like Kristol were asking the U.S. military to, as Keane put it, “do more with less”:

The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare.

The conclusions worth drawing from the latest Keep America Safe ad is that individuals like Kristol and his allies care very little about American casualties, oppose any withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan and will attack Obama for exercising his constitutional authority instead of handing all decision making powers to his generals. Unfortunately, their arguments rely on the ad’s viewers having a very short memory about the history of U.S. involvment in Afghanistan and the unhelpful role played by Kristol.

In an interview with Bob Woodward earlier this year, President Obama said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever. … We absorbed it and we are stronger.” That confident portrayal of American resilience has been seized upon by right wing pundits. As Ken Gude notes on the Wonk Room, “conservative critics won’t tolerate this kind of reasoned leadership” from Obama. For instance, consider the following statement Liz Cheney released today:

This comment suggests an alarming fatalism on the part of President Obama and his administration. Once again the President seems either unwilling or unable to do what it takes to keep this nation safe. The President owes the American people an explanation.

Recall, Cheney’s father — the former vice president of the United States — told Meet the Press’s Tim Russert in 2002 that another terrorist attack was “almost a certainty.” He added it that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. got hit again:

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: The prospect of another attack against the United States is very, very real. It’s just as real, in my opinion, as it was September 12.

TIM RUSSERT, NBC News: Not a matter of if, but when?

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Not a matter of if, but when.

Is Liz Cheney outraged that her father stated that another terrorist attack on the homeland is a certain eventuality? She’s probably unaware that the Bush White House put out the following national security document that laid out a strategy of being “better able to absorb the impact” of a terrorist attack:

For each CI/KR [critical infrastructure and key resources] sector, we must collectively work to ensure the ability of power, communications, and other life sustaining systems to survive an attack by terrorists, a natural disaster, and other assessed risks or hazards. In the past, investments in redundant and duplicative infrastructure were used to achieve this objective. We must now focus on the resilience of the system as a whole – an approach that centers on investments that make the system better able to absorb the impact of an event without losing the capacity to function.

Perhaps Liz Cheney should demand an explanation from her father.