Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has admitted that the CIA and intelligence community approved U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s talking points before she made her much-derided Sept. 16 appearance on several Sunday news shows to discuss the attacks in Benghazi. King, one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration’s response to the attack, came to his conclusion following testimony from former CIA Director David Petraeus.

After leaving the closed-door hearing, King spoke with reporters for several minutes about Petraeus’ statements. Rice’s television appearances were among the topics discussed, leading King to indicate that while Petraeus did not personally write Rice’s talking points, the CIA did approve them:

Q: Did he say why it was taken out of the talking points that [the attack] was Al Qaeda affiliated?

KING: He didn’t know.

Q: He didn’t know? What do you mean he didn’t know?

KING: They were not involved — it was done, the process was completed and they said, “Ok go with those talking points.” Again it’s interagency — I got the impression that 7, 8, 9 different agencies.

Q: Did he give you the impression that he was upset it was taken out?

KING: No.

Q: You said the CIA said “OK” to the revised report –

KING: No, well, they said in that, after it goes through the process, they OK’d it to go. Yeah, they said “Okay for it to go.”

Watch King’s statements here:

Rice has been hit by Republicans for weeks for indicating that the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi stemmed from a spontaneous protest related to an anti-Islamic video. However, as Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) has pointed out, the talking points used by Rice were the same unclassified points given to both the administration and Congress by the intelligence community.

Contrary to the current GOP narrative, Petraeus’ testimony made clear that various intelligence sources at of the time of his initial briefing to Congress indicated that a protest arising in response to a similar one in Cairo was the impetus for the attack in Libya. While those initial assessments were later disproved, the Wall Street Journal has previously reported that this change in thinking began too late to alter Rice’s talking points.

Today’s comments by King towards the intelligence community’s assessments also mark a sharp departure from his previous accusations that Rice should have known sooner that the intelligence that was presented to her was incorrect. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have both also recently said that Rice should “have known better” than to make the statements she did during her interviews.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations released poll results this week showing that 68 percent of American Muslims support President Obama while just 7 percent support Mitt Romney (1 in 4 remain undecided). These results reflect a new reality for Republicans: American Muslims are rushing toward Democrats. In 2008, 49 percent of Muslim-Americans felt “closer” to Democrats. Now that number has shot up to 66 percent. That’s in contrast to the population as a whole, where Democratic favorability has actually gone down 11 percent.

It’s only recently that the numbers shifted. In 1992, a majority of American Muslims voted for George H.W. Bush. While Bill Clinton won the American Muslim vote in 1996, Muslims continued to trend toward Republicans for the next several years. Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy wrote about a moment in 2000 when a Muslim American political action committee endorsed a Republican:

“The new political action committee spurred voter registration drives and candidate forums, and served as a portal for fundraising efforts; it ultimately endorsed Bush, after securing key promises on the use of secret evidence in deportation cases and racial profiling. After the election, CAIR trumpeted the role of Muslim–Americans in the Republican victory. According to an informal survey of the group’s membership, 72 percent of Florida Muslims had cast their votes for Bush.”

What could account for the shift? Throughout the last 10-years, anti-Muslim sentiment among the right wing and the Republican Party has proliferated significantly. In the background is a vast and well-funded Islamophobia network providing the anti-Islam intellectual framework that trickles its way to mainstream right-wing politicians, as documented in a CAP report last year titled “Fear, Inc,“:

[T]his core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.

This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.

There are many examples of the Islamophobia network’s influence on mainstream American politics. For example, in 2007, Mitt Romney said that he would not select a Muslim to serve in his Presidential cabinet (a statement he later denied). Four years later, in 2011, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) held an over-the-top congressional hearing about the “Radicalization of American Muslims.” At the state level, over the past two years Republican-controlled legislatures in several states including Kansas and Oklahoma tried to legislate Islamophobia, passing bans on Sharia law.

Politicians like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) have taken things further: Bachmann recently led an anti-Muslim witch-hunt alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had made a “deep penetration in the halls of our United States government.” Bachmann went on to claim that a top Hillary Clinton aide had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Joe Walsh, a Republican congressman from Illinois, said earlier this year that: “there is a radical strain of Islam in this country — it’s not just over there — trying to kill Americans every week.”

However, it’s important to note that not all Republicans have gone King and Bachmann’s route. “This Sharia law business is crap,” GOP New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has said. “It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” In August, Christie referred to Islamophobic conservatives as “bigots.” “I’ll tell you that there is a gaze of intolerance that is going around our country that is disturbing to me,” he said.

Republicans blamed President Obama for the killing of four Americans in Libya within hours of the September 11 attack, attributing the violence to the administration’s supposed penchant for “apologizing” and failing to lead in the region. Within days, Republicans charged that Democrats, by arguing that the deaths were caused by a YouTube video disparaging the Prophet Muhammed, were covering up and misleading al Qaeda’s involvement in the deaths and called for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s resignation. During a series of Sunday show appearances on September 16th, she pointedly argued that the attackers took advantage of a protest against the video to carry out the killings.

But now, a growing drumbeat of evidence has found that the administration’s claims were substantiated by the the intelligence community. Eyewitnesses in Benghazi initially told officials and reporters that “members of the group that raided the U.S. mission specifically mentioned the video, which denigrated the prophet Muhammad” and “found no evidence that it was ordered by Al Qaeda.” The CIA also believed that the clip acted as an accelerant for the killings, instructing both Obama and Rice that “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.” The agency did not change its assessment until September 22.

The new evidence undermines the GOP’s accusations. But rather than back away from the blame game, they’re doubling down on their attacks against the administration. During an appearance on Fox News on Monday, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY) — who led the Republican effort to use the Libya incident as a way to weaken Obama’s foreign policy credentials — insisted that Obama should have questioned the intelligence community’s conclusions and suggested that he pressured the CIA to doctor its findings to fit his re-election narrative:

KING: I want to find out why the president didn’t ask questions….Did they ask the State Department if they had any videos what occurred at the consulate that night? Why with all these threats leading up to September 11th and talking about terror attacks and how could they now be saying it was not a terror attack. I think they’re hiding behind the term intelligence community. To me shows the president did not look into what happened, did not inquire what happened, was willing to look at something face value. Why was the report at face value whether there was so much evidence in there showing it was terrorist attack. It cries out for explanation and investigation. [...]

Who are the individuals or the ones the president claim gave him this information? And did the president steer them in that direction? Was this is mind set by the administration that said Libya was great victory and Al Qaeda was on the ropes and no longer a threat to us?

During an earlier appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, King also suggested that Rice should have known that the intelligence presented to her was false and interrogated the assessments before appearing on that series of Sunday political talk shows. “She’s in the chain of command at the State Department,” he said. “Did she just take that information or did she go to the Secretary of State?”

Reports have indicated that despite the intelligence community’s growing uncertainty about the impetus for the attacks, “intelligence officials didn’t feel they had enough conclusive, new information to revise their assessment” and did not communicate their doubts to Rice before her Sunday show appearances. This assessment was also reflected in Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefings.

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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During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) could not explain when President Obama “apologized” for the United States, despite repeatedly claiming that he went on an “apology tour” across the Middle East shortly after becoming president.

Since violence broke out across the region, Republicans have charged that Obama’s “defeatist” policies have caused the unrest and contributed to the death of Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. But pressed to detail where Obama has apologized for America by CNN host Soledad O’Brien, King came up short:

O’BRIEN: Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here. that was — he never once used the word “apology.” He never once said “I’m sorry.”

KING: Didn’t have to. The logical — any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said that the United States can be too aggressive. [...]

O’BRIEN: Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I’m trying to find the words ‘I’m sorry, I apologize’ in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies…

KING: I don’t care what fact check says.

O’BRIEN: There are fact checks. You may not care, but they’re a fact checker.

KING: No. Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president’s apologizing for the American position. That’s the apology tour. That’s the way it’s interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for islam, that’s an apology. How else can it be interpreted?

O’BRIEN: I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don’t think that everybody agrees it’s apology.

Watch it:

As the Washington Post put it, “the apology tour never happened.” Rather, shortly after becoming president, Obama traveled to the world introducing himself and differentiating his foreign policy from that of President Bush. “This is typical of many new presidents,” including Bush himself, who “quickly broke with Clinton administration policy on dealings with North Korea, the Kyoto climate change treaty and the international criminal court.”

The manufactured attack, which Republicans kicked off in 2009, “feeds into a subterranean narrative that Obama, with his exotic, mixed-race background, is not really American in the first place.”

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said that the attacks on U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya last week were brought on by President Obama’s order to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq:

GREGORY: You’re a supporter of governor Romney, is this American weakness that brought this on. Is that the Republican view, is that what the view of President Romney would be?

KING: Well my view is President Obama’s policy has been confusing it’s been apologetic and it’s been misguided. From the day he started his apology tour back in 2009 , he was no matter what people say, apologizing for America. Somehow suggesting that we’ve been anti Islam until he became the president. Even talking about Iraq. He took our troops out of Iraq without even getting the status of forces agreement. He was given a glide path in Iraq and yet he pulled the troops out, brags about the fact that the troops are out, gives a definite get for getting out in Afghanistan. What he’s doing by that is telling our allies they can’t trust us.

Watch the clip:

Obama did indeed withdraw American forces from Iraq but it wasn’t a unilateral decision, the Iraqis wanted the U.S. military to leave as well.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has a long history of demonizing American Muslims. So it’s no great surprise that his hearing earlier this week on the radicalization of Muslims fell under attack as both a waste of time — Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) commented that his time would be better spent discussing how to protect water resources for his constituents — and yet another example of King congratulating himself for his previous hearings attacking Muslims. But appearing on Fox News yesterday, King continued his factually challenged attack on Muslim Americans:

What I am very concerned about is that while the overwhelming majority of Muslims are good people, the fact is even though Muslims are 1 percent of the population, almost 90 percent of the terrorist crimes are carried out by the Muslim community. And there are not enough people in the community willing to step forward and speak out against this and cooperate with law enforcement.

Watch it:

While the scope of King’s assertion is unclear, the reality is that a small percentage of terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. are the result of Islamic extremism — 56 percent have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, 30 percent by ecoterrorists and 12 percent by Islamic extremists:

And King’s claim that Muslims are simply unwilling to pushback against extremism appears to be refuted by recent reports of aspiring Muslims terrorists finding difficulty in raising funds in New York. Last year, a Gallup poll found that Muslim Americans are more likely (89 percent) to reject violence than any other U.S. religious group and nearly all Muslim Americans (92 percent) have no sympathy for al-Qaeda.

King also claimed that “it’s so important that the NYPD focus on [the Muslim community]. That’s why it’s important that the NYPD and law enforcement not give into political correctness.” But that claim ignores the FBI’s concerns about the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim businesses, Mosques and student groups in New York and New Jersey.

FBI Newark Special Agent in Charge Michael Ward complained in March that the NYPD’s spying was making the FBI’s job harder, telling reporters, “It’s starting to have a negative impact. When people pull back cooperation it creates additional risks. It creates blind spots. It hinders our ability to have our finger on the pulse of what’s going on around the state.”

Surprisingly, as House Homeland Security Chairman, King appears to absorb little information from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security.

After arriving in Afghanistan’s capitol Kabul to sign a strategic partnership agreement with President Hamid Karzai, President Obama took to the American airwaves to explain the agreement and his broader Afghanistan strategy to the U.S. A few critics on the right — prone to faulting Obama for his every move — sought to bash the president. “Clearly this trip is campaign-related,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), admonishing Obama for a supposed “attempt to shore up his national security credentials” in the 2012 campaign.

But Inhofe’s blatantly political shot is being undermined by members of his own party and their ideological allies, who have either praised Obama or stuck to criticizing the strategy. Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash before the speech if he viewed the trip as “spiking the football” for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has been a critic of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, said, “No, I don’t view it as that.” He also lauded the trip and the strategic agreement:

MCCAIN: I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s always good when the president goes to where young men and women are in harm’s way.

And I think that many of us who have been involved in Afghanistan are very supportive of the strategic partnership agreement, which I’m sure he’ll be talking about, and we think the agreement is good. We obviously would like to know the details.

BASH: …Do you think that this trip is also part of his political campaign?

MCCAIN: No, I can’t accuse the president of that.

Appearing separately on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Homeland Security Committee chair Rep. Peter King (R-NY) also supported the trip, though he reserved judgement on the agreement until he could view it in detail. King said, “(H)is visit to Afghanistan is perfectly right. I applaud him for doing it.” The Congressman went on:

KING: Well, as president and commander-in-chief, I applaud him being in Afghanistan. I think it’s important for the troops to see the president and certainly after all of these years of fighting where the troops have done such heroic work and did such an outstanding job. I think it’s important for the president to be there and signing the agreement with President Karzai.

…I think it is always very good when the president of the United States can visit a war zone, especially on such a key moment as this.

Watch clips of the interviews with McCain and King:

McCain and King aren’t the only Republicans praising Obama’s trip. Romney foreign policy adviser Max Boot wrote that “substance of the speech” was “somber and serious and largely free of election-year politicking.” Romney himself released a statement that said: “I am pleased that President Obama has returned to Afghanistan. Our troops and the American people deserve to hear from our President about what is at stake in this war.”