Who Changed the Talking Points?

Greetings from the Left Coast!

This Benghazi thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. CBS is reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence ("DNI" - run by James Clapper, who is an Obama appointee) changed the Benghazi talking points before they were given to Susan Rice for use in her circuit of the Sunday news talk shows 5 days after the attack. However, the DNI spokesperson also said: "The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." And according to the CBS report, "That information was shared at a classified level -- which Rice, as a member of President Obama's cabinet, would have been privy to."

So why did Clapper's office decide to make those changes? And are we to understand that Susan Rice simply took the talking points she was handed and headed out on the talk show circuit without knowing that they had been edited, even though, in the words of CBS, she would have been privy to the unedited version? Or was she, in fact, delivering a message that she knew to be false? Either of these alternatives would be cause for concern, although, obviously, the latter would be worse.

And what about the statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 14 to the relatives of the slain when the bodies came home? It strains credibility to believe that, if the intelligence community "assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," the Secretary of State would be ignorant of that four days after the fact. Yet, at that ceremony, she was still maintaining that the violence was due to "an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

And, as if that's not enough, a spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee chairman stated that, "The statement released Monday evening by the DNI's spokesman regarding how the Intelligence Community's talking points were changed gives a new explanation that differs significantly from information provided in testimony to the Committee last week." (Emphasis added) "Chairman Rogers looks forward to discussing this new explanation with Director Clapper as soon as possible to understand how the DNI reached this conclusion and why leaders of the Intelligence Community testified late last week that they were unaware of who changed the talking points."

I'm also looking forward to finding out why the new statement doesn't match testimony given last week to a Congressional committee. There's a word for not giving truthful testimony when you're under oath - it's called perjury.

Thanks for listening.