Benghazi Talking Points Timeline: Changed 12 Times: The Word 'Attack' Replaced With 'Demonstration'

By Susan Duclos

On the heels of the three whistle-blowers testifying in Congressional hearings about the systematic failures of the Obama administration, before, during and after the 9/11/12 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, ABC News obtains 12 different versions of the Benghazi talking points, before U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice appeared on five different talk shows to push the extensively edited White House version of the events.

The Benghazi Talking Points Timeline will be embedded below the post.

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited
Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the
documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence
community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a
different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points
that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts
first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to
Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made
with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included
requests from the State Department that references to the Al
Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to
CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding
the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

By the third version of the dramatically edited Benghazi talking points, the first reference of an “attack” had been changed to the word “demonstration.”

The original assertion that “Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda participated in the attack,” was heavily edited, first to sanitize any mention of al-Qaeda, then by the final version even the Islamic extremists had been changed to simply “extremists,” as well as any reference to “attack” was changed to “violent demonstration.”

References to jihad and jihadists were also scrubbed by the final version as were references to five previous attacks.

[Update] The cover-up was not to hide the mistakes made because those were bound to come out. The cover-up was to cast blame away from the Obama administration by asserting the CIA talking points were wrong but those talking points were changed by the Obama administration.

The CIA was spot on.

This brings up questions about the timing of the resignation of former CIA Direction David Petraeus and how convenient that timing was for the Obama administration as the investigation into the systematic failures were heating up. [End Update]

ABC News report on the Beghazi talking point revisions below, the timeline will be embedded beneath the video.