"It was a flash mob with weapons"

The title is a quote from a "senior US official" reported by super well-informed WaPo columnist David Ignatius weeks ago.  The gist of it is also backed up by a report by David Kilpatrick in the NY Times of the same period, both of which have been conveniently forgotten in the general rush to declare that the Benghazi attack was "a terror attack, not a spontaneous response to a video."  This is constantly being repeated by almost everybody discussing whether or not Susan Rice lied to the public on TV about what happened in Benghazi.  In fact, while some of her wording was a bit off, she was pretty close to the truth, and Ignatius reports that the CIA knew that the Ansar leaders had been watching the demonstrations in Cairo just before they set off to attack the consulate, the Cairo demo of course being inspired by the anti-Muslim video.  In short, it was a terror attack inspired by the video, or, "a flash mob with weapons."  People need to understand this.

A very recent report that reprises all of this and makes this point with cites to and quotes from the original articles is http://www.rutlandherald/com/article/20121121/OPINION04/711219953/1108/OPINION .

A further note on this is that while critics of Rice are quoting Petraeus as saying in closed testimony that references to Ansar-el-Sharia and al Qaeda were removed from the briefing materials given to Rice, what they are conveniently ignoring is that these were removed so that the groups would not know how well CIA was tracking them, and indeed, given the report from Ignatius that CIA was watching Ansar so closely that they knew they were watching TV footage of the Cairo demos is a sign that indeed there was very close surveillance and indeed why Petraeus was working so hard to keep news of CIA's involvement, including sending its rapid response team in within 20 minutes from being publicly reported.

People really need to know.  Liberal media repeating the story that "it was a terror attack, not a response to the video" are simply wrong.  It was both.  It was a terror attack inspired by the video."