President Obama said that a review board headed by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering "investigated every element of this. And what they discovered was some pretty harsh judgments in terms of how we had worked to protect consulates and embassies around the world." The report states that it looked specifically at "whether the attacks were security related; whether security systems and procedures were adequate and implemented properly; the impact of intelligence and information availability; whether any other facts or circumstances in these cases may be relevant to appropriate security management of U.S. missions worldwide; and, finally, whether any U.S. government employee or contractor, as defined by the Act, breached her or his duty."
That's a pretty broad purview, but it doesn't include everything related to the Benghazi incident. The FBI - not the review board - was charged with determining who exactly attacked the embassy, as Pickering noted in a Dec. 19, 2012, briefing in which the board's final report was released. The FBI is tasked with determining whether the incident stemmed from a pre-planned terrorist attack, a demonstration against an anti-Islamic film, a combination of the two, or something else entirely. The report covers security-related issues leading up to the attack as well as the attack itself - not what happened afterward, as the administration was explaining what had taken place to the American public.
This distinction is important because some of the most pointed questions that have been raised since the attack include how the administration portrayed the incident in its public announcements and the talking points administration officials used on television. The White House and Republicans have been at odds for nearly eight months over the talking points used by Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice used talking points written by the CIA that said the attack - which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens - started "spontaneously" as a protest.
It has been known since at least late November that Rice's talking points were changed. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence - not the White House nor the State Department - removed references to al Qaeda and terrorism from talking points given to Rice. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security issued a bipartisan report confirming that the talking points had been changed, and that the White House and State Department were not involved.
But reports show the CIA made many deletions and alterations in response to State Department comments, including removing references to other recent attacks on "foreign interests" in Benghazi and a reference to the al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia group as possibly being involved. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland objected to including the paragraph including names of terrorist groups, saying "we don't want to prejudice the investigation." Nuland was concerned that the talking points went beyond what she could say at State Department briefings and, "she believed the CIA was attempting to exonerate itself at the State Department's expense by suggesting CIA warnings about the security situation were ignored."
Rice's claim about a spontaneous demonstration in Benghazi ultimately proved to be false. Many Republicans have charged the White House with engaging in an election-year cover-up. It's important to note that all the evidence - then and now - shows that the talking points always said that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration in response to the Cairo protests. That was in the original draft of the talking points, and it remained in the final draft. There has been no evidence showing an election-year cover-up.
http://factcheck.org/2013/05/benghazi-attack-revisited/
www.state.gov/documents/organization/202446.pdf
