So Rice was just being a good team player. She said what she was told by intelligence agencies to say. If you look over her remarks, they were invariably carefully couched, to each host: “the best information we have at present,” she said to NBC’s David Gregory. So it was. As The Wall Street Journal and others have reported, the intel assessments were changing the day she was on those shows, but she didn’t yet know that.

I realize all this sounds very suspicious to Obama haters. But this is how the world goes sometimes. David Petraeus has confirmed that while he knew or sensed from the start that it was a terrorist attack, America’s 16 intelligence agencies weren’t ready to say that publicly, mostly for fear of tipping off the bad guys. So Rice said what she was told to say.

John McCain, I’d bet, knows all the above and isn’t even really mad at her. He’s mad at two other things. Well, three other things. First, he’s mad he’s not the president, and the president’s the president. Second, he, and many Republicans, are pissed off that Obama paid no electoral price for the Benghazi attack. This is all but inconceivable to them because in the ecosystem in which they thrive, Benghazi is bigger than Watergate, Waterloo, and waterboarding combined. They can’t understand or accept that many middle Americans don’t share their outrage.

But most middle Americans recognize Benghazi for what it was—a terribly sad tragedy, but the kind of thing that, in a dangerous world, happens. And yes, many middle Americans would consider it a smudge on the administration’s security record, but most middle Americans also know that record is otherwise rather impressive. It seems to me someone just ran for president trying to argue otherwise, and he lost pretty handily.

Now, let’s take an unfashionable step back and examine the facts, such as they are. Rice did not make up the “spontaneous” story or have it handed to her by White House conspirators. She got it from the same daily intelligence brief given to the president. Those daily intel reports told the very story Rice repeated publicly, i.e., that the Benghazi mob formed more or less on its own, mainly in reaction to the American video cartooning sacred Muslim figures, and that extremists then took advantage to kill, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Rice didn’t make up that story. The problem was not with Rice; it was with the inevitably complicated U.S. intelligence process.

Her mistake was taking the initial intelligence at face value. The White House briefers made the same error, and so did I. I too repeated in an op-ed on The Daily Beast what the intelligence briefers told me, but I knew very well that more and contradictory information would appear soon enough. It always does.

Sure, the CIA had additional intel from the start, but it hadn’t begun to sift through all the communications intercepts, satellite photos, and human reports. It always takes time to sort out facts from fictions and find consistent threads. Seemingly, this gossamer information is now taking shape.

Meantime, Rice is still very much in the running for the job at Foggy Bottom, along with Senator John Kerry, NSC Adviser Tom Donilon, and former diplomat Nicholas Burns, now of Harvard. She was Obama’s earliest loyalist in the foreign-policy crowd, and he still likes her, despite lackluster reports on her performance at the U.N. The smears, though flatly inaccurate, won’t help her either. What will help her and, more importantly a flagging Obama after the first debate, is hunting down the Benghazi culprits.

In addition, the briefing says this “assessment may change as additional information is collected” and that the “investigation is on-going.”

The theory that the attacks were spontaneous was echoed by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Sept. 14, just three days after the attacks, and again on Sept. 16 by Ambassador Rice. On Sept. 18, Carney said, “Based on information that we—our initial information, and that includes all information—we saw no evidence to back up claims by others that this was a preplanned or premeditated attack.” 

The intelligence that helped inform those talking points—and what the U.S. public would ultimately be told—came in part from an intercept of a phone call between one of the alleged attackers and a middle manager from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the group’s north African affiliate, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intercept. In the call, the alleged attacker said the locals went forward with the attack only after watching the riots that same day at the U.S. embassy in Cairo.