Red Pen

State Dept. Edited Benghazi Documents

Deleted references to terror.

It’s been clear for awhile that the White House’s talking points on the terror attack in Benghazi last fall were flawed. Now it’s come out that they were edited that way. According to ABC News, the talking points were extensively edited—going through at least 12 drafts—from the point at which they were written by the CIA and intelligence officials to the final version that reached the Congress and Susan Rice, who then trumpeted them on talk shows. The State Department reportedly gave extensive input on the final version, including requests to scrub all references to the al Qaeda affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia and CIA warnings about terror threats in the months before the Benghazi attack.