Yes, the "Innocence of Muslims" Video Really Did Play a Role in the Benghazi Attacks

[applegrove]

Yes, the "Innocence of Muslims" Video Really Did Play a Role in the Benghazi Attacks

By Kevin Drum at Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/05/yes-innocence-muslims-video-really-did-play-role-benghazi-attacks

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But here's the thing: it wasn't wrong. The CIA was mistaken about the existence of protests earlier in the day, but not about the role of the video. David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has written about this extensively, starting just a few weeks after the attacks, and last December he put together a definitive account of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Here's a piece:


The leader of Benghazi’s most overtly anti-Western militia, Ansar al-Shariah, boasted a few months before the attack that his fighters could “flatten” the American Mission. Surveillance of the American compound appears to have been underway at least 12 hours before the assault started.

The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

....There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.



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