Posted a little while ago on Twitter by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl:

In case you missed it, I sincerely regret the error I made describing an email from Ben Rhodes. 1/2

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 19, 2013

I should have stated, as I did elsewhere, the reporting was based on a summary provided by a source. I apologize for the mistake. 2/2

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 19, 2013

The facts are:

• Karl stated in no uncertain terms that he had “obtained” the emails. This was FALSE.
• Karl’s story also claimed that ABC News had “reviewed” the emails. This was FALSE.
• Karl’s story put the made-up email in quotation marks, when it was NOT A QUOTE.

Jonathan Karl clearly does not intend to retract his story, even though he lied outright about the circumstances and passed on false information from a Republican source. And just as clearly, he does not intend to reveal who gave him this false information.

It’s impossible to see this as anything other than a complete lack of journalistic ethics. Not to mention simple decency. What a disgrace.

If you’ve been following the story of the Benghazi “talking points” emails, you know that it’s now been confirmed beyond any doubt that Republican sources fed false information to the media, especially to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl. Karl claimed that he had “obtained” these emails, and we now know that this was completely untrue — he was quoting the words of his anonymous source, who lied to him. He did not “obtain” or even see the actual email in question.

The ethical thing to do at this point would be to correct and retract the story, and reveal the name of his dishonest source. But that’s not the path Karl is choosing:

On the Sunday, May 19 edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz read a statement from Jonathan Karl, chief White House Correspondent for ABC News in response to his reporting on altered emails related to the Sunday talk show talking points following the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. Karl now expresses regret about his original reporting on May 10th on the Benghazi emails. The statement reads:

“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately.”

-Jonathan Karl, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent

Amazing. ABC News should be ashamed of this kind of egotistical ass-covering. Their credibility is at stake, and they’re letting their anonymous right wing sources get away with lying to them.

Via: ABC News’ Jonathan Karl Addresses Criticism on Reporting of the Benghazi Talking Points Controversy - CNN Press Room Blogs

Also see:
Jon Karl got played by a confidential source and now ABC News has a big Benghazi problem » Pressthink
What do Jonathan Karl and James O’Keefe have in common?

An alternate title for this post might be, “The Recursive Conspiracy Theories of a Raving Freakazoid,” as our favorite right wing nut sandwich just continues to chase his own paranoid tail. Here he is opining that the AP and IRS “scandals” are really just attempts to cover up the Benghazi cover-up, because “that is literally where the bodies are buried.”

Via: Right Wing Watch.

SCOTT PELLEY: Also at his news conference today the president called for tighter security for U.S. diplomatic facilities to prevent an attack like the one in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Of course, Benghazi has become a political controversy. Republicans claim that the Administration watered down the facts in talking points that were given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for television appearances while Mr. Obama was running for reelection. Republicans on Capitol Hill claim that they had found proof of this in White House e-mails that they leaked to reporters last week. Well, it turns out some of the quotes in those e-mails were wrong. Major Garrett is at the White House for us tonight. Major?

MAJOR GARRETT: Scott, Republicans have claimed that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was trying to protect itself from criticism. The White House released the real e-mails late yesterday and here’s what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans. One e-mail was written by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes. “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.” But it turns out, in the actual e-mail Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.” Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an e-mail written by State Department Spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version notes Nuland discussing: “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.” The actual e-mail from Nuland says: the “…penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings…” The C.I.A. agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the C.I.A.’s original version, eliminating references to al-Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence, Scott, the White House orchestrated these changes.

More: Wow, This Is Pretty Epic

Also see:
WH Benghazi Emails Have Different Quotes Than Earlier Reported

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who oversaw the Accountability Review Board that reviewed the government’s response to the Benghazi attack, are clearly unhappy with Republican hitman Darrell Issa and his distorted characterizations of their work: Pickering, Mullen Challenge Issa to Let Them Testify in Public.

The dispute between Issa and the co-chairmen came to a head after neither Pickering nor Mullen attended a May 8 House Oversight Committee hearing on the attacks, sparking a heated back and forth about who was invited and when. The rhetoric intensified Sunday during a highly contentious joint appearance with Issa and Pickering on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which Issa maintained the two “refused to come before our committee.” Pickering insisted that he was not invited despite expressing a willingness to testify.

“Chairman Issa sent word back that he might want to take me up some time in the future” Pickering said.

Issa also suggested on the program that Pickering and Mullen meet with the committee behind closed doors so as not to create “some sort of stage show.” But the two assert in their letter that a public hearing is a “more appropriate forum” and accuse Issa of changing his “position on the terms of our appearance.”

By demanding that the hearing be open to the public, it’s clear that Pickering and Mullen simply don’t trust the blatantly partisan Issa to tell the truth — and they shouldn’t.

This is possibly the strangest and most ridiculous piece yet from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, as he gives four “pinocchios” (the “most dishonest” rating) to President Obama’s completely factual claim that he almost immediately used the T word to describe the Benghazi attacks: Obama’s Claim He Called Benghazi an ‘Act of Terrorism’.

You can read the whole thing if you like, although I wish I hadn’t wasted the time myself. Are we really going to be reduced to parsing the difference between “terror” and “terrorism?” And is this really supposed to be Washington Post-level analysis?

I’ll just quote from Kessler’s conclusion, to demonstrate how weird this pedantic piece is:

During the campaign, the president could just get away with claiming he said “act of terror,” since he did use those words — though not in the way he often claimed. It seemed like a bit of after-the-fact spin, but those were his actual words — to the surprise of Mitt Romney in the debate.

Yes, that’s right — Kessler thinks the President “got away” with … something … because he stated a fact. Wow.

Those “leaked” emails about Benghazi talking points first reported by the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, then picked up and trumpeted to the world by ABC News, were apparently distorted and mischaracterized to smear the State Department and the White House.

Imagine my surprise.

ABC News reported that Rhodes wrote: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.” The Weekly Standard reported that Rhodes “responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning.”

Whoever provided those quotes seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. While Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment, Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his email on the State Department’s concerns.

Previous reporting also misquoted Rhodes as saying the group would work through the talking points at the deputies meeting on Saturday, September 15, when the talking points to Congress were finalized. While the previously written subject line of the email mentions talking points, Rhodes only addresses misinformation in a general sense.

So whoever leaked the inaccurate information earlier this month did so in a way that made it appear that the White House - specifically Rhodes - was more interested in the State Department’s concerns, and more focused on the talking points, that the email actually stated.

Also see:
Jake Tapper Blows a Hole in Benghazi `scandal’

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush appointee, said today on Face the Nation that some of the critics of the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack have a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.”

“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were,” said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible.” he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to “scare them with the noise or something,” Gates said, ignored the “number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi’s arsenals.”

“I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances,” he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, “send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous.”

“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he said. “The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time to do that.”

Well said. A cartoonish impression of military capabilities goes along with a cartoonish world view.

Also see:
A Look at the Republican Benghazi Talking Points as They’ve Been Laid Out So Far - the Maddow Blog

rightwingwatch.org

On Wednesday, Religious Right activists and members of Congress gathered together for a prayer event held in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol called “Washington: A Man of Prayer.”

Among the speakers was Rep. Michele Bachmann, who used the opportunity to promote the 9/11 prayer event being organized by Birther-king Joseph Farah, saying that “it is no secret that our nation may very well be experiencing the hand of judgment” and declaring that both the original 9/11 attack and the attack in Benghazi on 9/11 of last year were God’s judgment.

As such, the only recourse, Bachmann said, is to humble ourselves before God and cry out in repentance for this nation.