something. you know you hit an unusual circumstance. but you know, the other reported thing here is they stopped briefing. the white house acknowledged stopped briefing entirety of the congress in 2011. feinste feinstein, chambliss, mike rogers, they have been getting briefings more recently on the programs. we saw representative rogers and the rest of congress being critical. the question for me is why this needed to be secret. robert gibbs said what i think is correct. you know, you need rule of law. you need a system for protecting classified documents. but you will get more respect for that from the press and public if people really believe that when the government is keeping things secret it is doing so for a good reason. this was than information that we are tracking a specific person or about ongoing plot. it is information about a general practice that it does not seem to me to would fact it is publicly known is going to interfere with the nsa s ability to continue do
some of the things that he was thinking to somebody. and we need to get ahold of that ahead of time. governor ridge, what is your experience particularly with the virginia tech shooting aftermath? what does it tell you about where we need to start reacting particularly to senator feinste feinstein s comment? i think everyone has really focused on a word you used. i think the country needs to have it. let s have the conversation. let s start with the act and pull back to the actors. there s a profile here. and in the cho case, it was really rather dramatic. the privacy laws intersected with the inferior mental health delivery systems. what we know about many of these troubled young men, they often reveal their suicidal intentions. they often reveal their desire to kill. and so there s a we talk about mental health generically. but that s not a conversation parents have with counselors, and we run to it after the fact. and so i think the fact that we need a national conversation
season, say that not to admit that it was terrorism because it would undercut the argument that the obama team had decimated al qaeda. and i wonder if senator feinstein s comments can be considered unequivocal, that the white house had no involvement. who can unequivocally say that? i don t think she can know that without the investigation. i don t know. well, the white house has said on the record that they only changed one word. but that doesn t mean that other parts of the executive branch, which are not the white house, could have changed these talking points as they went through the interagency process. republican senator lindsey graham believes the issue was clearly linked to the presidential election and would have ruined the administration s narrative that al qaeda was on the run. why would you choose someone who had nothing to do with benghazi to tell us about benghazi? that s kind of odd. the president said why pick on her. she didn t know anything about benghaz
you know, i don t david gregory, i don t get it. and what i don t get is how you could remove a couple of words from talking points that completely change the meaning of those talking points? if you re going remove a couple of details to protect assets on the ground, that s one thing. but if you say it s a video on youtube instead of an al qaeda attack, that is radically different and really, and you went right to it yesterday, really troubling. well, and i think what rodgers and feinstein do to underscore that is say, look, who are we protecting? what is this idea of protecting sources and methods? that s clearly backfired. you re tipping off al qaeda when they know that we re investigating them anyway, to take that out of the talking points, to change the narrative because, again, review what the reality is. attack happens. the cia director says immediately afterward this was a
be said in a declassified setting and that susan rice, the criticism is that she took what they handed her and didn t challenge it, which her defenders, dianne feinstein on meet the press and others say that is not unfair. you re pilaring this woman. feinste feinstein s word, character assassination, to suggest she would read anything other than the unclassified version of this. a lot of people were asking where was hillary clinton that weekend? she knew better than to go out in the middle of this. they gave susan rice this assignment. she went on all five shows. it was supposed to be an important venue for her. and by going with these declassified talking points, she has now taken the hit. this reminds me very much, joe, mika, everybody, of what happened in the month leading up to the iraq war when the declassified version was different in thrust than what was known about wmd and what the senators should have been