NYT Still Wants Readers to Believe 'There Is a Dispute' Over Role of 'Innocence of Muslims' in Benghazi Terrorist Attack

Others can comment on the entirely of the Sunday New York Times story by Serge F. Kovaleski and Brooks Barnes (used in Monday's print edition) about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the maker of the infamous "Innocence of Muslims" YouTube trailer the authors characterize as a "film" a dozen times in their write-up. Nakoula has now been in jail for two months.

I'm only going to comment on the following two sentences from the writeup which follow the jump:

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There is a dispute about how important the video was in provoking the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three other Americans. Militants interviewed at the scene said they were unaware of the video until a protest in Cairo called it to their attention.

The two sentences together don't even makes sense unless one believes that "militants" (i.e., terrorists) decided within hours to prepare and orchestrate from scratch an assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya because they became aware of a video and protests supposedly related to it. Give me break.

Though it only reported the news directly one time, the Associated Press ran a story on October 10 (noted at the time by yours truly at NewsBusters and Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard) relaying the following:

The State Department now says it never believed the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a film protest gone awry ...

... The State Department's extraordinary break with other administration offices came in a department briefing Tuesday, where officials said "others" in the executive branch concluded initially that the protest was based, like others in the Middle East, on a film that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.

That was never the department's conclusion, a senior official told reporters.

Everyone else has subsequently backed off the idea that a "film protest" or any kind of "protest" had anything to with Benghazi. In the real world, there is no doubt that it was a long-planned, straight-out terrorist attack. Yet two guys at the New York Times want to pretend that there still is some kind of "dispute," which only exists in their dissembling, confusion-sowing imaginations.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.