NY TIMES: ANTI-ISLAM FILM DID SPARK BENGHAZI ATTACK

A six-part report by the New York Times on the Benghazi attack has concluded that, contrary to claims by Fox News, some conservative politicians, and the now-debunked 60 Minutes feature, the 2012 attack was indeed sparked by protesters angered over the 13-minute YouTube trailer for a film called Innocence of Muslims and by local Islamist militants whom the U.S. and its NATO allies had aided during their uprising against Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi. The trailer, said the Times, provided the lighted fuse for the attack after it was screened on the ultraconservative Egyptian satellite channel ElNas a few days earlier. “There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers,” said the Times account. It cited Libyan witnesses who maintained that they had “received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.” Meanwhile, Politico.com noted on Monday that the Times report might have “saved” 60 Minutes had it run when it was first ready several months ago. The Times‘s Cairo Bureau Chief, David Kirkpatrick, whose byline appears on the report said that the article had been held up due to “internal log jams too complicated to explain.” (He made the comment on Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters.) Politico’s Hadas Gold wrote: “Had the Times published Kirkpatrick’s report when it was finished …it’s not hard to imagine that the Times article would have changed the 60 Minutes segment, as the show would have presumably dealt with the Times report.