By Kerry Picket

Lawmakers told reporters on Capitol Hill Friday that former CIA Director  David Petraeus testified that the White House edited out “Al Qaeda’s  involvement” from the agency’s original talking points. According to Fox News: (bolding is mine)

Former CIA Director David Petraeus stoked the controversy over the  Obama administration’s handling of the Libya terror attack, testifying Friday  that references to “Al Qaeda involvement” were stripped from his agency’s  original talking points — while other intelligence officials were unable to say  who changed the memo, according to a top lawmaker who was briefed.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News that  intelligence officials who testified in a closed-door hearing a day earlier,  including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Acting CIA  Director Mike Morell, said they did not know who changed the talking points. He  said they went out to multiple departments, including the State Department,  National Security Council, Justice Department and White House.

“To me the question right now is who changed those talking points and  why. … I’d say it was somebody in the administration had to have taken it  out,” King told Fox News. “That, to me, has to be  pursued.”

But should that really be a surprise, though? As pointed out by Liz Sheld of  Breitbart News, the piece I wrote on September 27 showed that even  the FBI counter-terrorism manual does not include the term “Al – Qaeda.” In  fact, it does not even include the terms: Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah, or Muslim  Brotherhood. PJ Media’s Patrick Poole found this  counter-terrorism document that the FBI attempted to claim did not exist.

As I pointed out previously:

The Obama administration’s response to media inquires over what happened  during the deadly terrorist attack on our U.S. consulate in Libya that took the  lives of four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, has been that it is  currently under investigation. However, according to CNN, the FBI is only investigating the attack from  afar and “bureaucratic infighting between the FBI and Justice Department, and  the State Department on the other” appears to be delaying the investigation.:  (bolding is mine)

FBI agents have not yet been granted access to investigate in the eastern  Libyan city, and the crime scene has not been secured, sources said.

“They’ve gotten as far as Tripoli now, but they’ve never gotten to Benghazi,”  CNN National Security Analyst Fran Townsend said Wednesday, citing senior law  enforcement officials.

Last Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that an  FBI team had reached Libya earlier in the week.

“In fairness to the secretary, it may be that she wanted to be coy about  where they were in Libya for security concerns. That’s understandable. But the  fact is, it’s not clear they’ve been in Libya for very long,” Townsend said on  CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.”

“They had difficulty, and we understand there was some bureaucratic  infighting between the FBI and Justice Department on the one hand, and the State  Department on the other, and so it took them longer than they would have liked  to get into country. They’ve now gotten there. But they still are unable to get  permission to go to Benghazi.”

FBI agents have made a request through the U.S. State Department for  the crime scene to be secured, Townsend said, but that has not  happened.

“The senior law enforcement official I spoke to said, ‘If we get  there now, it’s not clear that it will be of any use to us,’” Townsend  said.

The FBI team has conducted interviews of State Department and U.S. government  personnel who were in Libya at the time of the attack, Townsend said, but the  FBI’s request to directly question individuals who Libyan authorities have in  custody was denied.

It took the administration over one week to declare the attack on the  consulate in Benghazi was indeed a “terrorist” attack and many wondered why the  declaration took so long. Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly reported that sources  told Fox News that U.S. intelligence knew that the strike against the consulate  was the work of terrorists within 24 hours of the attack.  So why the delay  in the actual declaration from the administration?

Read more at Washington Times