now, we don't know yet what was said or whether those discussions covered raw intelligence from libya pointing to terrorist involvement. we have been reporting such early indications existed, and tonight, the associated press says some of it was coming from the cia station chief on the ground. whether or how it was distributed, we just don't know yet. late today, though, mike rogers, the republican chairman of the house intelligence committee, had this to say to cnn's wolf blitzer. >> i want to say we, the committee, were in possession of information that provided by the intelligence community that pretty much said this was a military style attack within less than 24 hours. >> are you sure -- >> presumably, the white house also had that information, so why then on september 15th did the united nations ambassador susan rice describe the attack this way? >> it's important to know that there's an fbi investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed. that will tell us with certainty what transpired, but our current best assessment based on the information that we have at present is that in fact, what this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated response to what had transpired in cairo. in cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated. >> the spontaneous, not premeditated is the important part. that was four days after raw intelligence was available contradicting that. three days after the intelligence community may have apprised both lawmakers and the white house that such intelligence, preliminary though it may have been, in fact existed. so why then did susan rice say that? an intelligence official tells us she was working off a set of cia talking points. several senior administration officials tell us ambassador rice's use of the word spontaneous came directly from an assessment coming from congress and was not edited by the white house. but keeping them honest the white house had been in frequent contact with the cia days before that, and the cia reportedly had at least raw intelligence casting doubt on the idea this attack was spontaneous. however, the intelligence official who told us about the talking points says it took days to reconcile contradictory information surrounding the attack so is this a case of the cia covering its backside or as many republicans allege, the white house initially choosing a more politically palatable narrative to downplay terrorism? fran townsend joins us shortly with her take and so does bob baer. first, another development. it comes days before president obama and mitt romney debate foreign policy. today, the "new york times," a sharp counterpoint to a promise the president made in the last debate. >> we are going to find out who did this and we are going to hunt them down because one of the things i've said throughout my presidency is when folks mess with americans, we go after them. >> well, today, the "new york times" david kirkpatrick reports on a meeting he had with a key suspect in the attack. he reportedly means the group widely suspected in the benghazi assault. that meeting took place not in a jail cell, not in secret, but on a hotel patio. joining me, david kirkpatrick, bob baer on the phone, fran townsend. fran now serves on the cia external advisory committee and recently visited libya with her employer, mcandrews and forbes. fran, every white house relies on information from the intelligence community, getting the experts to help with what to say publicly. you also say there are times when mistakes happen, but you say you don't think this is a mistake. you think they knew more than they were publicly letting on. >> john, look, what we know is in that first 24 hours as americans were waking to this tragic news, that senior intelligence officials were in hourly contact updating the white house. as you pointed out, we don't know what was said in those conversations but i can tell you from having lived through these crises, you're getting a constant feed of what the intelligence community understands about what is currently going on and what has happened on the ground. they will caveat the information because of course in those first hours, there will be all sorts of information, some of it which will turn out not to have been true, but you're going to get the whole feed, because of course, you're responsible for advising the president and the fact is when the president comes out the next day and says in the rose garden, makes an oblique reference to terrorism and terrorism acts will not go unanswered, clearly they understand that there's conflicting information out there and they don't want the president to be wrong, so he uses this language, he doesn't call it an act of terror but he uses language relating to terrorism because the white house clearly understands in that 24 hours that there is conflicting information. >> but we have news now that it was the cia station chief in libya who compiled intelligence reports indicating these attacks were not spontaneous but were launched by militants and the station chief, we're told, sent that information to washington. we don't know exactly who received it. would that not be passed on? would general petraeus at the cia keep that until he got a triple source, second source? >> no. he wouldn't hold it. in fact, it would be -- in every crisis that i've been involved in managing, the cia director who i would call myself, who would call and brief the president, would pass on exactly what he had as he developed it. he may caveat it. he may say this is not as reliable, he may say we haven't confirmed it, but the cia would not hold it back. they would tell the president and the white house what they had and what degree of confidence they had in it at that time as it was developing. >> bob, as a former cia officer, you understand how the system works, when it works well and when it doesn't work so well. you say it's not entirely surprising the white house, if it did not receive this information? >> well, john, what usually happens in a situation like this is the chief of station in a place like tripoli will be sending in what's called situation reports, and as the crisis picks up or gets worse, he'll be sending them in every hour. as fran said, they will be conflicting, it will be raw information, but apparently this happened in tripoli. these things are sent back to langley and distributed around the united states government, including the united nations, to susan rice, to the white house. there's not a chance that the cia would withhold this information from the white house or probably the united nations, our office in the united nations, either. it's just the way it works. it's a system. it's almost mechanical. it's hard to short-circuit. in addition, the cia director would be calling the white house and videoconferences, calling the national security council. i have never seen an attack on the united states that was not immediately reported to the white house. >> but you say it's amateur hour to allow ambassador rice to be sent out with the limited information and to say what she said, why? >> well, somebody dropped the ball. i mean, those situation reports should have been going to her office in new york. she should have been stopped from taking, you know, saying what she did. it's a true blunder in a case like this, as we've seen. you know, who did not get her the paper. if she did get the paper and still went out on the talk shows and said it was a demonstration, then she should lose her job. >> david, you're right there on the ground in benghazi. as we get a bit more information about who knew what, when, as you talk to your sources, what's your take on all of this? >> several days after the attack -- what was that? for sure it was strange that a few days after the attack, ambassador rice still was talking about a peaceful protest when we journalists without the resources of the cia were able to find out from witnesses and embassy guards, libyan guards, it was absolutely no peaceful protest. but at the same time, keep in mind that it's very hard to figure out who is and who is not a militant around here. there's a lot of, lot of people running around with guns and all kinds of ideologies and it is entirely possible to have a spontaneous attack that could be called terrorism and could also be called spontaneous. so some of this debate feels a little bit like a false dichotomy when you're here on the ground in benghazi. >> i want to turn to this remarkable story you broke today. you actually sat down for two hours with one of the men who possibly could be a ringleader in the attacks on the u.s. mission. the president says we will hunt this person down or these people down and find them. was it hard to find him? >> no, it was not. his name was mentioned in our paper and in the "wall street journal" earlier this week and when a libyan intermediary called him on our behalf, he was eager to talk and set up a meeting. so he met us at a hotel. he walked by a bunch of other journalists who didn't recognize him and we all sat together on the patio. you're right, he is at the very least a key witness. he acknowledged being on the scene even if he didn't say he participated in the attacks. many witnesses have described him as one of the people commanding fighters inside the attack, and it's puzzling to see how much at large and at ease he is around benghazi. >> you say puzzling. not interviewed by any libyan security officials, not interviewed by anyone in the united states? >> nope. i believe he's been interviewed by me and also by reuters. >> bob baer, does it surprise you, so long after these attacks, that a reporter can sit down, sipping a drink in a hotel, having a conversation with this man and no one from either the libyan government or the united states government has talked to him? >> well, it does surprise me in the sense i had no idea that libya was such in a chaotic situation where there's absolutely no central authority. this man should have been brought in within the first 24 hours, interviewed, either found guilty or innocent, let go or whatever, but the fact that journalists can get to him first tells me the situation is fairly hopeless there, that we will ever get to the bottom of the murder of the ambassador and the attack on our consulate there. it is truly, truly chaotic there, and it's absolutely right that it's the militias that run the country and we don't know what their ideology is. it could have been multiple militias that attacked the u.s. consulate there. we just may not know for years. >> fran, what do your intelligence sources tell you? was he involved in the attack, do you believe? >> you know, i think the fact that he's a sort of known extremist in terms of his ideology, it would not be surprising. and i will tell you, john, in answer to the question you put to bob about are we surprised, we should be disappointed but not surprised. it was journalists who found ambassador stevens' journal because neither libyan officials nor american officials had gotten to that consulate. time and again, it took the fbi three weeks to get to the consulate itself to do a forensic investigation. the investigation of this on both the american and the libyan side has been absolutely and completely incompetent. the notion that a journalist could find this guy and sit down with him and do an interview before investigators should not surprise us. disappointing, yes. surprising, no. >> as we get more information, sadly raises more and alarming questions. thanks so much. now for how this is playing out politically. paul begala and ari fleischer. so paul, the attack on the benghazi consulate was a big flash point in the last debate. i know you think it's time for these guys to move on. afghanistan, for example. but given the expanded congressional investigations, the lot of questions about the administration's handling, how much benghazi do you think will be in the next debate? >> i do think it's a certainty. it is, i will say, an important issue to investigate. the administration's investigating, congress is investigating, that's good. that's professionals doing their job. they happen to be professional politicians, too, but that is the job of the congress of the united states and also the pickering investigation that the administration has sponsored. the hard thing for both of these guys is i think they made important mistakes on this issue. the administration clearly did not have all the facts when they started saying that they had all the facts, so the initial stories they say were overtaken by events. that's a problem. governor romney, on the other hand, also didn't have all the facts and he issued a statement right when the attacks were happening that struck a lot of people, even republicans, as very, very political. so both of these guys have a vulnerability on it. they will each try to exploit it. it's certain to come up, but frankly, there's tens of thousands of americans still in harm's way fighting the longest war of american history and i hope we have a thorough discussion about afghanistan, because that actually i think, the real flash point and maybe the biggest divide between the two candidates. >> ari, draw the lines as you see them. governor romney is the challenger. he has to step across the commander in chief threshold, if you will, on a number of issues. how much time does he want to spend around the world and how much does he want to try to narrow in to get some advantage out of benghazi? >> well, it's not to get advantage out of benghazi, john. but the fact of the matter is, benghazi was the first successful terrorist attack on our country since september 11th, 2001. and we as a country have an obligation to figure out how and why it happened. after all, our embassies and our consulates around the world are built like forts. they're built like forts because we know they're targets. how in the case of benghazi was america struck? there were security failures, there were blunders made. who, why, how. all of this is vital to making sure we learn so it doesn't happen again. now, in the handling of it and the explanation for it, this administration was terribly ham-handed. it really looked to me as if for political reasons they did not want to indicate that america had been struck by terrorism. they wanted to downplay it. they wanted to attribute it to a youtube video. that way politically, the president could continue to score points off of his successful killing of bin laden and the suggestion he's kept us safe from terrorism. so it's a serious legitimate governing issue. it ought to come up. it's part of what commander in chiefs do to keep us safe. >> paul, this debate on national security foreign policy will be in florida, key swing state. it will be in boca, a place where you find a lot of jewish voters who care a great deal about the relationship with israel, u.s. support for israel. the president has talked to prime minister netanyahu by phone, he tried to downplay governor romney's suggestion that there's distance, that he's throwing him under the bus. if governor romney turns and says well, mr. president, when you're in new york, why did you go on "the view" and not meet with prime minister netanyahu, how does the president respond? >> he goes through how many times he has met with him and when he's spoken to him on the phone. we do have this new contraption thanks to alexander graham bell where he can talk to the israeli prime minister at any time. then i think he will pivot to what's really been noteworthy, that the israeli military and intelligence leaders have been so vocal, i can't remember them being this vocal about america's leadership and they have said especially defense minister barak, opposite party of prime minister netanyahu but in a coalition government with him in the most highly decorated soldier in the history of the israeli defense forces, he has said he's never had better, stronger military and intelligence cooperation from the united states than he's had under the obama administration. >> when the issue comes up, governor romney can obviously be thinking if i can swing a couple hundred, couple thousand jewish votes in florida, maybe that makes the difference, so where is the line between trying to play that up and the risk of looking like someone who may be, to borrow a term used against your former boss, too cowboy diplomacy when the nation's pretty tired about wars? >> well, it's not a question of cowboy diplomacy or any other kind of diplomacy. it's a question about is america moving away from a friend, israel, to establish neutrality. i say good try, paul, but the fact of the matter is this is an administration that has a serious israel problem. there is an israel gap. and barack obama has brought it on. he brought it on from the very beginning with the administration and his cairo speech, when he acquitted the founding of israel with, because of the holocaust with the suffering of the peninsula. he condemned israel for building houses and when he talked about returning to the 1967 borders, brand new terminology the previous presidents deliberately avoided because they knew it was provocative. he brought it on when he said in regard to the french president, netanyahu was a liar, the president said i have to deal with him every day in exasperation. this administration, this president, are deliberately weak on israel and florida in particular and ohio, it will be a significant issue in the jewish community. you already see the signs of weakness that the president has there. >> ari fleischer, paul begala, a little preview of a feisty monday night debate. gentlemen, thank you. let us know what you think. follow us on twitter. up next, new polling. i'll crunch the numbers on what's becoming a hotly contested electoral map. on soft. and tea parties. i'll have more awkward conversations than i'm equipped for because i'm raising two girls on my own. i'll worry about the economy more than a few times before they're grown. but it's for them, so i've found a way. who matters most to you says the most about you. massmutual is owned by our policyholders so they matter most to us. massmutual. we'll help you get there. are choosing advil®. here's one story. i'm sean. i switched to advil® 10 months ago. biking can be really tough on the lower back and your upper thighs. you have some nasty aches and pains. i really like advil® because it takes care of it all. neck ache, shoulder pain and definitely lower back pain. i use advil® because my wife, she's a nurse, she recommended it. 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