>> well, both the c.i.a. and the military were working on predator drones before 9/11 and shortly after the september 11 attacks president bush gave the c.i.a. this wide authority to go capture and kill around the globe. the c.i.a. started using drones in ahaistanthere wa a drone strike in yemen and then starting in 2004 began using drone strikes in pakistan. and from there what started as a real trickle of drone strikes really went into sort of -- escalated dramatically around 2008 to the point where there's been hundreds of drone strikes in pakistan carried out by the c.i.a. the military has also done a parallel -- had a parallel drone program in iraq and afghanistan and what we've seen in recent years, both the c.i.a. and the pentagon have both had programs yemen. so there's been a certain redundancy in these operations and what we've -- what we heard both the president say yesterday and other aides to the president talk about on background was this need to sort of shift more of the resources to the pentago

those were taken out after the c.i.a. wrote the initial draft. >> then the c.i.a. wrote another draft. >> input from the state departmental. >> here is what i've been saying. no, john what i am saying and i've answered this question before. there is an inner agency process which is always the case because a lot of agencies have a stake in a matter like this. state department and intelligence agencies and national security staff. everybody provided comment. c.i.a. said we're going to take a crack drafting these based on what we know. >> the initial kaqization of the white house a mischaracterization that the white house was involved? >> it's important to examine the information again that we employed congress months ago. they chose to leak it today which is their prerogative but the white house involvement to the talking points that were generated by the c.i.a. suggest a single change. >> why not come forward and say friday night, officials were involved in the interagency process? why not offer that information? >> there was no intent to do anything but answer the q

it says the c.i.a. talking points used by susan rice were revised by the state department to remove any references to terrorism. carnie discusses the acknowledge by the i.r.s. that they unfairly audited groups for their tax status. his briefing is about an hour. >> good friday afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. thank you for being here. i appreciate your patience. before i take your questions i want to note because it has been reported we did as many of you know, have a background briefing here earlier at the white house. i think 14 news organization were represented from online, print and the like. we do those periodically. we hope that the participants find them helpful. no one here thinks that is a substitute for this briefing that is why i'm here to take questions and with that i will go to the associated press. >> thanks, jay. two subjects starting out with the i.r.s. issue. i.r.s. says they flag conservative name -- groups. [unintelligible] when did the white house become aware that the i.r.s. engage

the c.i.a. defense department each runs its own drone department with different levels of transparency. the president made clear that america's use of drones would be reigned in. >> the same progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power. >> between 2004 and 2013, the total estimated number of strikes at 428, with 49 under president bush and 379 under president obama. that's almost eight times as many strikes under the obama administration. they estimate the number of militants killed to be between 1,982 and 3,251. the number of civilians between 276 and 368. and unknown casualties, between 200 and 330. the new york times says national security correspondent says to understand the program today, you have to start at the beginning. >> after 9/11, you see a big change that takes place at the c.i.a.? >> after 9/11, about a week after 9/11, president bush gives the cia authority to basically go around the world and capture and kil

plus, why would the c.i.a. revise its own talking points it had sent over before which completely changed the facts to the original talking points they had sent on the friday afternoon? i think there are a lot more questions they are going to have answer. the reason they had background briefings for reporters, usually if you do anything like that, it's to help educate reporters on the facts of the matters beforehand. since most of the reporters weren't covering benghazi maybe they need the background briefing. >> eric: very importantly, you rolled, jay carney, we change one point. i can hold this up. consulate to diplomatic facilities but importantly he said the white house and state department made one change. this is what they said they did. this is what we found out they did. not one word but a 147 words is what they eliminated. it wasn't one thing they changed. it was quite a bit. >> kimberly: that is not an edit it's a massacre. >> eric: but jay carney doubled down. he said the white house made the change,

michele: then today, reports that the c.i.a. talking points on the benghazi attacks were changed a dozen times in a series of small -- in a series of email exchanges between the white house, the c.i.a., and the state department. leading to questions about what the administration knew and when. this afternoon, the white house tried to explain how and why those were edited. >> just remember that these are talking points. not policies. talking points. to this day have been shown to be wrong in only one instance. and that was the existence of demonstrations preceding the attack. and so all of this, from the beginning, the republican attempts to politicize this, has been based on that single thing which we corrected once we knew that it was no longer a correct description of what happened. michele: so peter, let's begin with those talking points. what changed over the course of those 12 edits in all of those email exchanges? >> exactly. jay carney today said only one thing turned out to be wrong. what he didn't say is what was left ou

second thing is what we were witnessing and you referenced the c.i.a. here, what we were witnessing was essentially a struggle between the state department and the c.i.a. because what we didn't know at the time was that benghazi was a c.i.a. operation. not a state -- the state department was providing the cover for the c.i.a. these talking points are there. and they're saying we knew this. we knew this. we knew this. and the people at the state department are saying this makes it look like we were asleep at the switch. and it's your people. gwen: why is this -- why is this stuck? why is this a story that never went away? >> it never went away because house republicans believed there was always something more. and now that they have these emails, the fact that we're talking about it at all to them is a victory. they continue to believe that they haven't heard necessarily everything they could from secretary of state hillary clinton. the fact that this internal review at the state at the present time didn't involve talking to her about what she knew -- at

and countertryst center of the c.i.a. karen greenberg is the director of the center on national security at fordham university law school. david ignatius in the "washington post" will be joining us in progress. i'm pleased to have all here to talk about this. i want to go around the table and talk about what the president said and your assessment with what it might mean. i begin with david kilcullen. david? >> there was a lot of anticipation about this speech. people were talking about the president moving away from what are called signature strikes where drones are used to target a suspicious pattern of behavior rather than a known individual. people were talking about changes in significant areas of policy. unfortunately, we didn't really see any of that. what we saw was pretty polished rhetoric, but not a huge amount of policy substance. and the president, rather than walking back on drones, spent a fairly substantial part of the speech justifying how effective they are. now, that's actually a point that is very much de

brennan, intends to move the drone program out of the c.i.a. into the pentagon? is that a cause for separation on your part? >> when is it gonna happen? is it going to include pakistan? what is the -- what are the specifics behind those intentions? we've heard good intentions now for five years including the intention to close guantanamo but we need to see it done. in the meantime, brennan is the same person that told us in 2011 there has been no civilians killed by droabs and then changed it to maybe a handful. from our estimates, there are thousands of people who have been killed by drones. there was no recognition of that in the president's speech. no sense of we are going to give you these figures make them public. we're going to make the legal memos public. we're going to apologize and compensate to the innocent people who have been killed by our drones. certainly none of that was said. >> john: as you know, we've talked about drones extensively on this program and been critical of the administration. for those who didn't get to hear your speech during the p

to back off its claims. >> that's manipulating the c.i.a. >> john: because the c.i.a. o easy to push around. on friday presidential press secretary jay carney insisted the white house role had been small. >> the only edit made by the white house or the state department to those talking points generated by the c.i.a. was a change from referring to the facility that was attacked in benghazi from consulate because it was not a consulate to diplomatic post. >> john: but arizona senator john mccain wouldn't buy it. >> for the president's smoke man to say that, well, there was only words or technical changes made in those e-mails is a flat-out untruth. i'd call it a cover-up. i would call it a coverup in the extent that there was willful removal of information which was obvious. >> john: for more, i'm very honored to welcome back to "viewpoint" thomas pickering ambassador what a pleasure it is to have you on the show. >> thank you john, it is nice to be back with you. >> thank you, and we enjoyed watching you with chairman issa. you corrected him on air letting us know that t

he has the president's trust in the c.i.a., he knows that. john is going to reduce that effort towards counterterrorism to some extent and move it back towards the traditional intelligence roles that it really does need. >> agencies don't give back money. if we're not going to be involved in as big a drone war, is the c.i.a. going to say, here's my black budget, which we can't even tell the american people about. only two committees really look at it but you can take $100 billion back. >> money is guarded more than anything else in this city. and i think what we don't know yet is, is when the president says, the threat has come down, we've got a more distributed threat here in the united states, the c.i.a. is going to do less drones, and the military will do more. what does that mean for the fourses? how does it shift? until those resources actually shift, none of this truly takes hold in the federal bureaucracy. >> michael leiter thank you very much. >>> up next, a major milestone for the boy scouts, stay with us. [ phil ] when you have joint

so the c.i.a. alking points and talked about the real dangers and talked about terrorists and stuff like that. next thing you know, the state department goes in there and they go, this is bad, essentially for hillary clinton. so you got to change all that. that flies in the face of what hillary said. she said the talking points was an intelligence product, but -- and that the intelligence community was the chief decider about what went into the talking points. and yet, that's not true. the intelligence community prepared stuff and then the state department is going, oh, no, you can't put that out there because that's going to make us look bad. so then they wound up changing everything. >> gretchen: but they did go along, the c.i.a. did go along with the changes. that's a big question for me this morning is two things: why would the c.i.a. go along with these obvious changes, changing the whole line of thinking, number one. number two, who is actually ultimately in charge of making these changes? in

first of all on the c.i.a. part of it, on the one hand at the beginning, i think the c.i.a. as they were developing the talking points, wanted to say hey, wait a minute, we warned you about that, we told you al qaeda was in there. and they said wait a minute, all of our people are in benghazi, we don't want our cover blown on that so they dialed back. that's way inside the beltway, nobody is going to follow that i agree with jonathan, the republicans were looking, second term, stasis in the presidency. let's get him for something. i think they also want a slow-motion swift boat the president. because they were irritated, the republicans were irritated beyond measure that a generation's worth of dominance that they had as the tough on crime party so to speak, in world afairs, had been taken away by the president, because he got osama bin laden. and because he had been tough. i think we need, we almost need like a scandal stock market here. we've got three, we have three stocks. we have irs, a.p. and beenon benghazi. i agree, benghazi's down. the other two are up. >> it's like

the c.i.a. did draft it and the c.i.a. did change it. the thing is, the c.i.a. the administration, here are the talking points. the admiration, in particular hillary clinton state department, and the white house said, wait a minute, we can't talk about this. go back and fix it. so the c.i.a. did change it. the c.i.a. did come up with it. but clearly the white house and the state department saw the political peril and said, go back to your room. fix this. >> brian: i don't know why the c.i.a. gave in. but listen what general petraeus on his e-mail. this is what he said. so for those of you who think it's the c.i.a.'s idea and were fine with the final product. here is his quote, frankly, i just as soon not use this. and he goes on to say, why is all this changed? no word. you don't have listed in here that we gave you warning about a hit on 9-11 in cairo as well as benghazi. >> gretchen: he also changed his story later on, which raises even more questions. why did he tell members of congress and the media that it actually was the islamic videotape? that is a huge

white house as iin said, made one minor change to thein talking points drafted by and produced by the c.i.a. and even prior to that made very few -- had very few inputs on it. the other discussions that went on prior to this, in an interagency process rehe flected the concerns of a variety of agencies who had a stake in this issue. >> our friend dana perino joins us by phone. your thoughts onrl the developments in the briefing today? >> hi, greg. quite a day. reminded me a little bit of what it was like to be in the white house briefing room in particular, the u.s. attorney scandal. but i don't ever remember being under the gun like jay carney was today. they would like to think that this briefing today will just solve everything and everyone will continue to move on and w pretend that benghazi never happened. however, i do think that the hearing, the coverage, theti additional information built on this steve hayes report from the "weekly standard" builds upon by jonathan karl of abc news who found there were 12 interiorai agencies. two things that remain to be answered, although there are

the c.i.a. t. that's why there is tension between the f.b.i. and nypd. he went on to sarks the guardian database is available for anyone to see. but if you don't know to look for somebody, why would you randomly plug in a name and look to cross check it? >> steve: just because there is a keyboard right this and the data is in there, that's one thing. but if you have somebody from your town, goes to russia, disappears for six months, there is an inclination he may become radicalized and you don't tell the local cop. what happened yesterday, they looked like they were pointing fingers. but ultimately if this gets everybody on the same page where they change things going forward, it will have been a good day. >> gretchen: it will. but people should still be upset because that was the whole point of creating all these agencies in the communication after 9-11. 12 years ago. i think people will still be frustrated to find out they still weren't doing it and by the way, the cops didn't know the names of

and, by default, this becomes the c.i.a. basic coast. the problem is nobody in the c.i.a. ents for him to come into the base without him being searched or checked. >> people have been too quick to blame jennifer. and that i reject totally because there were many people in this operation. people wanted to believe that the source was good. >> there were also pressures coming from the white house and saying pursue, pursue, pursue. >> i'm sure there were voices out there saying maybe not. maybe we should slow down. >> that happens in many operations. it didn't happen in this one. >> so they set up a plan to get him through the check points without him even being looked at by the guards. he gets further into the base, goes through a second check point, goes to a third check point and gets all the way into the innermost heart of the base, the inner sanctum. >> he gets out of the car on the wrong side and he's chanting the words in arabic, got is great. >> he hits the switch, blows himself up and there's a terrific explosion that kills almost everybody who's within direct sight of

next on "the young turks." >> a c.i.a. cer pinched by the russians as he begins to recruit for the u.s.? it sounds clumsy and crazy but that's what happened. it gets columnsier and crazy eyer. he has not declared persona non grata and will have to leave russia and makes positive relations between russia and the u.s. more difficult. according to a russian security agency ryan fogle is not in fact the third political secretary at the u.s. embassy in moscow. he is in fact according to them a c.i.a. agent. they caught him trying to recruit a russian special agent they say a counter terrorism agent working in the north caucuses to work for the c.i.a. >> we're back with our panel. it's a crazy story. ana kasparian ben mankiewicz, dorothy lucey, lindsay moran. what about this story it sounds so crazy and klumsily done. >> there's three possibilities. either he really worth for the c.i.a. and is the most incompetent spy ever, or he's a rogue diplomat spy wannabee conducting some crazy operation on his own. more likely, in my opinio

they took out any mention of al qaeda and removed all the c.i.a. warnings of imminent threat. bottom line. susan rice went on the sunday shows and, for political reasons, was not completely accurate about something in the middle east. you would never see a republican do something like that. folks, benghazi isn't even the best. i mean, worst scandal to hit the administration today. >> the white house also had to respond today to another fire storm. the admission by the i.r.s. that it gave extra scrutiny to organizations with the words, quote, tea party or, quote, patriot in their titles when they were applying for tax-exempt status. >> as early as march 2010 the cincinatti field office which was put in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status began searching for groups with politically identifiable names. according to the "washington post" of the 298 groups selected for special scrutiny 72 had the words "tea party" in their title >> stephen: the i.r.s. owes an apology to every tea party group in america including suzy johnson and her eight stuffed animals. folks,

secondly, this was a squabble between two agencies, the c.i.a. and the state department, about the wording. the person representing the state department happened to be victoria nuland who has worked for democrats and republicans alike, at one time worked for vice president cheney. so she's certainly not a partisan in this exchange about how they're going to term this. now, when it gets down to the point that senator ayot made about secretary clinton, let me tell you, there are two things you should remember. first, these been breathless nonstop coverage of this issue by fox from start to finish. and second, when the "washington post" looked at the assertion as to whether hillary clinton should be held responsible and what came out at the hearing, they awarded it four pinocchios, which means the lowest level of credibility you can possibly have. it is unsubstantiated. and yet the witch-hunt continues. >> schieffer: finally, senator ayotte, what should happen next in your point of view? >> bob, what i believe should happen next is that there are ser

so the administration goes ahead, the c.i.a. goes ahead and says, well, they violated security here and we're going to investigate it using that as a pretext when they were going to release the information the very next day themselves. >> so if the white house had gotten to make this announcement the way they wanted to, judy, would we be having this investigation? >> we don't know that because look, none of us has top security clearances here, right? we're at a bit of a disadvantage. but it's not correct that the government doesn't have the right to seize records without notifying a news organization. they do have that right if an ongoing criminal investigation or issue of national security is about to be compromised. and that's what the issue is here. did the department of justice have cause to do what it did and did it -- was its dragnet too broad? we don't know the answer yet. >> the media matters is that liberal watchdog group. they have taken a lot of heat here for sort of pushing the line that the department of justice, the

you've written about another government agency, the c.i.a. as part of the occupy movement. tell us about that. it is just amazing what's been going on around the country. not so much the c.i.a. as homeland security and state after state. all working together with the private sector. that's the shocking thing about this. to spy on occupy activists -- it is incredible that they're doing this. they just need to -- we need to take a look at this because what's happened is they're equating activists as terrorists. they're spying on them. they're sending people underground to infiltrate them and then they're saying to the banks, the occupy activists are trying to protest hey, we'll give you any information we need on them. it is not just occupy either, bill. it is the protestors against the american legislative exchange council, alec. in phoenix, for instance, there was a protest that both the occupy people and the protestors against the american legislative exchange council were planning. well, what did the phoenix police department do in coordinat

their story of the c.i.a. analysts and officers who'd tracked down the al qaeda chief is told in the documentary hbo film "manhunt", debuting tonight. it's based on the book by cnn's peter bergen. >> in 1997 osama bin laden had declared war on the united states and no one was paying attention. >> there was just warning after warning. we knew something huge was going to happen. >> warner: but long before that september day, their chase began in a near-total information vacuum. >> well we certainly didn't know that al qaeda existed. we didn't know there was a terrorist organization. we knew there was a very wealthy >> warner: the group tracking the elusive saudi militant was known as alec station, and was novel in its approach. >> the unique thing about alec station was the fusion of analysis and operations. we pushed the analysts and the >> warner: the analytical team at c.i.a. was comprised mostly of women; before 9/11 it was not a prime assignment. cindy storer was an analyst, part of what was called "the sist