He was conflating because that was something the intelligence community believed at first and either way whether it was a mob of people angry over a video or a group that had planned it ahead of time it was terrorism. There's no denial of terrorism in saying the video was a possible cause. 

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, then. I could understand there being some initial confusion with all these protests, and maybe they could have thought that one of them had just gotten way out of hand. But that doesn't seem to be the case. There had been warnings that al-Qaeda was going to hit the place, and Greg Hicks briefed Clinton that very night that it was an attack and mentioned Ansar al-Sharia by name. The emails show that, at the very least, Nuland was very worried about this being used for political purposes and was trying to change the talking points to blunt any Republican attacks that might come from it. I'm not at all convinced that the "act of terror" stuff in the days after was a reference to Benghazi instead of 9/11. Taken out of context it's impossible to tell if even the "no act of terror will go unpunished" line is a reference to Benghazi because, again, it could just as easily refer to bin Laden.

Without falling into the conspiracy stuff floating around (the consulate was arming Syrian rebels and the administration denied sending help because they didn't want people to find out, or whatever it is) the only explanation I have for the constant flogging of that video long after they knew better is that either the Obama campaign couldn't bear to let it be known that al-Qaeda had once again drawn blood on 9/11, or the State Department didn't want people to know about their failures to address the security problems at the consulate, or both.

http://youtu.be/ZSEM2rYjHcI

He specifically mentions that last night there was an attack in Benghazi and then talks about American freedom is contingent on the sacrifices of people like those that died followed by an act of terror won't change the US. Why would he still be referring to the original 9/11 right after mentioning the new attack and those that died? 

And then he follows it up with justice will be done for this act and that their deaths are in stark contrast to the attackers and that their death stood for liberty. 

It could be that he was. It's just not particularly clear to me. I agree that whether it's a mob angered by a video or a designated terrorist group, such an act of murder could still technically be called a terrorist attack. So I'm not particularly concerned with what words he used and whether or not he called it "terrorism" but with the misleading about the video and the way we were all allowed to think it was just a protest that had turned violent. Did they just not want to use the words "al-Qaeda" because it was politically problematic, or what?

Just because a person comes forward and says they killed someone, it doesn't mean they did. A confessed murderer still has an investigation to find evidence proving his guilt.
In the same vein, who was to say that it was a terrorist attack definitively? It looks to me like they looked at the evidence, made doubly sure that the evidence was concrete, and did an investigation....and meanwhile saying, 'we think it's an attack but, well, there's a lot of variables. We think it could also just be part of this protest and terrorists are taking credit for it, we just don't know. We'll have to investigate to make sure everything is 100% accurate'

This is pretty much what I believe except replace attack  with 'whether it was Al Qaeda attack or someone else attacking'. 

I can think of another:

CIA wanted it to appear as if we were not mobilizing our forces against a known group. 'No, no, we were sure it was because of a protest', the machinegunner said, standing in the rubble of the group hq. So the CIA pushed the video story.

If I was going to speculate it might have a lot to do with the definition of terrorism when it comes to media narrative. I think an angry mob attacking civilians with weapons for a political or religious reason is terrorism, but some people are satisfied with limiting the definition of terrorism to specific kinds of attacks like trained gunmen, bombers and so on belonging to organized terrorist groups. Usually being non-state actors or backed by states but not being military personnel. 

'An act of terror' sounds like terrorism to me, but maybe some people think a 'terrorist attack' means something else? Linguistically they're the same thing. So it might be after saying 'act of terror' the first two days, the administration thought they shouldn't use that language until they knew specifically which terrorist group did what? I can only speculate that they did this while waiting to be 100% sure what happened. 

So by being extra cautious after the first two days of the attack and not using the word terror for a few days to avoid making claims without evidence and sounding incompetent, they ironically sounded incompetent and confused. To me this is bad media management, not a cover up. 

If the definition of terrorism was 'any act of violence against unarmed civilians for political/or religious reasons' then none of the semantics conflict would come up. 

We now know for sure that most of the people in the consulate were CIA. I think 20 out of the 30 that were evacuated were CIA and 2 of the 4 that died. There's also been reporting in the media about the CIA working to collect weapons like surface to air shoulder held missile launchers from local militias and that might have spurred action by the Ansar Al Sharia too because they were one of many local armed groups (militias) in addition to being a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda. 

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/15/analysis-cia-role-in-benghazi-underreported/

Also, LA Times is reporting that the information about a protest attack came from the CIA originally. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-na-benghazi-emails-20130516,0,75839.story

Excerpts: "But a senior administration official said Wednesday that Michael Morell, then the acting CIA director, already had decided to remove references to the CIA warnings. The White House released a photocopy of what it said was Morell's hand-marked copy."

"In December, a report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies didn't look hard at "whether a protest had in fact occurred." The CIA's description of a protest in Benghazi was based on "news reports and on other information available to intelligence agencies," the report said."

Lol what? I posted research backing up that point...you posted nothing of the sort showing yours. I think it's clear which person is being objective about this. Faith does indeed promote irrational thought, so I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that you're a flat-earth christian fundamentalist.

I'm just posting what it says. 

I even used that study to further my point about liberal bias.

I mean this is a huge difference between arguably the most polarized bias in the media. It shows devotion on both sides to discredit the candidate with opposing views, but also shows more of a devotion from the left - a staggering 25% more hate on articles with tone. 

There is an overwhelming majority of democrats in journalism, so it only makes sense that this is the case with most of the mainstream media. I believe the number was close to 80%.

And here we see that MSNBC doesn't care to post factual stories and is fine posting incessant op-ed pieces, which essentially confirms a bias, whereas Fox actually deals with a near even split, along with CNN.

All I see is constant ammunition for me to make the objective statement that there is left-lean to most media outlets and thus there is a left-lean as a whole.