With Focus on Talking Points, Benghazi Attack's Big Issues Fade WASHINGTON - Three days after the lethal attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, asked intelligence agencies to write up some unclassified talking points on the episode. Reporters were besieging him and other legislators for comment, and he did not want to misstate facts or disclose classified information. More than 10 weeks later, the four pallid sentences that intelligence analysts cautiously delivered are the unlikely center of a quintessential Washington drama, in which a genuine tragedy has been fed into the meat grinder of election-year politics. In the process, the most important questions about Benghazi, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed on Sept. 11, have largely gotten lost: Were requests for greater security for diplomats in Libya ignored? Even if Al Qaeda's core in Pakistan has been decimated, what threat is posed by its affiliates and imitators in other countries where they have taken refuge? How can crucial diplomacy be conducted amid the dangerous chaos that has followed the toppling of dictators across the Arab world? Instead, it is the parsing of the talking points - who wrote them, altered them, recited them on television or tried to explain them - that could decide the fate of a leading candidate for secretary of state, Susan E. Rice, currently the United Nations ambassador. On Wednesday, for the second time in two weeks, Ms. Rice received a hearty endorsement from President Obama in the face of a continuing battering on Capitol Hill. "Susan Rice is extraordinary," he said in response to a reporter's question as he met at the White House with his cabinet for the first time since the election. Couldn't be prouder of the job that she's done. Now the talking points could also affect the chances of a top candidate for C.I.A. director, Michael Morell, the agency's acting director, who on Tuesday accompanied Ms. Rice to a briefing for some of her most vocal Senate critics and misspoke about changes in the original draft of the talking points. Intelligence officials said Wednesday that Mr. Morell's flub, which prompted a sharply worded statement from three Republican senators, was an insignificant mix-up: He said the F.B.I. had taken out a specific reference to Al Qaeda, when in fact that change was made by the C.I.A. The F.B.I. had added another phrase to the same sentence. "This was an honest mistake, and it was corrected as soon as it was realized," one official said. There is nothing more to this. But such earnest attempts to lower the political temperature have so far failed. As so often in Washington, the clashes over Benghazi have a semi-hidden personal element that adds to the emotion. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who led the initial lambasting of Ms. Rice, had been subjected to withering criticism by her in 2008 when he was running for president. And senators considering Ms. Rice's future are quite aware that her main rival for the job of secretary of state is their colleague Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. For now, the focus of Congress and the news media is mostly on language. For weeks after the Benghazi attack, Republicans accused Mr. Obama and his aides of avoiding labeling it "terrorism" for fear of tarnishing his national security record in the weeks before the Nov. 6 election. Since his re-election, that issue has faded, and the debate has shifted to the talking points. The facts about the talking points, like those about the Benghazi attack itself, have dribbled out slowly and awkwardly from intelligence officials who generally do not relish airing their internal deliberations. But there is now a fairly clear account. The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies rarely prepare unclassified talking points; more often, policy makers submit proposed public comments, and intelligence analysts check them for classified information or errors of fact. But in the storm of news media coverage after the killings in Benghazi, C.I.A. officials responded quickly to Mr. Ruppersberger's request on Sept. C.I.A. analysts drafted four sentences describing "demonstrations" in Benghazi that were "spontaneously inspired" by protests in Cairo against a crude video lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. Later assessments concluded there were no demonstrations. The initial version of the talking points identified the suspected attackers - a local militant group called Ansar al-Shariah, with possible links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an offshoot of the terrorist network in North Africa. Jeremy W. Peters and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.