U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said that the attacks on a United States consulate in Benghazi which took the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomats were spontaneous and not premeditated on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
“But our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice said.
Rice continued: “We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to — or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo. And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that as you know in — in the wake of the revolution in Libya are — are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there.”
