America's free speech retreat: the Obama administration's shoddy response to the consulate attack in Libya.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Barack Obama

ON THE 11TH anniversary of the September II attacks, scores of men armed with rocket propellers, hand grenades, and automatic rifles assaulted two separate U.S. diplomatic buildings in Benghazi, Libya, for more than four hours, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Despite clear evidence of planning and the symbolism of September 11, officials in Barack Obama's White House spent the next week blaming the attacks on a crude, straight-to-YouTube trailer for an anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims, made by an ex-convict living in Cerritos, California.

"What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended very many people around the world," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said September 16 on Fox News Sunday. "It began spontaneously in Benghazi, as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo," Rice asserted on ABC's This Week that same day, "where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video."

Most of Rice's claims were soon debunked. CBS News reported September 20 that there had been no spontaneous demonstration outside the consulate in Benghazi. Reuters, The Daily Beast, and other outlets followed up with reports that the day after the attack the administration already had good intelligence indicating that it was a planned, foreshadowed assault by militants connected to Al Qaeda.

Even more damaging than the White House's blame-shifting spin was the notion, reinforced by President Obama, that a single piece of bad art in California could "spark" violence in more than 20 countries. It's an inapt metaphor, giving the mistaken impression that the arsonist is not the one lighting the match but rather the one who allegedly makes the pyromaniac angry. Such confusion of responsibility is materially eroding our ability to speak freely, while providing an incentive for those who wish to attack us into silence.

As mobs of angry Muslims headed toward U.S. diplomatic missions in Cairo and elsewhere on September 11, one of the State Department's first responses was to serially condemn Innocence of Muslims, the trailer for which had been plucked out of months-long Internet obscurity by an Egyptian television personality the week before. The U.S. embassy in Cairo released a statement accusing the film of "religious incitement," adding, "We firmly reject...