After Benghazi Attack, Talk Lagged Behind Intelligence WASHINGTON — Even as Susan E. Rice took to the Sunday talk shows last month to describe the Obama administration’s assessment of the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, intelligence analysts suspected that the explanation was outdated. Ms. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, has said that the judgments she offered on the five talk shows on Sept. 16 came from talking points prepared by the C.I.A., which reckoned that the attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans had resulted from a spontaneous mob that was angry about an anti-Islamic video that had set off protests elsewhere. That assessment, described to Ms. Rice in briefings the day before her television appearances, was based on intercepted communications, informants’ tips and Libyan press reports, officials said. Later that Sunday, though, American intelligence analysts were already sifting through new field reports that seemed to contradict the initial assessment. It would be several days, however, before the intelligence agencies changed their formal assessment based on those new reports, and informed administration officials about the change. Intelligence officials say such a lag is typical of the ever-changing process of piecing together shards of information into a coherent picture fit for officials’ public statements. Gov. Mitt Romney and Congressional Republicans have sharply criticized Ms. Rice’s comments and the administration’s shifting public positions on the cause of the attack, criticisms that Mr. Romney will probably reprise in the final presidential debate on Monday night. On Sunday, Congressional Republicans cited the administration’s response to the attack as symptomatic of larger leadership failings. “This is going to be a case study, studied for years, of a breakdown of national security at every level, failed presidential leadership — senior members of the Obama administration failed miserably,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.” The gap between the talking points prepared for Ms. Rice and the contemporaneous field reports that seemed to paint a much different picture illustrates how the process of turning raw field reports, which officials say need to be vetted and assessed, into polished intelligence assessments can take days, long enough to make them outdated by the time senior American officials utter them. Intelligence officials, alarmed that their work has been turned into a political football, defend their approach, noting that senior administration officials receive daily briefings that reflect the consensus of the nation’s array of intelligence agencies, but can also dip into the fast-moving stream of field reports, with the caveat that that information is incomplete and may be flat wrong. “A demand for an explanation that is quick, definite and unchanging reflects a naïve expectation — or in the present case, irresponsible politicking,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said at an intelligence symposium on Oct. 9. The Associated Press reported Friday, for instance, that within 24 hours of the attack, the C.I.A.’s station chief in Tripoli, Libya, e-mailed headquarters that witnesses said the assault was mounted by heavily armed militants. But intelligence officials said Sunday that one report was not enough to establish the attack’s nature. According to interviews with a half-dozen American officials, including policy makers and intelligence officials, here is a rough chronology of what happened, some details of which The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. On Sept. 13, Ms. Rice and other cabinet-level officials were told about the assessment that there had been protests at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi. “The first briefing was exactly as one would expect in the early aftermath of a crisis,” an American intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the continuing F.B.I. investigation of the assault. “It carefully laid out the full range of sparsely available information, relying on the best analysis available at the time.” Briefers said extremists were involved in attacks that appeared spontaneous.