Libya, Protests, and Spin

I hope you will all have seen the news breaking this morning prior to the meeting of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.   I first saw it on Powerline, in a piece by John Hinderaker.   Now, Paul Mirengoff of that site has a piece about leaking classified briefing information to Leslie Gelb, a friend of Joe Biden’s.  Perhaps this was to ensure that the president read or heard the information?  Maybe not.

Gelb defended Rice by blaming the intelligence community. He wrote:

Her mistake was taking the initial intelligence at face value. The White House briefers made the same error, and so did I. I too repeated in an op-ed on The Daily Beast what the intelligence briefers told me.

I have a question and it is a real question because my sense of the timeline of events is sketchy.  My memory is that the news about the death of the ambassador and the claim that it was caused by a protest gone bad was accompanied by the information about the video, the infamous “Muhammad Movie Trailer”.  Here is my question: How did that video come to light?  Was it common knowledge and were there protests of the video prior to the September 11 attack on Ambassador Stevens?   Do I misremember that the State Department threw out the explanation of the horrible anti-Islamic video as the cause of the Libyan attack and then the world erupted in protests?