With Mitt Romney prepared to hunt down attackers in Libya, maybe we should clue in to how that country has reacted to the deadly assault on the US consulate in Benghazi. First of all, the newly elected Prime Minister has been given a vote of no confidence, which in Libya as in most Parliamentary democracies triggers the collapse of the government.

In a speech today at the Virginia Military Institute, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney will commit to arming Syrian rebels, and will attribute the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi to the “same forces that attacked our homeland on September 11th, 2001,” which under the still-active Authorization to Use Military Force commits the United States to military action in that country.

Tonight’s debate is supposed to be focused mainly on the economy, but the Romney campaign has worked hard to get the Benghazi consulate attack into the conversation. And given the shifting story from the White House and the potential implications, that might be a good idea.

Today the US State Department pulled out all of their government personnel from Benghazi – essential personnel and non-essential alike. In the wake of the attack on the US consulate, they have determined the city too unsafe, even after residents drove militia groups operating in Benghazi from their bases. The FBI has still not reached the site of the consulate attack as part of their investigation.

US intelligence agencies have officially described the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 that killed four Americans as a planned terrorist attack carried out by militants friendly to Al Qaeda. That’s distinct from it being an Al Qaeda attack, though the decentralized (and also battered) nature of the organization means that such a thing doesn’t exist anymore.

Iran will not submit a film for Academy Award consideration because of “an intolerable insult to the Prophet,” culture minister Muhammad Hosseini told INSA news.

An official with the National Counterterrorism Center officially described the September 11 assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, as a terrorist attack, though he hedged by saying it was an “unplanned” one.

As we learn more about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the probability that the militants involved were retaliating for a drone strike that took out a top al-Qaeda leader who happened to be Libyan.

Protests and attacks continued at Western embassies across the Middle East and North Africa today, and at this point they have little relationship to the anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims.” A reporter for the Times of London asked protesters outside the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday if they watched the clip of the film online, and to a man all of them said they hadn’t. The film is a pretext to stir up sentiments among a small but determined band of agitators. I’m not sure we can say too much about the sentiments of the populations of these Arab countries as a whole, but we can say that they contain at least an element of anti-Westernism.

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lively before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do now that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to the US Embassy in Yemen and possibly Iran.