As was noted on AT recently, a retired State Department Foreign Service Officer said: "Our Benghazi facility was a half-baked operation. It was not a consulate. It was a 'facility' with an ambiguous purpose, at least as far as the unclassified world is concerned."

If it was not a consulate, then it was not sovereign United States territory.  This fact has important legal consequences -- as was only just touched upon (at ~13:00, but pick up at ~10:00 for full context) by Newt Gingrich on Fox News in his appearance on Greta Van Susteren's Oct. 30 show (caution: auto-play).

One of these consequences may be that the United States had no "legal" authority under international law unilaterally to violate sovereign Libyan airspace by sending in a military force or by engaging attackers with U.S. aircraft, irrespective of the fact that U.S. citizens, including an ambassador, were the ones being attacked.

The purpose of this "facility" and its associated "safe-house" is increasingly becoming less ambiguous, as J.D. Longstreet points out:

That CIA "safe-house" has troubled me from the very beginning. ... What was the CIA doing there? There was no embassy in Benghazi. In fact, the building attacked was not even a consulate. If anything, it was a "mission" ... this was NOT an embassy.

It no longer reasonably can be denied that what was going on in Benghazi was "Fast and Furious in the Maghreb" being run by Ambassador Stevens, et al. at the direction of "fill in the blank."

He continues:

A few weeks ago, there was a report that Libyan militia members had been ordered to turn-in the weapons that had been supplied them in their struggle to overthrow Qaddafi. That report confirmed that many of those weapons had been turned in. Where did those weapons go? Perhaps, to the Syrian rebels?  It has been suspected for some time now that the US has been supplying small arms to the rebels in Syria for a while-even though the Obama Administration denies it.

Read the rest of that whole piece and see if you concur that "there was a covert operation underway-one so black that sacrificing the lives of four Americans was deemed 'worth it' by our leaders in Washington."

The central issue at the heart of the Benghazi fiasco and cover-up would appear to be that Team Obama cannot admit that it could not use the military to combat this attack on this "black" operation, the existence of which it cannot admit.

As put by Bob Owens:

We've also heard claims about why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to begin with: some sources suggest this was part of an Obama administration plot to arm Syrian rebels. ... If Ambassador Stevens was facilitating weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian Islamist forces aligned with al-Qaeda, via his Turkish alliance, then we are at a troubling, perhaps catastrophic point in this republic's history.  We have been at war with the Islamist hydra of al-Qaeda for more than a decade, and now sources are accusing a sitting president of arming this enemy.

In the words of Sir Walter Scott, "Oh! what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive!"

Thus far, the consulate vs. "facility" issue, not surprisingly, seems not to have been noted elsewhere.