No one is asking about who ordered the Stand down...
Well, you see, that's the beauty of this beautiful picture that Carney just painted for us:
"The CIA - it was them, you see - just wasn't sure enough about its facts and couldn't tell the White House definitively that there was a terror attack going on. For all they knew, it could still have been about a protest (after all, there was precedent for that possibility in Cairo!). So that's why we mentioned that there may have been a Libyan protest along with making sure that we also left open the possibility of other causes. I'm sure we communicated that to you all.
So based on all of that, the President had to make that difficult, gut-wrenching heroic call to have our gallant troops stand by (not 'stand down', per se) in the hopes that the situation would clarify itself in the next few hours.
Well unfortunately, at that point, our equally heroic Employees had already lost their lives, so it was too late to do anything further on their behalf. Rather than concern the American people with this information, the President wisely thought it best to simply keep to his original schedule and get back to the campaign while his administration worked hard to get to the bottom of this situation."