Amazing how that keeps bouncing off you. The classified briefing was much less ambiguous, and was available to the President, his Cabinet, and the State Department.

Note that you have now simultaneously subscribed to two contradicting premises:

1) Obama knew it was a terror attack and immediately said so (the Rose Garden debate controversy)

2) The administration honestly thought it was all about the video, and spread that meme far and wide.

I have more of an "Occam's Razor" analysis:

Obama knew damn well what happened within a few days of the attack, if not hours. An organized terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy would have blown the bottom out of Obama's "Al Qaeda is on the run" meme prior to an election, so he decided to make it all about the video, confident (for whatever reason) that no further information would ever come out and that the compliant media would spike the story for him if it did. His Cabinet did what they were told.

I can't get at the WSJ article without a subscription.