On her show Thursday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow explained that the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya appeared to be the work of an organized jihadist group rather than the act of an angry mob.

She noted that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who was killed along with three other Americans, wrote a diplomatic cable in 2008 regarding Libya that was later released by WikiLeaks. The cable described Derna, a city not far from Benghazi where Stevens was killed, as a hotbed of al Qaeda activity.

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“One Libyan interlocutor likened young men in Derna to Bruce Willis’ character in the action picture ‘Die Hard,’ who stubbornly refused to die quietly,” Stevens wrote. “For them, resistance against coalition forces in Iraq is an important act of ‘jihad’ and a last act of defiance against the Qadhafi regime.”

Initial reports claimed the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was the result of Muslim anger over a crude anti-Islam film produced in the United States. But additional reports of the incident suggest the consulate faced an organized assault from heavily-armed militants sympathetic to al Qaeda.

“Anybody who tells you that what happened to our ambassador and our consulate was the result of a protest over an offensive movie, you should ask them why they think that,” Maddow said. “I mean, that was the first version of events we heard, that does not seem to explain what happened that night. It does not seem to be born out by the facts the more facts we get.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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