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| FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2012 file photo, a Libyan man investigates the inside of the U.S. Consulate, after an attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens on the night of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya. U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a mob upset about an American-made, anti-Muslim movie. It is unclear whether anyone outside the CIA saw the cable at that point or how high up in the CIA the information went. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Sensing a moment of political vulnerability on national
security, Republicans pounced Friday on disclosures that President
Barack Obama's administration could have known early on that militants,
not angry protesters, launched the attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya.
Within
24 hours of the deadly attack, the CIA station chief in Libya reported
to Washington that there were eyewitness reports that the attack was
carried out by militants, officials told The Associated Press. But for
days, the Obama administration blamed it on an out-of-control
demonstration over an American-made video ridiculing Islam's Prophet
Muhammad.
Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee, led Friday's charge.
"Look
around the world, turn on your TV," Ryan said in an interview with WTAQ
radio in the election battleground state of Wisconsin. "And what we see
in front of us is the absolute unraveling of the Obama administration's
foreign policy."
As a security matter, how
the Obama administration immediately described the attack has little
effect on broader counterterrorism strategies or on the hunt for those
responsible for the incident, in which the U.S. ambassador and three
other Americans were killed. And Republicans have offered no explanation
for why the president would want to conceal the nature of the attack.
But
the issue has given Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney an
opportunity to question Obama on foreign policy and national security,
two areas that have received little attention in an election dominated
by the U.S. economy. Obama's signature national security accomplishment
is the military's killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
Ryan was teeing up the issue for Monday's presidential debate on foreign policy.
"I'm excited we're going to have a chance to talk about that on Monday," Ryan said.
Obama,
speaking Thursday on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," insisted that
information was shared with the American people as it came in. The
attack is under investigation, Obama said, and "the picture eventually
gets filled in."
"What happens, during the
course of a presidency, is that the government is a big operation and
any given time something screws up," Obama said. `'And you make sure
that you find out what's broken and you fix it."
The
report from the station chief was written late Wednesday, Sept. 12, and
reached intelligence agencies in Washington the next day, intelligence
officials said. It is not clear how widely the information from the CIA
station chief was circulated.
U.S.
intelligence officials have said the information was just one of many
widely conflicting accounts, which became clearer by the following week.
Democrats
have spent the past week explaining the administration's handling of
the attack. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said a
period of uncertainty typically follows attacks.
"In
the wake of an attack like this, in the fog of war, there's always
going to be confusion," Clinton said. "And I think it is absolutely fair
to say that everyone had the same intelligence. Everyone who spoke
tried to give the information that they had."
On
Tuesday, Obama and Romney argued over when the president first called
it a terrorist attack. In his Rose Garden address the morning after the
killings, Obama said, "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of
this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the
values that we stand for."
But Republicans
said he was speaking generally and didn't specifically call the Benghazi
event a terror attack until weeks later. Until then, key members of the
administration were blaming an anti-Muslim movie circulating on the
Internet as a precipitating event.
This
Wednesday, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., put the blame on the director of national
intelligence, James Clapper.
"I think what
happened was the director of intelligence, who is a very good
individual, put out some speaking points on the initial intelligence
assessment," Feinstein said in an interview with news channel CBS 5 in
California. "I think that was possibly a mistake."
Congress
is asking the administration for documents about the attack, in hopes
of building a timeline of what the government knew and when.
"The
early sense from the intelligence community differs from what we are
hearing now," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said. "It ended up being
pretty far afield, so we want to figure out why."
Rep.
William "Mac" Thornberry, R-Texas, a member of the House Intelligence
and Armed Services committees, said: "How could they be so certain
immediately after such events, I just don't know. That raises suspicions
that there was political motivation."
Obama
has weathered similar criticisms before. After both the failed bombing
of a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 and the attempted car
bombing in Times Square in 2010, the Obama administration initially said
there were no indications of wider terrorist plots. The Christmas Day
bomber turned out to be linked to al-Qaida and the Times Square bomber
was trained by the Pakistani Taliban.
Nevertheless,
polls have consistently showed voters trust Obama over Romney to handle
terrorism. If Obama was worried that Monday's debate would change that,
he showed no signs of it Thursday night.
Speaking at a charity dinner, he offered this preview of the debate: "Spoiler alert: We got bin Laden."
