I was reading through the headlines at Yahoo! and found this story, "After Libya misfire, pressure on Romney in the foreign policy debate." A bullet point below the link to the story suggested that Romney really, really messed up about his answer regarding Libya during the debate last week. Interested, I clicked on the story and was met with this:
As former governor of Massachusetts and an ex-businessman, [Romney] is out of his comfort zone when not focused on domestic and economic matters.
That was evident in last week's debate when he mistakenly said Obama took weeks to acknowledge that the Benghazi assault - which claimed the lives of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans - was a terrorist attack.
Obama, who said he had done so in a September 12 appearance in the White House Rose Garden, challenged Romney to "check the transcript" and chastised him for trying to score political points from a national tragedy. (Empahsis mine.)
Ok, let's check the transcript from the pertinent section of Obama's rose garden speech on September 12:
As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it. Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe.
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. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
The line in question, which was said near the end of his remarks, does not say conclusively that what specifically happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. He used the words "acts of terror," which suggests he is talking at a 30,000 feet level, a more generalized statement about our country and its people. Now, for arguments sake, a person could reasonably read into this statement that what occurred in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. But why then for the next two weeks did everyone in the administration, including but not limited to President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Susan Rice, Jay Carney, etc., tell the American people repeatedly that what happened in Benghazi was not a terrorist attack but the result of a 14 minute video that inflamed locals to retaliate, which then, in certain accounts, was co-opted by terrorists?
And if it was a terrorist attack and had nothing to do with a video, why did Obama say this earlier in the same remarks:
Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.
James Rosen, a Fox News correspondant, writing at the WSJ, gives us a good timeline of events regarding when President Obama gave up on the "video did it" meme:
Not until his afternoon appearance on "The View" on Sept. 25—the "two weeks" of delay that Mr. Romney alluded to in the debate—did the president offer Americans an explanation of Benghazi that made no reference to a protest over a video. The YouTube connection had figured prominently in his Benghazi pronouncements as late as Mr. Obama's Sept. 20 appearance on Univision, and even in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 25.
And McClatchy on Jay Carney and Susan Rice:
With images of besieged U.S. missions in the Middle East still leading the evening news, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney became the first official to back away from the earlier declaration that the Benghazi assault was a “complex attack” by extremists. Instead, Carney told reporters, authorities “have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” He added that there was no reason to think that the Benghazi attack wasn’t related to the video, given that the clip had sparked protests in many Muslim cities.
“The unrest that we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims, find offensive,” Carney said.
When pressed by reporters who pointed out evidence that the violence in Benghazi was preplanned, Carney said that “news reports” had speculated about the motive. He noted again that “the unrest around the region has been in response to this video.”
Carney then launched into remarks that read like talking points in defense of the U.S. decision to intervene in last year’s uprising against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi: that post-Gadhafi Libya, he said, is “one of the more pro-American countries in the region,” that it’s led by a new government “that has just come out of a revolution,” and that the lack of security capabilities there “is not necessarily reflective of anything except for the remarkable transformation that’s been going on in the region.”
By that Sunday, Sept. 16, the evolution of the narrative was complete when Rice, the U.N. ambassador, showed up on all five major morning talk shows to make the most direct public connection yet between the Benghazi assault and the incendiary video.
While she couched her remarks in caveats – “based on the information we have at present,” for example – Rice clearly intended to make the link before a large American audience.
According to the then-current assessment, Rice told ABC’s “This Week,” the attack was “a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo” – a reference to a demonstration triggered by the anti-Muslim video in which hundreds breached the U.S. Embassy compound there and tore down the American flag. Rice repeated the claim throughout her talk-show appearances and later blamed intelligence services for giving her incorrect information before she went on air.
Also, for anyone interested, this 7 minute video from Ed Henry of Fox News details the entire timeline.
I hope Mitt Romney and his team have put this all together so that he can make a persuasive case on Monday night on the failures of Benghazi and the entire Obama foreign policy in general.
(h/t to Scott Johnson for providing many of the links)
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