Benghazi investigationThe administration's struggle to define Benghazi attack as “terrorism”
Administration critics on the Hill now focus more of their attention on the changing explanations administration officials have offered in public as to the nature of the attack and the identity of the perpetrators. Yesterday, President Obama said the he used the term “terrorism” early on, and that he dispatched a senior official to brief lawmakers in the issue. He is right – up to a point: On 12 September Obama did describe the attack as an “act of terror,” and on 19 September counterterrorism director Matt Olsen used the term in response to a senator’s question, but otherwise, until 20 September, all high-level administration officials, including Obama, declined to attribute the attack to terrorists.
With the Senate Intelligence Committee set to release its report about the Benghazi attack, a report which, like the report by Accounting Review Board, is going to support, with some criticism, the administration’s position on the issue of securing the Benghazi compound and on the absence of a viable military option to influence events on the ground during the firefight at the compound — Republicans on the Hill are directing their attention to the issue which seems to give the administration more serious problems: the changing explanations administration officials have offered in public as to the nature of the attack and the identity of the perpetrators.
President Obama appears to be feeling the heat, and on Monday, during a joint press conference with U.K prime minister David Cameron, pushed back by describing lawmakers’ efforts to find out the reason for the changing explanations as a “sideshow.”
The president said he himself used the term “terrorism” early on to describe the nature of the attack, and that he even sent an official to the Hill to talk with lawmakers and clarify matters. The president said these two facts are proof that there was no cover up on the part of his administration, and no effort to minimize terrorism as being the reason for the Benghazi attack.
Fox News reports, though, that the president’s Monday assertions do not agree with the facts.
Obama did use the term “acts of terror” on 12 September, in a statement to the American people he made in the Rose Garden. This was the first, and last, time the president and high-level administration officials used the word “terrorism” for quite a while.
The official Obama sent to brief lawmakers, National Counterterrorism Center director Matt Olsen, testified on 19 September and used the word “terrorism” to describe the attack – but the next day, 20 September, Obama declined to do so, responding to a reporter who asked him whether the attack in Benghazi was carried out by terrorists, saying “I don’t want to speak to something until we have all the information.”
With Republican lawmakers’ focus now almost exclusively on the post-Benghazi attack period, Obama on Monday was more detailed than before in trying to bolster his claim that his administration did not water down its early public announcements.
Obama said: “The day after it happened [12 September] I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”
This is true, but later the same day —
