Josh Rogin reports that a top administration official conceded what had long become obvious during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing yesterday:
The Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was in fact “a terrorist attack” and the U.S. government has indications that members of al Qaeda were directly involved, a top Obama administration official said Wednesday morning.
“I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” Matt Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in response to questioning from Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT) about the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
At the White House press briefing yesterday, Jay Carney softened his language from last week, when he had insisted the violence was prompted by the film and had nothing to do with 9/11. While he wouldn’t confirm reports of terrorism, Carney referred to the “precedent in the past where bad actors, extremists who are heavily armed…have taken advantage of and exploited situations that have developed in order to either attack westerners or western assets or Americans or American assets.”
Still, Carney maintained that there was no indication the attack was planned in advance. “Based on the information we had at the time and we have now, we do not yet have indication that it was preplanned or premeditated,” he said.
In other words, a group of terrorists may have just lucked out and come across a spontaneous U.S. embassy protest on September 11, while they were transporting mortars and rocket-propelled grenades through Libya. Not ones to let an opportunity go to waste, they decided to take advantage of the situation. See? A completely reasonable explanation.
The White House is now hastily backtracking on the previous claim that this wasn’t a terrorist attack. But they still won’t acknowledge the advance planning, because that would mean they could have potentially prevented it, but failed to do so.
At the Daily Witness, Ivan Kenneally writes:
Of course, it is infuriating to be bombarded with attempts to spin the sad events of September 11th as feckless as the precautions taken to prevent it. The cavalier abuse of the truth, besides its grinding condescension, sullies the memory of those who died for their country, men already dishonored by the lack of effort devoted to their safety, by the incompetence that compromised their lives. The Obama administration is so singularly obsessed with pursuing every avenue that leads to their own exculpation that they have sacrificed even the bare appearance of coherence, no longer make common cause with the demands of common sense. The families of those brave Americans slain have surely noticed this disrespect with sadness, and our enemies have surely noticed, too, with an emboldening.
Good points. Some may dismiss this messaging debacle as a minor concern, but what signal does our government send to the world when it responds to terrorist attack by condemning fringe anti-Islam YouTube videos and trying to get them pulled from the internet? It looks either completely clueless or completely spineless. This was an enormous blunder by the White House.
I thought Romney was the one who rashly jumped to a conclusion and then screwed up the messaging about the attack?
It's about time that the Obama administration recognized what most observers already knew. This was terrorism. But think for a moment what it would mean if the administration's earlier explanation was true, that the out breaks and demonstrations were simply a response to a bad video. Thus we would have a new and twisted standard for protest. Protests would have stepped up from rhetoric and placards, from effigies and chants, to uncontrolled violence with rocket launchers, grenades, and rifles. Is that really how we want to classify protests? Bring a sign, bring a gun, bring a rocket—there's no difference because it's all about the protest of a perceived slight. Nothing more. n nIs this what protests would be today? Violence and murder as sisters to speeches and signs. Can anyone really suggest that they should be seen as equivalent or, what's more, justified? n nIt's good the administration now says it was terrorism. And, to add to it, this terrorism need not be planned or provoked or organized by known terrorist groups. To violently attack others, to burn a foreign embassy, to murder an ambassador, to do these things for whatever reason is terrorism. It's about time our government recognized them as such.
"The White House is now hastily backtracking on the previous claim that this wasn’t a terrorist attack. " nI'm losing track. Is it Eastasia or Eurasia that we have always been at war against?
that's a doubleplusungood thought chaver. synchronizing our watches to thirteen… n n
What are the odds that Ostinko is deliberately LYING? 365 to 1 that he is deliberately LYING.
Obama needed a week's breathing space to shift the focus to Romney's fabricated gaffes while he tamped down the situation, sent in some Marines to secure those embassies securable and pull out diplomats whose hostile hosts refused to buy into that. And Romney didn't follow-up throughout the week to prevent the narrative that, somehow, he owned the debacle. n nNow, step by step, they can back step into something closer to the universe we all live in while maintaining the ideological props of the Obama outreach to international Islam: near-riot/riots without RPGs are the understandable Muslim reaction to Islamaphobia, well the Islamaphobia expressed in obscure cartoons and youtube clips nobody has heard of until the imams publicize them. If it is impossible to deny that Islamic self-expression means blowing up our embassies and killing our diplomats, then the extremists responsible don't represent mainstream Islamic protest and are not necessarily terrorists. If it is impossible to deny that they are organized terrorists then they could well not be Al Qaeda that has absolutely nothing to do with the religion of peace which has bequeathed us astronomy, differential calculus, and the internal combustion engine. If it is impossible to deny that they are associated with Al Qaeda then … hey, that Romney is one rich SOB isn't he,
"In other words, a group of terrorists may have just lucked out and come across a spontaneous U.S. embassy protest on September 11, while they were transporting mortars and rocket-propelled grenades through Libya" n nWell stated. And then they lucked out a second time when they stumbled across the super-secret "safe house" where the ambassador was moved to for his safety and they just happened to be carrying more heavy weaponry which they proceeded to use. n nCarney actually expects people to believe this garbage????