WASHINGTON — 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 told radio station WTAQ 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 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.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN that the administration didn't understand the gravity of the situation in Benghazi and as a result bad decisions were made to promote the video as the root of the violence.
"By continuing to promote the video, by escalating the value and credibility of that video to a presidential level, by buying ads in Pakistan that actually fueled protests all across Pakistan — and so, this is what's so disturbing to me: Were those decisions based on intelligence? I think it's hard to say yes. So why did they do it? That's the question we need to get answered."
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 their debate Tuesday in Kentucky, 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.
Then Wednesday, Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., put the blame on 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 told San Francisco television station KPIX. "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."
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