Posted on 10/16/2012 11:47:57 PM PDT by Qbert
After the White House for the first time Thursday explicitly called the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya an act of terror, President Obama ducked an opportunity to clear up the confusion about the ever-changing narrative -- appearing to hold firm to the story that an anti-Islam film was to blame.
The president spoke Thursday at a town hall hosted by the Spanish-language Univision. He declined to get into specifics, even as lawmakers said after an intelligence briefing that there clearly was "some pre-planning" in last week's deadly attack.
Instead, Obama launched into an explanation about how the U.S. saw something it's seen before, where "there is an offensive video or cartoon directed at the Prophet Muhammad" and that is used "as an excuse by some to carry out inexcusable violent acts" against the U.S.
Obama stressed that we're "still doing an investigation" and said he didn't know whether Al Qaeda was involved.
"There are going to be different circumstances in different countries. And so I don't want to speak to something until we have all the information. What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests," he said.
[Snip]
Obama, in his public statement last Wednesday on the attack, referred to "acts of terror."
But no official had explicitly labeled the strike as such until National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olsen did on Wednesday during a Senate hearing.
This past Monday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declined to label the strike.
[Snip]
The White House still has not definitively backed off its claim that there's no evidence of a pre-planned strike.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
"What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests..."
- Barack Obama,
September 20, 2012
U.S. President Speaks to U.N. About YouTube Video Sept. 25, 2012
14 days after the attack.
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