President Barack Obama and his administration did not only mislead the American people, they misled themselves on what happened the night of Sept. 11 in Benghazi, a top Romney foreign-policy advisor told The Cable ahead of Monday night’s debate.
Regardless of whether or not Obama called the events in Benghazi an “act of terror” in the days following the attack, Mitt Romney does not believe the administration’s insistence that the attack was related to an anti-Islam video was based solely on reports from the intelligence community, Romney advisor and former National Security Council official Eliot Cohen said in an interview.
“This notion that this was all because the intelligence community gave them bad information is just not correct. The idea that this was all attributable to the trailer for a crackpot movie was just not true,” Cohen said. “That’s a big fundamental problem that the administration has to deal with, that they did mislead people for a period of time, and what’s even scarier, they misled themselves.”
Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have reported that the intelligence community didn’t formally revise its view that there may have been a protest related to the video until Sept. 22; the intelligence community maintains, according to the Times, that militants involved in the attack were inspired by the breach of the U.S. Embassy walls in Cairo.
But the Romney campaign’s critique is broader than its claims of mishandled intelligence.
More at Foreign Policy
