Eh, what? Romney was lying or idiotic, Obama was correct.
Obama September 12 (1 day after the attacks) Rose Garden speech transcript:
This actually happened. Obama called it “acts of terror”. The later parsing I remember from the likes of right wingers, saying that acts of terror doesn’t mean he called it terrorism was about as idiotic as watching pre-schoolers fight. They were factually wrong, Obama was right, full stop, end of story.
The wiki references this article as when “The White House, for the first time Thursday [September 20, 9 days after the attacks], declared the attack that killed Stevens and three other people a terrorist attack.”
I did some digging and the ultimate issue here and the source of the confusion was that the days immediately after the attacks were filled with speculation as investigators sorted through what happened. When Obama made his remarks the day after the attack, calling it an act of terror, there wasn’t a definitive conclusion as to what happened. Administration officials were also not speaking of one mindwhen they spoke to the media, which in turn lead to several different people speculating or refusing to speculate on what happened. There were beliefs that the Mohammed video on Youtube caused spontaneous reactions that lead to the attacks.
What the administration did wasn’t wrong or deceptive at all. Jay Carney on September 13 spoke of the protests, which was a REAL THING that happened in many parts of the world. There was no indication or ability of terrorists to create such a mass outpouring of anger to cover up one attack. They probably took advantage of it or by coincidence planned it on the same day.
The State Department spokeswoman quoted next talked about 2 different things: being careful to draw quick conclusions on the attacks, and acknowledging the anger from the videos. Not Obama’s fault Fox decided to link those together. There can certainly be anger to the video AND separate terrorist attacks.
Then Susan Rice basically echoed the previous sentiment to not jump to conclusions. Nobody was hiding anything, we just didn’t know for sure at that time.
Then Carney on Sep. 20 again repeated what Obama first said in the Rose Garden speech, but what right wingers seem to draw from that is that a planned terrorist attack must be different from the angry reaction to the Mohammed video. Whether or not there is a link is irrelevant, people can be mad about 2 things at once.
And finally Obama did link the video to terrorist motivation but seem to stop short of tying it directly to Benghazi. Which is sensible since we didn’t know for sure. There were protests, obviously some terrorist acts arose from that, separating those attacks from Benghazi until a link can be established is proper. Right wingers felt Obama should have blamed the attacks on terrorism immediately without knowing anything, and denied any anger stemming from the video because in their world, one should be able to criticize Islam without repercussions.
Taken all together, administration officials had to respond but went with what was known at the time. They passed that information along to the media and some of it conflicted, which is normal when the full story was not known. Right wingers saw a conspiracy instead of the simple process of investigation, and in their echo chamber the story evolved from “Obama administration is investigating conflicting reports” to “Obama never called it terror and covered it up”. That’s why Romney was so intent on getting Obama “on the record” during the debates, as if he found a smoking gun. His zeal in focusing on the specific words “act of terror” was wrong, he got caught, Crowley corrected him, and he and the GOP looked like fools.