WASHINGTON — The White House is now describing the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, as a “terrorist attack,” a shift in emphasis after days of describing the lethal assault as a spontaneous burst of anger over an anti-Islamic film made in California.
“It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters traveling Thursday on Air Force One. “Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials.”
Also Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the creation of a panel to investigate the attack. The panel, called an Accountability Review Board, will be led by Thomas Pickering, a veteran diplomat and former undersecretary of state. The board is authorized by a 1986 law intended to strengthen security at U.S. diplomatic missions.
The four Americans killed included J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. U.S. officials have blamed militants who rushed to take advantage of anger over a video made in the United States that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad.
Obama administration officials initially said the attack had not been planned in advance. But, with the election less than two months away, they have come under criticism from Republican lawmakers who say the administration is playing down a threat for which it was unprepared.
When U.S. Sen. John Mc-Cain, R-Ariz., called the attack an “an act of terror” last weekend, a spokesman for the Obama campaign suggested that the senator was being political.
White House officials, until now, have avoided calling the attack a terrorist attack, but in congressional testimony Wednesday, Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described it that way. Neither official offered any additional information about the assault.
On Sunday, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said the attack apparently began as a “spontaneous reaction” to the news of a Cairo protest.
But later “there were extremist elements that joined and escalated the violence. Whether they were al-Qaida affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremist or al-Qaida itself, I think, is one of the things we’ll have to determine,” Rice said on CBS’ Face the Nation.
On Tuesday, Clinton said there had been no intelligence warnings that an attack was imminent. She said FBI investigators had arrived in Tripoli and that the United States, with the Libyan authorities, would find those responsible. She did not discuss any potential ties to al-Qaida but blamed extremists opposed to the democratic changes in places like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt for the violence and protests around the region.
Asked whether he drew a connection between the Libyan attack and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon 11 years ago, Carney said: “The attack occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, so we use the same calendar at the White House as you do.”
President Barack Obama said Thursday that extremists used the anti-Islam video as an excuse to assault U.S. interests, including the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.
Speaking at a candidate forum on Spanish-language network Univision, Obama said the attack is under investigation.
Asked if the attack was by al-Qaida, Obama said, “We don’t know yet.”
Obama said the U.S. has insisted on and received cooperation from governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and other countries as it investigates the attack. He said groups affiliated with al-Qaida “have not gone away” and remain dangerous.
Meanwhile, Libya has arrested eight people in the fatal U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi and is seeking leaders of the groups believed to be involved who have fled abroad, the country’s prime minister-elect said in an interview Thursday.
Mustafa Abushagur, who was named premier earlier this month, said Ansar al-Shariah was one of the groups thought to be involved. Several suspects are being sought after crossing the border into Egypt, Abushagur said in his Tripoli office. All the people arrested so far are Libyans, he said.
Elsewhere, U.S. Embassy advertisements condemning the anti-Islam video appeared on Pakistani television Thursday in an attempt to undercut anger against the United States. Hundreds of youths, however, clashed with security officials as they tried in vain to reach the embassy in Islamabad amid anger in many countries over the film’s vulgar depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.
The ads reflected efforts by the U.S. government to distance itself from the video in a country where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Violence linked to the movie has left at least 30 people in seven countries dead. Two people have died in protests in Pakistan.
The television ads in Pakistan feature clips of Obama and Clinton during news appearances in Washington in which they condemned the video. Their words were subtitled in Urdu.
“We absolutely reject its content and message,” said Clinton in the advertisement.
The advertisements end with the seal of the American Embassy in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland said the ad was produced by the embassy, which spent $70,000 to air the 30-second spot on seven Pakistani television stations. Pakistan is the only country where the ads are running. The embassy wanted to run the ads because it determined that the messages of Obama and Clinton were not reaching enough of the Pakistani public through regular news reporting, Nuland said.
In an e-mail, the embassy in Islamabad sent out a link to video of ordinary Americans condemning the anti-Islam film, which appeared on You-Tube. The State Department compiled the clips to give foreign audiences an idea of what regular Americans and their religious leaders thought of the video, Nuland said.
Protests have tapered off in many countries, but Thursday in Pakistan more than 2,000 people tried to reach the U.S. Embassy inside a guarded enclave that houses embassies and government offices.
Riot police used tear gas and batons to keep the stonethrowing demonstrators away from the enclave, and hundreds of shipping containers were lined up to cordon off the area. The government later called in army troops to protect the restricted areas when it appeared that police could not handle the situation.
Most of the protesters appeared to be students affiliated with the Islamist hard-line Jamaat-e-Islami party. Flags from other Islamist groups, Jamaat-u-Dawa and the al-Qaida linked militant group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, could be seen flying among the crowd. Demonstrators also rallied peacefully in the Pakistani cities of Lahore, Chaman, Karachi and Peshawar.
The demonstrations are expected to grow today, the traditional Muslim day of prayer. The Pakistani government deemed today a national holiday so people can demonstrate peacefully against the film.
That decision drew rare praise from the Pakistani Taliban, which is usually at war with the government. A spokesman for the militant group said it welcomed the decision but also thought the government should expel all American diplomats.
Tunisia’s government meanwhile has banned any protests today against the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, over its publication of lewd, crude caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
Interior Minister Ali Larayedh told Tunisian radio that authorities sensed that some groups were planning to pillage and carry out violence after weekly communal prayers at mosques today.
In Indonesia, the U.S. Consulate in the country’s third-largest city of Medan was closed for a second day because of demonstrations. Fifty students from an Islamic university gathered in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province in Indonesia, to protest the film.
In Iran, hundreds of students and clerics gathered outside the French Embassy in Tehran to protest the publication of the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the French weekly. In Kabul, a few hundred people demonstrated against the film before dispersing peacefully.
Meanwhile, an actress who appeared in the anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in the Middle East lost her legal challenge Thursday to have the 14-minute trailer taken down from YouTube.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Luis Lavin rejected the request from Cindy Lee Garcia because she wasn’t able to produce any agreement she had with the makers of Innocence of Muslims, and the man behind the film hadn’t been served with a copy of her lawsuit.
Information for this article was contributed by Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times; by Kathleen Hennessey of the Tribune Washington Bureau; by Munir Ahmed, Rebecca Santana, Asif Shahzad, Matthew Lee, Bouazza ben Bouazza, Greg Risling and Anthony McCartney of The Associated Press; and by Brigitte Scheffer of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/21/2012