Terrorism

Issa sent a letter to the White House demanding to know why the security presence in Libya was toned down

Your morning global affairs speed-read

The Obama campaign suffered a blow Thursday when new polling showed Republican Mitt Romney closing the gap on foreign policy, which had been a key point of strength for the president. The two candidates will face off on the topic Monday during their third and final debate.

Much of the president's ground on the topic has been lost over the past month, following the attack in Libya, and administration officials have been working hard to undo the damage. They've pushed back especially hard on Republican accusations that the president deliberately misled voters about the circumstances of the attack and laid out their most detailed explanation yet for the changing intelligence assessment in interviews with The Wall Street Journal.

As for Obama, he made it clear Thursday that he won't shy away from playing his trump card during Monday's debate. 

“Monday’s debate is a little bit different because the topic is foreign policy,” Obama said at last night at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. “Spoiler alert: We got bin Laden.”

Obama holds a slim 47 percent to 43 percent edge in a Pew survey taken after the attacks in Libya.

Ahmed Abu Khattala, head of the Islamic Libyan militia Ansar al-Sharia, admitted on Thursday to being present during the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Senate hawk Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is doubling down on his theory that the Obama administration deliberately hid the truth about the attack in Libya that left four Americans dead even as the accuracy of that assertion is increasingly in doubt.

Graham, a longtime critic of Obama's foreign policy, has become the most vocal proponent of the theory that Obama tied the attack to anger over an anti-Islam video so he could look strong on national security. The issue of who knew what when has become an issue in the presidential race, with the Obama campaign now saying the president called the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi an “act of terror” from the beginning but continued to tie it to the video based on his intelligence team's initial assessment.

“The video had nothing to do with this because there was never a mob,” Graham told Fox News on Wednesday night. “If it's a riot based on a video that's spontaneous, they have a lot less blame. And I'd be the first to say that if this was a mob generated by video, that's a different national security threat, harder to plan for. So they wanted us to believe that.”

Reporters on the ground in Libya paint a more nuanced picture, however. Both The New York Times and Bloomberg reported this week that numerous witnesses to the attacks — and the attackers themselves — similarly describe a hastily organized strike, without any warning or protest, by well-known local Islamic militants infuriated by a U.S.-made anti-Islam video that had sparked violent protests in neighboring Egypt hours earlier.

She said administration officials were given "speaking points" by intelligence adviser James Clapper in the immediate aftermath.

Next week's debate on foreign policy will give each candidate a final chance to shape opinion on the Benghazi attack.

Your morning global affairs speed-read

Mitt Romney temporarily lost the debate on the Obama administration's handling of last month's attack in Libya during Tuesday's town hall meeting, as even many conservatives have acknowledged. By focusing narrowly on what the administration said and when — and suggesting, without proof, that the president was seeking to cover up the facts about the attack rather than simply responding to incomplete intelligence — Romney painted himself into a corner and allowed Obama to come out ahead.

Numerous questions remain, however, notably regarding lax security in Benghazi and the slow pace of the investigation into the deaths of four Americans, and Romney will be primed to pounce during Monday's debate on foreign policy. He'll also be ready to point out the obvious inconsistency in Obama's insistence that he called the attack an “act of terror” from the get-go: why, then, did his administration continue to point to an anti-Islam video as a “proximate cause” of the violence for several weeks?

As both sides duke it out for political gain, one loser is already emerging: the truth. As Bloomberg argues in a deeply reported piece from Libya, “there is ample evidence neither the Obama administration’s initial accounts nor Republican portrayals of the incident are accurate.”

"It was a passing comment about acts of terror in general," said Ryan of Obama's Sept. 12 comments.

Biden said Romney's strategy was to "make it appear that the president didn’t know or didn’t care or was lying."