Republican White House challenger Mitt Romney has accused US Vice President Joe Biden of “doubling down on denial” as the White House struggled to combat a growing storm over the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
The latest exchanges battered an administration repeatedly thrown onto the defensive by the political reverberations of the attack on Sept. 11 which killed US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
White House spokesman Jay Carney was forced on Friday to clarify remarks by Biden which appeared to contradict evidence that US officials refused extra security for US posts in Libya prior to the Benghazi assault.
“The vice president was speaking about himself and the president and the White House. Obviously he wasn’t talking [about] the administration writ large,” Carney said.
Biden said in his campaign debate on Thursday with Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, that “we weren’t told they wanted more security.”
Republican nominee Romney pounced on those remarks as he sought to splinter US President Barack Obama’s reputation as a strong commander-in-chief, 25 days from election day.
“He’s doubling down on denial,” Romney said in Virginia.
“When the vice president of the United States directly contradicts the testimony — sworn testimony — of State Department officials, American citizens have a right to know just what’s going on,” he added.
Carney said the vice president was aware of the testimony by US security officials at a congressional hearing on Wednesday that extra protection for the posts had been requested and then denied.
“Nowhere in those four hours of testimony was it suggested that those requests were made essentially to the White House because that is not how this works,” Carney said.
The lack of a direct tie so far between Obama and the security situation at the Benghazi post gives the White House a plausible defense, but has not stopped fierce Republican efforts to make the president pay a political price.
Protection issues related to Libya diplomatic posts and elsewhere were dealt with in the appropriate place — at the State Department — and not at the White House, Carney said.
Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland agreed that generally such issues were handled inside the department.
“I obviously don’t have any information to contradict what the vice president said, if that’s what you’re asking,” she told reporters.
The latest developments would be a headache at any time for the White House, but are especially tricky given Obama’s looming date with voters on Nov. 6.
The Obama campaign hit back, again accusing Romney of politicizing a national security crisis, with spokeswoman Lis Smith saying “the American people deserve more from someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also rode into the fray on Friday amid Republican claims that the administration was too slow to brand the attack as terrorism and has frequently changed its story on what happened.
“To this day, to this day ... we do not have a complete picture, we do not have all the answers,” Clinton said.
She also defended US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who had said on the Sunday after the attack that it appeared to be a “spontaneous” protest over an anti-Muslim film made on US soil and posted on YouTube.
Subsequent evidence have suggested there was no major protest outside the consulate and that the plot was planned by local militants, possibly with help from several outside extremists.
Clinton said that Rice was acting on the same intelligence assessments that every other government official had at the time.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of