Barack Obama was under renewed pressure over his handling of the fatal attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi last night, after CIA sources said they had reported "within 24 hours" that the assault was carried out by Islamist militants.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton deliver remarks the day after the Benghazi attack Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA
By Peter Foster, Washington
6:45PM BST 19 Oct 2012
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The claims raised fresh questions about when exactly Mr Obama learned that the storming of the consulate was a terrorist event, as senior Republicans continued to accuse him of misleading the public over the attacks in order to protect his record on neutralising al-Qaeda.
As the US general election enters its final weeks, the Benghazi incident has become an increasingly charged political issue ahead of Monday's last presidential debate, which will focus exclusively on foreign policy.
Mr Obama defended his record on Benghazi during an appearance on the acerbic current affairs comedy programme, The Daily Show, pledging to get to the bottom of what happened and hold those responsible.
However his pledge to track down those responsible for killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was contrasted by a report from Benghazi that one of the alleged ring leaders in the attacks was openly mocking both the Libyan and US governments.
Ahmed Abu Khattala, who has been linked to the militia group Ansar al-Shariah gave a two-hour interview to the New York Times at a luxury hotel, in which sipped a strawberry frappé while boasting no one had questioned him over the attacks and that he had no plans to go into hiding.
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Mr Obama was also asked why Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, was still linking the attacks to an offensive video a week after the attacks, when other officials have subsequently testified that it was already then clear to intelligence agencies that attack was terrorist in nature.
"The truth is that information comes in, folks put it out throughout the process, people say it is still incomplete," Mr Obama told the show's host Jon Stewart.
"What I was always clear about was we are going to do an investigation and figure out what happened."
He later added: "Every piece of information that we got as we got it we laid it out for the American people, and the picture eventually gets fully filled in and we know how to prevent it in the future."
The timings of what Mr Obama knew – which were the subject of heated discussion during this week's presidential debate – have been further muddied by the reports from the Associated Press quoting anonymous CIA officials describing the attacks as terrorist events.
However the US intelligence officials also said the delay in officially designating the attacks as terrorist was caused in part to the time it took to analyse various conflicting accounts.
"It was clear a group of people gathered that evening" in Benghazi, but that the early question was "whether extremists took over a crowd or they were the crowd," one of the officials told AP.
Republicans remain openly sceptical of the Obama administration's handling of the incident, including a decision to refuse additional security in Benghazi after several attacks in the city, including a rocket attack on the British ambassador's car weeks earlier.
Last night Darrell Issa, the Republican chair of the powerful Oversight and Government Reform Congressional committee sent a letter and 600-pages of documents to the White House demanding more answers about the attacks.
"The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation from this administration about these events, including why the repeated warnings about a worsening security situation appear to have been ignored by this administration," he wrote.
Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, added his voice to the calls for Mr Obama to explain when exactly he was briefed by the intelligence officials that the attack was terrorist in nature.
"We want to know what he knew, when he knew it," Mr McCain told Fox News, "If it was intelligence people who told him otherwise, what in the world were they doing, and who are they, and who is being held responsible?"
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