As we all know, Romney criticized the Obama administration on it’s handling of the events surrounding the attack on American embassies in Cairo and in Libya. Chief among those critiques was Romney’s statement taking Obama to task for his administration’s “apology” to the perpetrators of those attacks.
I’ve already “awarded points” to those defending Obama by going after Romney on two parts:
- In failing to admit that he had the timeline wrong that evening.
- Continuing to label the Cairo statements as an apology.
However, I have been strong in my defense of Romney issuing his statement because I felt that everyone was in the dark surrounding the timing of those statements.
I’m here to tell you that I was wrong.
Foreign Policy is reporting that an embassy employee sent an e-mail to the State Department in Washington to clear the statement:
Before issuing the press release, Schwartz cleared it with just one person senior to himself, Deputy Chief of Mission Marc Sievers, who was the charge d’affaires at the embassy on Tuesday because Ambassador Anne Patterson was in Washington at the time, the official said.
Schwartz sent the statement to the State Department in Washington before publishing and the State Department directed him not to post it without changes, but Schwartz posted it anyway.
Clearly this shows that the Obama administration was not operating under what I have been referring to as “the fog of war.”
With this clarification I can no longer claim that an complete sense of confusion was being experienced by everyone. It is safe to say that only the Romney team was unclear as to the timing of the release and was, perhaps, relying on the Twitter feed from the Cairo embassy.
This leads me to add an additional critique to Romney’s team; get the facts right.