GOP seizes on accounts of attack

WASHINGTON - Republicans lashed out at President Obama and senior administration officials over their evolving description of the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, a late campaign-season broadside challenging the veracity and leadership of an incumbent on the upswing.

Desperate to reverse the apparent trajectory of the White House race, Republicans sense a political opportunity in Obama's reluctance to utter the words terrorist attack as well as the varying explanations emerging from the administration about the assault in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Talk of Watergate-style scandal, stonewalling, and cover-up echoed in the GOP ranks on Thursday, from the head of the party to members of Congress to Mitt Romney's campaign staff. This full-throated criticism comes five days before the first debate between Obama and Romney, with Republicans determined to cast the president as dishonest and ineffectual on both foreign and domestic policy.

"Amid Middle East turmoil and six weeks before the election, President Obama refuses to have an honest conversation with the American people," Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican Party, wrote in an article for the website Real Clear Politics. "The country deserves honesty, not obfuscation, from our president."

Republicans say the administration has been slow to call the assault a terrorist attack and has criticized its initial insistence that the attack was a spontaneous response to the crude anti-Islam video that touched off demonstrations across the Middle East.

Since then, it has become clear that the Benghazi assault was distinct from the mobs that burned American flags and protested what they considered the blasphemy in the movie, but didn't attack U.S. personnel. Republicans have also suggested that the administration had intelligence suggesting the deadly attack might happen and ignored it.

"I think it's pretty clear that they haven't wanted to level with the American people. We expect candor from the president and transparency," Romney told Fox News this week.

The White House and Democrats accused the GOP of politicizing national security, with officials specifically mentioning Romney's quick swipe at Obama as an extremist sympathizer as the crisis was still unfolding in North Africa around Sept. 11.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta on Thursday called it a terrorist attack.

"What terrorists were involved I think still remains to be determined by the investigation," he told reporters at the Pentagon. "But it clearly was a group of terrorists who conducted that attack."