Obama Blames ‘Sloppiness’ for Benghazi Attack

Mr. Obama, in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” reaffirmed a decision by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to carry out all 29 of the panel’s recommendations, including sending 225 additional Marine guards to embassies and consulates and revamping how threat warnings are used to secure posts.

“My message to the State Department has been very simple, and that is we’re going to solve this,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re not going to be defensive about it; we’re not going to pretend that this was not a problem — this was a huge problem.”

Mr. Obama said one major finding — that the State Department relied too heavily on untested local Libyan militias to safeguard the compound in Benghazi, Libya — reflected “internal reviews” by the government.

“It confirms what we had already seen based on some of our internal reviews; there was just some sloppiness, not intentional, in terms of how we secure embassies in areas where you essentially don’t have governments that have a lot of capacity to protect those embassies,” Mr. Obama said.

Four State Department officials were removed from their posts this month after the five-member panel led by a former ambassador, Thomas R. Pickering, criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi that was attacked on Sept. 11, leading to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has been one of the fiercest critics of the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack, said on Sunday that the Senate should delay confirmation hearings on Mr. Obama’s choice to be his next secretary of state, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, until Mrs. Clinton fulfills her promise to testify to Congress.

“I want to know from the secretary of state’s point of view, ‘Were you informed of the deteriorating security situation?’ ” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “ ‘Were all these cables coming out of Benghazi? Did they ever get up to your level? And if they didn’t, that’s a problem. If they did, why didn’t you act differently?’ I think it’s very important to know how the intelligence coming from Libya, how it was received in the State Department, so we can learn and correct any mistakes.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, also said on the same program that it was important to hear from Mrs. Clinton.

“The problem was the right people apparently either didn’t make the decision or didn’t analyze the intelligence, because I think if you looked at the intelligence, you would have substantially beefed up the security in that particular mission, in Benghazi,” Ms. Feinstein said. “It didn’t happen sufficiently.”

The senators made these comments before it had been made public on Sunday that Mrs. Clinton had been hospitalized with a blood clot stemming from a concussion she suffered earlier this month.

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White House Memo: President Obama Facing Critical Choice After Newtown Shooting

Should he invest his energy and the stature he won with his re-election last month in a fight he may believe in but is not sure he can actually win? And with his last election now behind him, is he willing or even able to shift the dynamics in Washington to make such fights winnable?

To his core supporters, this is a moment that will define what a second-term Obama presidency will look like — whether it will be closer to the soaring aspirations that set liberal hearts aflutter in 2008 or more like the back-room deal making that characterized the four years that followed. Advocates on the left have long lamented that Mr. Obama was too quick to compromise, even as those on the right see him as a champion of a radical agenda.

From his point of view, Mr. Obama has been pragmatic, making cleareyed if cold assessments about when the votes were there and when they were not. Mr. Obama does not accept the notion that he has not pursued goals that seemed hard to achieve, most notably the historic health care program he pushed through. The economic crisis invariably forced other priorities onto the shelf.

But with the election over, outside events have now presented Mr. Obama with a series of decisions. Vote counts might suggest that he is still a long way from passing significant legislation on climate change, immigration and gun control. But Hurricane Sandy, last month’s Latino turnout for Democrats and now the Newtown shootings have also given him openings to make new arguments.

The developments in his fiscal negotiations with Republicans, overshadowed momentarily by the gun control debate, underscore the same tension. After agreeing to renew Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy in his first term, Mr. Obama has stood firm against it on the eve of his second and forced Republicans to accept raising rates on high income. But he compromised this week by agreeing to exempt many of those he has deemed wealthy and faces a test on whether he will stick to that even as House Republicans readied an alternative proposal.

Although he has spoken out for gun control without putting muscle into it before, his emotional speech at a memorial service in Newtown on Sunday declaring that there was no longer any “excuse for inaction” suggested that this time may be different. The pressure is high from pundits who compared the speech to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and suggested that Newtown may be what Birmingham was to John F. Kennedy in inspiring civil rights action.

“This moment is so pain-filled and there is such a desire — I think you can feel it building — to move forward in a common-sense way that he sees the imperative,” said Melody Barnes, the president’s former domestic policy adviser. “I’ve looked at the pictures of his face, and I think he sees that there’s no other course than to move forward. The situation demands it.”

Yet the normally sure-footed White House has seemed uncertain how far the president intends to go. Aides who normally offer expansive explanations of Mr. Obama’s thinking have declined to return phone calls. On Monday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, generally stuck to repeating the president’s words from his speech to avoid boxing him in, and he tamped down expectations of instant action by using the phrase “in coming weeks” 16 times.

Then, later in the day, the White House confirmed that Mr. Obama had met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and three cabinet secretaries to discuss gun control and other responses to the tragedy, but declined to provide details. Even the simple question of whether the president put Mr. Biden in charge of developing a response went unanswered by a half-dozen White House aides questioned on Tuesday. (The president planned to announce Mr. Biden's assignment on Wednesday morning.)

The White House opened the window a little on Tuesday, hinting at the kinds of gun measures Mr. Obama would embrace. In the past, he has endorsed the reinstatement of an expired ban on assault weapons, but this time, Mr. Carney said the president would be “actively supportive” of a new legislative effort. The president will also support reversing the exemption from background checks for gun show purchases in certain circumstances and “potentially” limits on high-capacity ammunition clips of the sort used in Newtown, Mr. Carney said.

But Mr. Carney said the president hoped to forge a broader response, including looking at mental health, education and cultural issues.

These decisions are made on a scale of trade-offs that may be unique to the White House. President Bill Clinton made big pushes in his early days for priorities that did not have the votes, or that helped cost Democrats control of Congress in his first midterm election, including the assault weapon ban that later expired and left the party feeling burned for nearly two decades. Then Mr. Clinton adjusted and focused more on making incremental progress toward his goals.

President George W. Bush scorned what he considered Mr. Clinton’s “small ball” approach and prided himself on bold initiatives like cutting taxes, remaking education, expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs and combating AIDS in Africa. But by his second term, he pursued big goals like overhauling Social Security and immigration only to lose.

“There certainly can be a cost to it,” said Peter Wehner, an adviser to Mr. Bush who worked for Mitt Romney this year. “You can fight for something and lose and be a weakened figure. On the other hand, sometimes there’s honor in loss. You may lose but in the process you advance a cause in the eyes of history.”

Mr. Wehner and other conservatives consider the groundswell for gun control to be understandable but more a symbolic gesture than an effective response. But he said Mr. Obama had been smart about picking the terrain he fought on. “He has waited until the stars aligned before he acted,” he said.

In the end, the stars have not aligned before for Obama priorities like legislation on climate change and immigration. He took office amid the worst economic crisis in generations and pursued a historic health coverage expansion that had eluded his predecessors. By the time he pushed that through, enacted a stimulus package, toughened Wall Street regulations and lifted limits on gays in the military, he had lost the House and did not think the new Republican majority would agree to gun legislation.

“The president always had a personal commitment to the issue,” said Phil Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama’s first legislative affairs director. “But given the crisis he faced when he first took office, there’s only so much capacity in the system to move his agenda.”

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Obama Expected to Name Kerry as Secretary of State

But the announcement will be delayed, at least until later this week and maybe beyond, because of the Connecticut school shooting and what one official called “some discomfort” with the idea of Mr. Obama’s announcing a national security team in which the top posts are almost exclusively held by white men.

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, who is black and was considered Mr. Obama’s leading candidate for the job, withdrew her name from consideration last week after opposition to her nomination grew in the Senate.

For Mr. Kerry, 69, the appointment would fulfill an ambition that dates back many years. He had hoped for the post when Mr. Obama was first elected in 2008; since then, he has shepherded the passage of a critical arms-control treaty and conducted a series of quiet missions on behalf of the president, notably at moments of crisis with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But he would be entering an administration whose primary foreign policy strategies are already set, even as it tries to use American leverage in dealing with a Middle East that is veering toward hard-line Islamist governments and an Iran that is getting perilously close to a nuclear capability.

With Ms. Rice out of the running, Mr. Kerry’s appointment “is the working presumption,” said a senior State Department official who has been preparing for the transition to a new secretary. But White House officials said the deal was not entirely done, because the lineup currently envisioned — with former Senator Chuck Hagel to head the Defense Department and the acting C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, likely to be named to the post permanently — looks a bit too much like national security teams of a previous era.

For Mr. Obama, a national security team led by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hagel, and their longtime colleague in the Senate, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would be deeply experienced but also, in many ways, deeply conventional. All three came to the Senate long before Mr. Obama. All describe themselves as pragmatists rather than ideologues, and all became skeptics, then critics, of the American experiment in Iraq from the early days of the war.

Still, administration officials said, for now there are no serious candidates for the State Department job other than Mr. Kerry. He would be the first white man to serve in the post since Warren Christopher left the job in early 1997. His successors have been Madeleine K. Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Kerry’s colleagues in the Senate have said that he would sail through confirmation hearings. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has already begun jokingly calling Mr. Kerry “Mr. Secretary.” Both men are veterans of the Vietnam War and worked together to provide President Bill Clinton with political cover to grant diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. Mr. McCain said of Mr. Kerry recently that he would most likely win a large number of Republican votes for confirmation.

The issue of the composition of Mr. Obama’s team arose anew when Ms. Rice withdrew. If she keeps her current post as ambassador to the United Nations, she will remain in Mr. Obama’s cabinet and on his national security team. She is also considered the likely successor to Thomas E. Donilon as national security adviser. But Mr. Donilon does not intend to leave that post for a year or two, his friends say, unless he is named White House chief of staff.

Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense for policy, remains a candidate to become the first female defense secretary. But in internal discussions, White House officials have said that the challenge of the next few years will be working with Congress to shrink the defense budget and kill some major cold war-era weapons systems. For that, Mr. Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, is seen as better able to win votes from his former colleagues.

Ms. Flournoy has also been mentioned as a possible C.I.A. director, but Mr. Morell, who ran the analysis division of the agency, is the favorite of C.I.A. officials. “Mike has been concerned about the over-militarization of the C.I.A.,” a senior military officer who has dealt with him said recently. “And so are many at the agency, who fear they have wandered too far from the job of analyzing trends and obtaining secrets.”

John Brennan, a close aide to Mr. Obama and a former agency station chief in Saudi Arabia who has directed counterterrorism activity from his basement White House office, is also a candidate for C.I.A. director. But officials note that his current post already gives him sway over all 18 intelligence agencies.

Mr. Kerry has worked hard to deepen his relationship with Mr. Obama. The president has at times considered him long-winded and a throwback to a previous generation of diplomats, aides said. But Mr. Kerry impressed Mr. Obama and Mr. Donilon when he was sent to deal with Hamid Karzai, the famously unpredictable president of Afghanistan, after Mr. Karzai’s supporters rigged a presidential election in 2009 and refused a second round of voting.

Mr. Kerry also visited Pakistan several times to try to ease recurrent tensions, including a two-week visit after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Pakistani officials tried to get Mr. Kerry to write what they called a “blood oath” that the United States would never take action to seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Mr. Kerry found a diplomatic way out, saying the United States had no “designs” on Pakistan’s weapons.

“It meant nothing,” a member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said later. “And it solved the crisis. Quite artfully.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

An article on Monday about the possible nomination of Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to be secretary of state described incorrectly the time frame during which former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, served in the Senate. Mr. Hagel, who may be named defense secretary, was elected in 1996, so he did not serve “during the cold war.”

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‘These Tragedies Must End,’ Obama Says

NEWTOWN, Conn. — President Obama vowed on Sunday to “use whatever power this office holds” to stop massacres like the slaughter at the school here that shocked the nation, hinting at a fresh effort to curb the spread of guns as he declared that there was no “excuse for inaction.”

Newtown Reacts to Obama’s Speech Mourners gathered at Newtown High School in Connecticut on Sunday for a service for those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “We must change,” President Obama told the gathering. More Photos »

In a surprisingly assertive speech at a memorial service for the 27 victims, including 20 children, Mr. Obama said that the country had failed to protect its young and that its leaders could no longer sit by idly because “the politics are too hard.” While he did not elaborate on what action he would propose, he said that “these tragedies must end.”

The speech, a blend of grief and resolve that he finished writing on the short Air Force One flight up here, seemed to promise a significant change in direction for a president who has not made gun issues a top priority in four years in office. After each of three other mass killings during his tenure, Mr. Obama has renewed calls for legislation without exerting much political capital, but the definitive language on Sunday may make it harder for him not to act this time.

“No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society,” he said. “But that can’t be an excuse for inaction.” He added that “in the coming weeks I’ll use whatever power this office holds” in an effort “aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.”

“Because what choice do we have?” he added. “We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Mr. Obama, speaking on a stark stage before a table of votive candles for each victim, mixed his call to action with words of consolation for this bereaved town. When he read the names of teachers killed defending their students, people in the audience gasped and wept.

The service came as new details emerged about the terrifying moments at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday. Authorities said Sunday that the gunman, Adam Lanza, shot his mother multiple times in the head before his rampage at the school and that he still had hundreds of rounds of ammunition left when he killed himself. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut said Mr. Lanza shot himself as the police were closing in, suggesting that he may have intended to take more lives had he not been interrupted.

The president’s trip here came amid rising pressure to push for tighter regulation of guns in America. The president offered no specific proposals, and there were no urgent meetings at the White House over the weekend to draft legislation. Administration officials cautioned against expecting quick, dramatic action, especially given the end-of-the-year fiscal crisis consuming most of Mr. Obama’s time.

But the administration does have the makings of a plan on the shelf, with measures drafted by the Justice Department over the years but never advanced. Among other things, Democrats said they would push to renew an assault rifle ban that expired in 2004 and try to ban high-capacity magazines like those used by Mr. Lanza in Newtown. The president also said he would work with law enforcement and mental health professionals, as well as parents and educators.

The streets outside the memorial service and the airwaves across the nation were filled with voices calling for legislative action. By contrast, the National Rifle Association and its most prominent supporters in Congress were largely absent from the public debate.

“These events are happening more frequently,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, said here before the service began, “and I worry that if we don’t take a thoughtful look at them, we’re going to lose the pain, the hurt and the anger that we have now.”

Governor Malloy said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” that when someone can burst into a building with “clips of up to 30 rounds on a weapon that can almost instantaneously fire those, you have to start to question whether assault weapons should be allowed to be distributed the way they are in the United States.”

Mark Landler reported from Newtown, Conn., and Peter Baker from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

An article on Monday about President Obama’s remarks at a memorial service in Newtown, Conn., for shooting victims quoted incorrectly from comments by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who criticized Mr. Obama for inaction on gun control. Mr. Bloomberg, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” said that if Mr. Obama “does nothing during his second term something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns.” He did not say that is the number that would be killed in the next year.

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