During tonight’s presidential debate, moderater Candy Crowley corrected Mitt Romney’s suggestion that President Obama did not refer to the attacks in Benghazi “an act of terror” the day after the assault occurred:

ROMNEY: I think it’s interesting that the president just said something which is on the day after the attack he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That’s what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration? Is that what you’re saying?

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

OBAMA: Get the transcript.

CROWLEY: He did in fact sir, so let me call it an act of terror and —

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder Candy?

CROWLEY: He did call it an act of terror. It did as well two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out, you’re correct about that.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, on Sept. 12, one day after the attack, in “remarks by the President on the deaths of U.S. Embassy staff in Libya” in the Rose Garden, Obama said:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

On Sept. 19, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen also called the assault in Benghazi an “terrorist attack” in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The Romney campaign’s lead foreign policy adviser Dan Senor in an interview that aired on NPR this morning did not dispute the validity of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warnings about a military attack on Iran. During the interview, Senor, as he has previously, criticized the Obama administration for publicly discussing the potential consequences of an attack on Iran. Pointing to a recent speech Panetta gave delivering those warnings, Senor claimed that such discussion by the administration leads Iran and U.S. allies to think that “we are absolutely not serious, that the credibility of the threat [of military action against Iran] is not there.”

But when pressed about whether or not the Obama administration’s points were true or not, Senor dodged:

SENOR: The president says the military option is on the table but then Defense Secretary Panetta at a security conference, which was widely covered, he walked through all the problems with a military action, that there would be backlash in the region, that it may not be successful, you may not actually be able to wipe up the program, you just might delay it, that there will be economic repercussions.

HOST STEVE INSKEEP: Was he wrong about those things?

SENOR: Secretary Panetta has said that on many occasions. Our only view is, one obviously has to consider these very things he’s talking about. And if you want to talk to our allies about it, you absolutely should, but do it behind closed doors. By broadcasting it in public the way the administration has done, it has sent one message to Tehran, which is that we are absolutely not serious, that the credibility of the threat is not there, and it has sent the exact same message to our allies in Israel and in the Gulf Arab countries that are worried about a nuclear Iran.

INSKEEP: Is Panetta wrong about those concerns that he raised?

SENOR: I mean I would let him explain, you know, the reasoning behind each one of those.

In his December 2011 speech at the Brookings Institution, Panetta said that a potential Israeli strike on Iran “might postpone [Iran] maybe one, possibly two years.” Panetta also laid out other possible complications of an Israeli strike on Iran: Iranians might rally around the government, blame would inevitably be placed on the U.S. and an escalation leading to the loss of “many lives” could follow.

Other experts have echoed Panetta’s comments. Just last month Mike Hayden, former CIA director in the George W. Bush administration, told an Israeli newspaper that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would “only set the Iranians back some time and actually push them to do that which it is supposed to prevent, getting nuclear weapons.” In addition, a bipartisan group of military and defense experts, including Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, in a recent report echoed Panetta’s comments, saying that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel would only delay Iran’s nuclear program by two years. It’s not only American officials: Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s spy agency, has also said that a military strike would only “delay” the Iranian nuclear program.

President Obama has repeatedly said that a military option on Iran’s nuclear program is not a “bluff” and that he is against a “containment” strategy for Iran’s nuclear program. However, the Obama administration, following current intelligence that says Iran has yet to decide whether to build nuclear weapons, is sticking to a diplomatic track for the time being, a move it sees as the “best and most permanent” way to end the nuclear crisis with Iran.

The Romney campaign has been hard at work attempting to blame President Obama for the terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Lead foreign policy adviser Rich Williamson claimed the attack wouldn’t have happened in a Romney administration and Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan chalked it up to the “broader problem” of the current administration “projecting weakness.”

But at least one prominent Republican would object to the GOP’s efforts to politicize terrorism and his name is Gov. Mitt Romney.

During a 2004 National Press Club luncheon, Romney was asked to address the 9/11 Commission’s finding of serious intelligence failures on the part of the US government in the run-up to the attacks. He responded that it is easy, but ultimately not particularly helpful, to blame different parts of the government for the attack:

It’s very easy, it is extraordinarily easy to point fingers and say, ‘Why, this part of government knew this and it didn’t tell that part.’ And, ‘These people here haven’t learned that.’ Well, the reason those barriers exist is for legitimate purpose in a world that was pre-September 11th. And judging our intelligence by post- September 11th conditions is something we have to do carefully. We do that to help us get better, and to the extent we find criticism in the kind of work that I’ve had to do and others are doing, it should be focused on how we can make ourselves more effective in the post-9/11 world. But trying to judge what happened pre-9/11 by post-9/11 knowledge is probably not terribly fruitful.

Watch it:

Romney’s approach was consistent with then-President Bush’s, who when asked whether he should apologize for his administration’s failure to prevent 9/11, said simply “The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden.” Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told the 9/11 Commission something similar, saying “I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack…I believe that the absence of light, so to speak, on what was going on inside the country, the inability to connect the dots, was really structural.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, took a more concrete approach to accountability this Monday, saying “I take responsibility [for Benghazi]. I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts.”

While the Romney campaign has been routinely accusing the administration of deliberately misleading Americans on Libya, a detailed timeline of the events suggests that isn’t the case.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned the conviction of Osama bin Laden’s driver for material support for terrorism. However, the court opted to apply its ruling in an extremely limited manner, dimming the chances of it having a significant impact on current cases before military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay.

Salim Hamdan was originally charged by a military tribunal with “material support for terrorism” in 2004 after being captured in Afghanistan in possession of weapons and al Qaeda documents. His prosecution was overturned in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [PDF], directly prompting Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in response. Retried under the updated law, Hamdan was sentenced to sixty-six months imprisonment, though granted credit for time served.

Following the completion of his sentence, the U.S. still detained Hamdan for several more months before finally transferring back to Yemen. Once released in 2009, Hamdan continued to petition to have his conviction overturned. In drafting the ruling on the case, Judge Brett Kavanaugh found that Hamdan’s release did not moot the appeal and that the Military Commissions Act was improperly used in the tribunal’s prosecution. The ruling’s summary concludes as follows:

Because we read the Military Commissions Act not to retroactively punish new crimes, and because material support for terrorism was not a pre-existing war crime under 10 U.S.C. § 821, Hamdan’s conviction for material support for terrorism cannot stand. We reverse the judgment of the Court of Military Commission Review and direct that Hamdan’s conviction for material support for terrorism be vacated.

War crimes in this case refers to those acts recognized as illegal by “universal agreement and practice both in this country and internationally.” Such acts of war include those punishable under the Rome Statute, including genocide and mass murder, along with smaller scale acts such as several related to terrorism.

In deciding Hamdan’s appeal, the District Court found that as “material support” was not viewed as a war crime under international law at the time of the passing of the Military Commissions Act — along with the Act’s inability to apply to actions taken in 2001 — the conviction must be vacated.

While the court has overturned this specific conviction, the ruling is unlikely to apply to many other trials either currently under way or completed. Of the cases heard by military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, as compiled by Human Rights Watch, only one other deals solely with the crime of material support. That defendant, Ibrahim al-Qosi, was convicted after confessing to serving as a driver and cook for bin Laden, but has since been released to Sudan. All other cases involve acts such as attempted murder and conspiracy to commit terrorism.

Also, as a footnote, the Court included a severe limitation on the scope of its ruling:

Our judgment would not preclude detention of Hamdan until the end of U.S. hostilities against al Qaeda. Nor does our judgment preclude any future military commission charges against Hamdan – either for conduct prohibited by the “law of war” under 10 U.S.C. § 821 or for any conduct since 2006 that has violated the Military Commissions Act. Nor does our judgment preclude appropriate criminal charges in civilian court. Moreover, our decision concerns only the commission’s legal authority. We do not have occasion to question that, as a matter of fact, Hamdan engaged in the conduct for which he was convicted.

Had Hamdan not already been released, under this ruling, he could still be held at Guantanamo Bay without further charges. Given the fifty-five prisoners being held still who have been cleared for transfer, this is not outside the realm of imagination.

Senior Romney campaign foreign policy advisor Dan Senor continued to press the unsubstantiated narrative that the White House deliberately misled the public on last month’s attack in Libya. In an interview aired this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Senor claimed that the Obama administration purposefully put forward a false story to explain the September attack on a diplomatic outpost in the city of Benghazi:

HOST STEVE INSKEEP: Would an attack like that not happened if Mitt Romney were President?

SENOR: Oh look, there’s — some folks have tried to assert that. We’re simply saying there were security requests for additional security resources; they appear to have been denied. There were a series of misleading statements after the incident claiming that the result – in response to a YouTube video, a spontaneous mob that turned into a terrorist attack. Those we now know aren’t true and yet the administration stuck to those explanations. Those other failures around the region we certainly believe could be addressed by a Romney administration.

Senor’s answer fits into the predominant narrative, that the administration continued to push the video as the cause after it knew otherwise. But in reality, from the beginning the Obama administration has avoided definitively pronouncing a cause for the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Senor was specifically referring to the statements from U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice during Sept. 16 interviews on the Sunday talk shows. Rice said at that time that based on available information, the Benghazi attackers highjacked a protest against an anti-Muslim film as cover for the assault and that an investigation was on-going. Rice has since then said, “What you get Day 1, Day 2, Day 14 isn’t the whole story.”

Following Rice’s initial statements, the administration candidly put forward its new thinking, based on evidence as it was acquired. In a Sept. 28 statement, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as coordinator of the seventeen Federal intelligence offices, said the intelligence community “revised [their] initial assessment to reflect new information.”

In testimony before the House Government and Oversight Committee on October 11th, Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy elaborated on the shift from the time of Rice’s statements to current administration position. “If any administration official, including any career official, were on television on Sunday, September 16th, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said. As time went on, additional information became available,” Kennedy said. “Clearly, we know more today than we did on the Sunday after the attack.”

Senor’s statement also refers to denied requests for additional security at Benghazi. The requests in question were actually intended for the Embassy in Tripoli — 400 miles away — and would have made little difference during the September attack.

Stevens’ father said this week that “[i]t would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue.” Apparently the Romney campaign is not taking that advice.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Tuesday agreed with Fox News host Steve Doocy’s claim that had the Obama administration granted requests for additional security in Libya prior to the assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi last month, “four Americans may very well be alive right now”

DOOCY: Because you know so much about this, you know you’re the perfect guest to be talking about this because, you know, the big question is, what did the president know and when did he know it? But people in the administration –

GRAHAM: And what did they do about it.

DOOCY: Exactly because had they actually granted the requests for extra security, four Americans may very well be alive right now.

GRAHAM: Well Steve that’s a very good point.

Watch the clip:

Yet, according to State Department officials involved, the security requests were for the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Tripoli, not Benghazi, the New York Times reported last week:

In a stream of diplomatic cables, embassy security officers warned their superiors at the State Department of a worsening threat from Islamic extremists, and requested that the teams of military personnel and State Department security guards who were already on duty be kept in service.

The requests were denied, but they were largely focused on extending the tours of security guards at the American Embassy in Tripoli — not at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, 400 miles away. And State Department officials testified this week during a hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that extending the tour of additional guards — a 16-member military security team — through mid-September would not have changed the bloody outcome because they were based in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

Graham, along with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) continue to politicize the Libya attacks even after the late Ambassador Steven’s father said it would be “abhorrent” to do so.